There are some people who get a frisson from visiting the scene of violent crimes. I do not belong to that category, so it was purely by chance that I sat in the same spot where Arkan, the notorious Serb gangster paramilitary, was sipping tea when he was shot dead on January 15th, 2000. It's a booth in the vast sprawling lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Belgrade and I had thankfully enjoyed my morning coffee and read the newspaper before it was pointed out to me that, yes, this was the very place.
They made short work of him. My informant showed me where the gunman came up behind Zeljko Raznatovic, to give him his proper name, and shot the feared mobster and indicted war criminal along with two of his associates. Immediately, one of Arkan's bodyguards, perhaps overcompensating for a lack of vigilance, sprayed the area with bullets, some of which ricocheted around the lobby putting staff and other customers at risk.
The dead man had commanded "Arkan's Tigers" a merciless paramilitary group which was blamed for some of the worst atrocities in the Balkans conflict, including the massacre of 250 wounded men taken from a Croatian hospital in Vukovar in 1991 and the executions of 3,000 Muslims at Brcko in northern Bosnia in 1992. Raznatovic had accumulated substantial wealth, including his own soccer club, and there was quite a turn-out for his funeral - sportsmen, entertainers and of course fellow paramilitaries, all of whom regarded him as a great Serb patriot maligned by NATO propaganda.
The soccer club's grounds are located close to Belgrade's Central Prison which currently houses another prominent Serb, and one of the many people who might have wanted Arkan dead, the former Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic. Arkan had come to prominence, and the notice of the international community, as a cutting edge for Milosevic's policy of "ethnic cleansing", euphemism for the vile practice of terrorising whole communities out of their homes for political ends.
Even after 30 years of strife in Northern Ireland, the depths of hatred in the Balkans are hard for an Irish person to fathom. They are perhaps best explained in a famous short story, `A Letter from 1920' by the Bosnian writer and winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature, Ivo Andric. A young man explains to the narrator of the story that he has decided to leave Bosnia and make a future in some other land because in Bosnia - as in other Balkan lands - hatred acts "as an independent force, as an end in itself . . . hatred like a cancer in an organism, consuming and eating up everything around it, only to die itself at the last".
With Milosevic in jail and an unwieldy coalition of 18 parties in government, Belgrade is returning to some kind of normality. The scars left by the NATO bombing and the hardships imposed by international sanctions cannot disguise the fact that it is a beautiful, vibrant city which even in the dark days never quite lost its cosmopolitan atmosphere. Would-be tourists on a tight budget should get there fast because prices are climbing rapidly, although you can still dine well at half Dublin prices. The city also offers the most politically incorrect tourist attraction going: deer and boar-hunting in the nearby countryside.
Tito's Yugoslavia contained six republics but now there are only two: Serbia, with almost 10 million people, and Montenegro, with less than 700,000. Even Montenegro may now be about to leave the federation and strike out on its own, following elections later this month. Political and constitutional problems in the rump Yugoslavia are exacerbated by the huge challenge of economic recovery. Just imposing the elementary norms of economic life as they exist in the West would be a major step forward. An executive from an international tobacco firm told me how eager the government was to have his company set up a plant in Serbia because it would be the source of badly needed taxes - cigarette smuggling is a major problem in the Balkans with consequent loss of revenue to the state. At the same time, the prevalence of cigarette smoking among the population is a public health nightmare.
There are many symptoms of an economy and society that have been isolated and damaged and still do not function properly. Mobile phones, the life's blood of modern verbal communication, work poorly in Belgrade: mine could receive calls, but when I tried to make one it was nearly always a case of "network busy". Credit cards and even travellers cheques are not always acceptable, as it is still basically a cash economy.
The overall economic situation remains grave. Output stands at approximately 40 per cent of its 1989 level and about half the labour force is unemployed. There are some 900,000 refugees living under difficult conditions. Inflation has taken a huge bite out of ordinary people's incomes. Government debt is more than 100 per cent of GDP.
However, despite all the problems and deficiencies, one leaves Belgrade with a curious and almost unexplainable feeling of hope. There are many obstacles on the road to normality, never mind prosperity, and the security situation could still go badly wrong in Kosovo or over the border in Macedonia, but there is a feeling, as in Northern Ireland, that the warlike impulse has burnt itself out, at least for the time being. Senior government officials are hopeful the country can now start to unlock the doors to membership of the European Union. The cultural differences between Belgrade and, say, Vienna are minimal and Serbia should assimilate easily into Brussels' scheme of things. However, the horrors of the past are still a vivid memory and the closest analogy is with Germany in the aftermath of the second World War. That proved a remarkable and encouraging success story which, with luck, could be repeated in the Balkans 50 years on.
