Money Trail: How Paramilitaries’ Per Diems Proved Serbian Officials’ Guilt

For at least two years, officers at the Serbian Interior Ministry's State Security Service kept records thoroughly about their outgoing on personnel. About every two weeks, they made a list of all the people receiving per diem allowances and the total amount of money paid to them.

On one of those lists, done on a typewriter, is the name Nenad Bujosevic, with the word Big (Veliki) added next to it, probably referring to his nickname, Big Rambo. According to this list, Bujosevic received at least 16 per diem allowance payments during the second half of October 1995.

At the time he was receiving money from the Serbian Interior Ministry, Bujosevic was one of the senior officers in the Serbian Volunteer Guard, a paramilitary unit led by notorious criminal Zeljko 'Arkan' Raznatovic, which was also known as Arkan's Tigers.

Today Bujosevic is an inmate in a Serbian prison where he is serving sentences for his participation in the murder of former Yugoslav President turned opposition politician Ivan Stambolic and his involvement in killing four members of the opposition Serbian Renewal Movement. Both crimes were committed in 1999.

His name, however, resurfaced this week in the court room of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague, which handed down its last verdict related to the Yugoslav wars on Wednesday.

Jovica Stanisic, former chief of the State Security Service and Franko Simatovic, his deputy, were sentenced to 15 years each for participation in a joint criminal enterprise to forcibly and permanently remove non-Serbs from parts of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and of bearing responsibility for murders, deportation, inhumane acts and persecution.

Stanisic and Simatovic were the much...