Nighttime. A shaven-headed thickset man in a checked black and white shirt is videoed from behind, in the aspect of the German romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, as he appreciates across a snowy landscape the blaze, bangs and fizz of celebratory fireworks released around a small group holding up an inscribed banner.
He walks towards it all, revealing a tough man gait, stopping to take in the banner.
The birthday boy
The romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog’ (1818, Wikipedia, Left) and a figure presumed to be Milan Radoičić (X, Nemanja Šarović, Right), share a pose.
Presumably dedicated to him, it says (archived video) “Happy Birthday Comandante!
This is the video circulated on Twitter (X) on 22 February by Serbian right-oppositionist politician Nemanja Šarović, purportedly taken in the front of the Grey Hotel, co-owned until recently by Milan Radoičić, the north Kosovo enforcer, former deputy leader of the Belgrade-backed ‘Serbian List’ Kosovan political party and political associate of President Vučić who led a heavily armed insurgent group that killed a Kosovo police officer and fled a firefight at the Banjska monastery on 24 September 2023, leaving three of its number dead.
Kosovo has an international warrant out for him, but Radoičić is free in Serbia. President Vučić denied knowledge of his political lieutenant’s paramilitary adventure yet devoted a day of national mourning to his fallen fighters. A BIRN investigation later linked part of the group’s heavy weaponry to Serbian state facilities. Five days after the skirmish, the USA released intelligence indicative of Serbian invasion plans and in early October the UK rushed troops to reinforce KFOR.
Radoičić reportedly owned businesses to the tune of 24.5 million euros in 2022. After the Banjska debacle, he demonstratively divested his shares from all businesses in Serbia, including the Grey Hotel, handing over on paper to his co-owners and longtime partners, also businessmen from the north of Kosovo, Zvonko and Žarko Veselinović. In Kosovo, he is reported to own the Grey cafe and Grey restaurant in north Mitrovica, both run by his son.
Three days after the video’s appearance on Twitter (X) we take an opportunity to drop by and ‘smell the coffee’ in Kopaonik.
Милан Радоичић је јуче на Копаонику, уз ватромет и транспарент “СРЕЋАН РОЂЕНДАН КОМАНДАНТЕ!!!” прославио 46. рођендан.
Шта ли му је @avucic поклонио? pic.twitter.com/iZUEqfWX4i
— Немања Шаровић (@NemanjaSarovic) February 22, 2024
Affronting the privacy of a prickly building
Daytime. Sunday afternoon 25 February. Departing, Alex points his phone back at the Grey Hotel from the sloping street as, ahead, Jeta walks back to the car.
Suddenly a man appears in front of him, holding a hand up. “Zabranjeno slikanje hotela” (It is forbidden to photograph the hotel). Alex utters a perfunctory “oh sorry” and walks on to join Jeta at the car, parked 100 metres away.
Some minutes later, as Jeta gets into the car a different man appears and stony faced, as if vengefully embodying the affronted hotel building, applying the Old Testament law of a lens for a lens, he holds up a retaliatory phone to film her, close up in her face. As if we had photographed the hotel in an intimate pose or naked in the shower, rather than clad in its Sunday best of slates, brickwork, pointing, plaster, curtained windows etc. He gives no response to Jeta’s “Zdravo” (Hello). Instead he puts on a show of menace and implacability, following and filming us and demonstratively making a call to base for backup as Jeta backs the car down a slushy street.
“There will be people there watching everything and they look exactly how you imagine secret service men should look like”, we were warned by Serbian journalist colleagues.
“They will take your phones if they catch you” warned another. We knew a police checkpoint and a toll point awaited us a few kilometres on, along the twisty road down from the Kopaonik resort. As a precaution we started cleaning our phones while the road funneled us toward these filters.
The Grey Zone
Grey Hotel, Kopaonik- Serbia, Photo: Alex Anderson
It has not taken any sophisticated geolocation technique for us to match the surroundings of the Grey Hotel to features visible in the “Happy Birthday Comandante” video.
The hotel occupies the prime position in this, Serbia’s only, ski resort. It directly overlooks where everyone assembles to take the ski lifts up to the slopes. Although a large edifice its look and construction do not significantly stand out from the other nearby hotels. For the day we arrived it offered accommodation on Booking.com at just under 400 Euros the night. Its menu is also pricey.
Out among the weekend crowds congregating for the ski lifts Jeta asks a few people if they saw fireworks recently and what was the celebration about. Three people confirm there were fireworks in Kopaonik a few days ago.
Two of them claim they do not know what the fireworks were about but fail to meet her eyes as she asks them about it. A third thinks there were some ‘famous DJ-s playing and it was part of their program’.
Taking tea and coffee inside the hotel we cannot help but notice how many men sport the shaven-headed or bald look. Automatically we find ourselves trying to match each to the man seen from behind in the video, or indeed to the known visages of Radoičić and the Veselinović brothers, who all share this look.
