Organized Crime: The Case of Serbia
Organized Crime: The Case of Serbia

Summary/Abstract: If “every state has the kind of crime it deserves” (Dobrivoje Radovanovic,director of the Institute for Criminological and Sociological Research), what kind of organized crime does a post-conflict states “deserve”? Is that crime in any way specific, and what does the case of Serbia tell us about it? Analysts say that crime started to develop in the late 1980s, which proves that the criminals did have a good organization even before the war. The Balkan “wars of the 1990s” merely marked the beginning of mutation of its diverse forms. The coupling of war and crime has left a legacy of a serious and direct security threat, as noted in the White Book of Defence of (now already former) state union of Serbia and Montenegro. Crucial for the metastasizing of this problem is its political nature. That is why it requires a political, rather than police solution. In this article I will try to prove these hypotheses and probe into the assumption that one of the remedies could have been lustration, gone missing in Serbia. The adoption of the Lustration Law was excessively prolonged and even when it was finally adopted it was not enforced.

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