ABSTRACT
Managers of state firms, ruling party officials and private businessmen dominated the new political establishments throughout much of the region. But in Serbia and Croatia, war conditions also enabled people from marginal backgrounds who had been completely anonymous figures in communist times to push their way to the forefront of national life. When they used war as an instrument of policy designed radically to alter human geography, Milošević and Tudjman needed to employ people not lacking in recklessness, cruelty or rank opportunism, ones who were sometimes in short supply even within the old party-state structures. Village criminals, scrap metal dealers, the heads of football supporter clubs, released prisoners and returning members of the diaspora (especially in the case of Croatia) became enormously wealthy on the proceeds of goods seized through the process of ethnic purging. They were ready to act as enforcers, carrying out orders from patrons at the apex of politics in Belgrade, Zagreb, Mostar and Banja Luka and passed on down the line through various intermediaries. The route to wealth and dubious respectability was not so different in either country: the wholesale seizure of private property, often at the point of a gun, which enriched many small-time figures from Croatian-populated Herzegovina and the Republic of Srpska after the killing spree against ethnic opponents in these areas was over; the smuggling of drugs, weapons and people, which involved figures sometimes quite high up in the power structures of these territories; and dubious privatisation schemes, first in Croatia and later in Serbia, in which state assets were transferred to those in or near the ruling circles.
