West Germany: Balkan Vendetta

For almost 25 years, West Germany has served as the front line of the cold war between the two superpowers. For nearly as long, it has also been the site of a smaller, less-publicized struggle that nonetheless has been far more lethal for its participants. It is an underground war involving hired assassins, silent murder, terror attacks and mission-impossible type weapons, including a variety of poison gas that West German authorities cannot yet identify. The fighters are Yugoslavs—exiles opposed to the regime of Josip Broz Tito on one side, agents of the Yugoslav secret service, the U.D.B.A., on the other.

Not that the 23,000 exiles form a united front—far from it. In fact, they are divided mainly into three major political and ethnic groups: the royalist Zbor movement; the Chetniks of the late Draža Mihailović, Tito’s chief rival for power during World War II; and the Croats, including many former members of the Ustachi movement, which collaborated with the Nazis during the war. Since the three groups despise each other nearly as much as they do Tito, a good part of the murder and mayhem among Yugoslavs in West Germany undoubtedly involves exile rivalries.

Recently, the exiles concluded an uneasy alliance to take advantage of a new factor: some 226,000 Yugoslav “guest workers” who are admitted to labor-short West Germany for two-or three-year stints. Over glasses of slivovitz in grimy bars, during friendly talk in homes, and in full-fledged secret political gatherings, Yugoslav exiles try to spread discontent among their visiting countrymen. Their hope, of course, is that the workers will form an anti-Tito underground when they return home.

However unlikely that prospect, the activity of the exiles has worried Tito. In retaliation, he has begun slipping paid informants and assassins across the border with groups of ordinary workers who arrive daily in major West German cities. Western experts estimate that some 1,000 U.D.B.A. informants are keeping an eye on Yugoslav workers, and that about 100 others are in West Germany to handle more sensitive assignments. Whatever their number, the agents work efficiently. In Munich alone during the past year, there have been six unsolved Yugoslav murders and several mysterious disappearances.

The exiles retaliate by machine-pistoling and bombing Yugoslav offices in West Germany. Employees of the Yugoslav embassy in Bonn work behind fortress-like defenses installed seven years ago, when exile attackers stormed the building and killed a doorman. In the past two years, exiles have hit Yugoslav offices in five major cities, including Berlin, where this summer a 27-year-old Croat riddled the consulate with bullets in an unsuccessful attempt to kill the chief of mission.

Diplomatic Problem. The émigré leader who claims that he is now No. 1 on the U.D.B.A. murder list is Branimir (“Branco”) Jelic, 62, who was a founder of the pro-Nazi Ustachi movement. It is not a claim that Jelic—or anyone else—makes idly. The last person who said his name was at the top of the list was Ante Vukic, 48-year-old president of the League of United Croats in Dortmund. He and his wife are now recovering from partial paralysis of their arms and legs, suffered when they inhaled a poison gas that had been sprayed on the interior of their car. Jelic, publisher of an émigré newspaper, has placed four walkie-talkie-equipped bodyguards outside his office and asked protection from the West Berlin police.

The Balkan vendetta being waged in West Germany has caused some setbacks in the newly cordial relations between Bonn and Belgrade. Yugoslav officials complain that West German courts have refused to hand over the exiles responsible for the bombings. West German officials reply that they cannot influence the decisions of the country’s independent courts, and somewhat helplessly plead with the Yugoslavs to take their war somewhere else.