The wealth they have ploughed into businesses such as the Grey Hotel stems from their years of informal control over Serb-inhabited north Kosovo. That grey zone has hosted crypto mining and marihuana farms, and spilled contraband and financial crimes into both Kosovo and Serbia. While the Serbian government awarded Radoičić and Veselinović contracts for building roads in Serbia itself, Kosovo’s political leaders have also linked to Radoičić: he allegedly tried to bribe a whistleblower who denounced the mass illegal construction of elite villas in Kosovo’s Brezovica national park and ski resort, and was courted by Ramush Haradinaj for political support to become prime minister in 2017. Arguably, Radoičić is our common monster: both Kosovo and Serbia contributed to his rise and his wealth.
Serb sources in north Kosovo told us that Radoičić instilled deep fear in the community. People who dared speak of contraband and corruption got fired, beaten up and jailed. Radoičić is suspected of ordering the 2018 murder in Kosovo’s Mitrovica of independent Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanović.
In January this year, Serbian liberal opposition politician Nikola Sandulović, who was arrested and beaten after returning from a visit to Kosovo where he laid flowers at the grave of Blerina Jashari, aged 7 when killed along with 57 other members of the extended Jashari family in Serbia’s March 1998 assault on their compound, alleged that among those beating him while he was detained by Serbia’s security service, the BIA, he recognised Milan Radoičić, Zvonko Veselinović and leader of the ‘Serbian List’ Goran Rakić.
A video published by Kosovo’s public broadcaster RTK on 27 February provides timely underscoring of Radoičić’s menacing reputation. It allegedly shows him punching a man to the floor, reportedly in an office of the Grey Hotel, “a while ago”. The person in the video is identified as Adis Ladjar, who runs a vehicle servicing centre. Another of Radoičić’s beating victims is suspected to be Aleksandar Spirić, who headed the unofficial Belgrade-financed parallel authority in north Mitrovica, until he disappeared in late August 2023. The Serbian pro-government tabloid ‘Informer’ swiftly reported a denial from the otherwise elusive Spirić that he was the man in the video.
Although not the man in the video, the latter had bones broken and was treated at a succession of hospitals. Radoičić is “always surrounded by BIA people”, one of whom could have recorded the video clip – to be stored up in case of future need. “This is how the secret service operates.”
Why has it emerged now? Leaking of such startling footage of Radoičić opens up wider options for his discreditation and removal, is the view of the sources. “Radoičić has become a big problem for Vučić; the Americans are piling on pressure to have him dealt with”. Doors are closing to him, social invitations thinning out, it is suggested. The hubris suggested by the birthday video may have been a prompt.
Radoičić may find himself on a slippery slope. The brutal reckoning with Oliver Ivanović was similarly preceded by a campaign of discreditation, ironically mounted by Radoičić and Vučić in concert. In the months before his murder, The Serbian List ordered TV adverts attacking Ivanović’s credibility, insinuating that he was a traitor.
Co-option of gangsters, illustrated by new allegations of top Serbian security officials assisting drug lord Darko Šarić, the Veljko Belivuk trial, and apparent subornation of law enforcement services and databases, highlighted by the mass registration of phantom voters for the 17 December 2023 elections, are alleged to be part and parcel of the system of power built under President Vučić.
Downhill
Grey Hotel, Kopaonik- Serbia, Photo: Alex Anderson
“Be very careful. This is a lawless country” was the warning of a Serbian journalist colleague. We heeded it insufficiently. In Kopaonik the severe men forbidding us from photographing in the street, intimidating us into hastening our exit and into deleting threads from our phones considered themselves the law, that was for sure.
The shadows of the Grey lengthen over the resort, from control of its environs including takeover of the ski slope for a private birthday festivity to video evidence that, inside, its informal co-owner can brutalise anybody he pleases to.
Our immediate concern was – were these simply Radoičić’s and the Veselinovićs’ heavies, or, given the shading of the state and the criminal under Vučić, did they also have BIA or police prerogatives too? Having driven out were we now OK, or would their writ extend down the mountain? Right to the border?
We had come here to test the boundaries – and found them.
Were we being followed? Unclear.
Keep on driving, but simultaneously scrolling through phones to nix anything particularly compromising.
At last we reach the police point. Initially the officer flags us down, but re-thinks and waves us on.
Then the National Park toll point. We have to stop the car past a road camera then get out and pay a man in a booth. Constantly looking around for the expected interdiction, none came. We drove on.
Onwards to the Kosovo border. Still unable to afford to relax, we encounter a bizarre apparent checkpoint formed by a dog lying in the middle of the road with a police car behind it. Just an odd confluence, we pick our way around it.
Traffic police later stop us at a junction, but after a cursory look at documents they wave us on.
Lastly, the crossing. The Serbian and Kosovo border guards’ booths just 20 metres apart. No hitches. Home safe.
Could they have had us interdicted and chose not to? The Serb sources in north Kosovo suppose that our profile was too high: shaking us down would have been a publicity own-goal.
Or may it be that, so far, the Grey’s writ extends only over its own mountain?
Greying though is a process difficult to stop once it starts. Things tend to go downhill.
Correction: The article initially identified Aleksandar Spiric as the person in this video but in fact the man in the video is suspected to be Adis Ladjar, a representative of a vehicle servicing centre. The text has been amended to reflect this.