A series of houses demolished overnight without any police intervention, a strange deal between a state-owned munitions factory and a private company, a smear campaign against an independent media outlook that has been investigating over these and similar episodes.

The fall of Slobodan Milosevic on October 5th 2000 was supposed to be watershed moment in Serbia’s democratic transition. Reforms were implemented slowly and not without resistance. Over the last decade, however, the new regime led by the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) has done its best to discontinue and reverse institution-building efforts of its democratic predecessors.

The city of Kotor, one of Montenegro’s most famous tourist destinations known for its rich history and medieval fortresses, has acquired a different kind of reputation in recent years: it has become known as the birthplace of two criminal clans which are involved in a bloody war to extinction.

Early on Wednesday morning, October 13th, Kosovo’s police raided several targets across the country, including Mitrovica. During and after the raids against suspected smugglers, they arrested eight people and issued arrest warrants for another ten. Six of the arrested people are of Albanian nationality, one is Serb Serbia, and another is Bosnjak. Eight out of the ten people who received arrest warrants are Albanian while two are Serbs.

The Balkans, which lie at the heart of South-Eastern Europe, have historically been an important transit route for drugs, especially for heroin coming from the East to be trafficked across Europe. 

According to the Serbian investigative portal KRIK, Veljko Belivuk, arrested on multiple charges in February 2021 and notably known as both a leader of the football club Partizan Belgrade’s fan group Principi[1] and as a top underworld figure close to the Montenegrin Kavac clan, described multiple occasions and cases in which President Aleksandar Vucic would have asked for favours, from providing security services at his meetings to beating up opponents.

By strengthening civil society, investigative journalism, NGOs and anti-corruption services we can show that the problem of organized criminal can be resolved. There is a lack of political will, so if we can’t tackle this problem necessarily from the top-down, we have to change the approach and tackle it from the bottom-up. This was concluded during the online discussion “Transnational Organized Crime in the Western Balkans: Effects in the Region and Beyond”, organized on October 7, by LSE IDEAS and Ratiu Forum, in cooperation with the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy (BCSP).

One of the key preconditions for a successful fight against organized crime is the cooperation between governments and civil society organizations. This was a conclusion by the panelists of the online discussion "Boosting Resilience to Organized Crime in the Western Balkans," organized by the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy (BCSP) together with regional partners from the Western Balkans Organized Crime Radar (WB OCR).

How the narrative of the fight against organised crime is used to capture the state? Find out in the latest BCSP analysis.