On 12 May, 2026 Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, was the scene of a brutal gangland murder which continues to reverberate.

It rivalled anything that might have occurred in 1950s Havana or in Al Capone days in Chicago. It was shocking even by the permissive standards of Serbia’s neo-Batista regime.

To read this article in the following languages, click the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

The crime technically (and conveniently) remains “unsolved.” It is the subject of an official “investigation” which seems deliberately designed to meander aimlessly and forever, like the probe into the nearly forgotten fatal collapse of the concrete canopy in Novi Sad in November of 2024 which killed seventeen persons and sparked indignant protests which have not abated. The venue of the crime is notable in itself. It is a high end restaurant, cryptically named after its street address “The 27,” located in a posh neighbourhood and frequented almost exclusively by the regime nomenklatura and their underworld associates. Described  idyllically by foreign restaurant critics as “a hidden sanctuary for those wishing to escape the city bustle for the greenery of [Belgrade suburb] Senjak,” the “27” is in fact inaccessible to regular Serbs much as its prototype in the 1950s Mafia-run Havana, the Hotel Nacional, was off limits to regular Cubans.

The Nacional in Havana is where a notorious Mafia conference in 1946 laid the foundations for the underworld takeover of Cuba.

Now fast forward to Belgrade, Serbia, 2026. The “27” plays an identical role. It is the place where criminal schemes are hatched, corrupt deals are clinched, and where crooked government officials can interact unobserved with their Mafiosi associates.

The victim of this spectacular murder at the “27” was Serbian underworld figure Aleksandar Nešović, whose criminal gang in the past loyally served the regime, but who had since then fallen out of favour. The killing, which occurred in the physical presence of a high police official who was instrumental in enticing the victim to the location of his demise, is a blunt reminder of the symbiotic relationship between what in Serbia passes for the government and the powerful crime cartels whose strangulating tentacles extend to every facet of Serbian society, economy, finance, and public life. The plot of the  cinematic masterpiece The Godfather can be seamlessly transposed from 1950s Cuba to 2026 Serbia, without significant editing or loss of meaning. Those wishing to savour some Belgrade atmosphere should click onto the iconic Havana Hotel Nacional rooftop scene here.  

The murdered Nešović, once close to the ruling structure, was lured to a fatal meeting with rival cartel boss and another known criminal Saša Vuković, with whom Nešović had unsettled accounts. The session at the restaurant was supposedly called to regulate their dispute. Leaked mobile telephone records suggest that the deadly ambush was set up by none other than the head of the Belgrade Police Directorate, Veselin Milić. When the homicide occurred, the high ranking police official was sitting at the same table with the two criminals, acting as mediator in their underworld quarrel. There are conflicting reports of who fired the shots that killed Nešović. One version holds that it was Vuković whilst another points to the “peacemaker” police director Milić himself, giving ample credence to the devastating assessment delivered by Le Monde recently that “a Belgrade, personne ne peut plus faire la différence entre un criminel ou un policier” [In Belgrade no one can any longer tell the difference between a criminal and a policeman]. The truth of the matter is unlikely to ever come to light because, according to witnesses, the crime scene clean-up operation began immediately after the fatal shots were fired. Cameras were seized and clues that might have enabled a reconstruction of the crime were removed, all with the apparent connivance of police chief Milić, who never bothered to explain his awkward association with organised crime figures, or even to report to superiors the homicide that he had just witnessed, as required by professional protocols.

Along with the bullets, which might have yielded some valuable forensic clues, Nešović’s body also conveniently disappeared from the crime scene. It was located eventually several days later, decomposing and  stuffed in a barrel, Jimmy Hoffa style. The latter reference readers whose memories extend back to the mid-1970s will readily understand.

The lifeless and decomposed body of Aleksandar Nešović is a fitting metaphor for the condition today of a tormented European country, Serbia to be precise, which groans under the yoke of a kleptocratic tyranny it seems helpless to shake off. That tyranny is fully enabled by the collective West as Serbia draws near to the full implementation of the agenda set for it at the 2008 clandestine meeting at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, where the Serbian Batista made the Faustian bargain with his Western handlers. Almost two decades later, the fruits of that infernal deal are plain to see.

In return for his Warholian fifteen minutes of fame, and licence to loot without restraint, the Serbian Batista has willingly subjected himself and his country to total vassalage, which consists of promoting the collective West’s agenda in the Balkans and beyond, as instructed. He was assigned a set of operational tasks which he has been implementing meticulously.

The first of these tasks, renunciation of sovereignty and formal recognition of the geostrategically pivotal territory of Kosovo as an “independent” state under collective West occupation, is nearly completed. During Batista’s thirteen-year rule, all Serbian institutions still remaining in Kosovo after 1999 have been dissolved and the ethnic cleansing of the Serbian population continued at an accelerated pace. Serbia has agreed to favourably consider the Western plan to give Kosovo observer status in the UN, which is the prelude to de jure recognition by Serbia of the illegal secession.

The second key task assigned to the Serbian vassal regime concerns the restructuring of Bosnia to suit collective West and specifically NATO requirements, prior to the entire country’s incorporation into NATO in anticipation of the planned conflict with Russia. Serbia, which is a state-party guarantor of the original Dayton Accords, has undertaken to cooperate in the planned restructuring of that agreement at the expense of the Republika Srpska, the Serb entity in Bosnia. In the interim phase, preceding Republika Srpska’s complete absorption, the revised Dayton Agreement would acknowledge the Serb Republic’s existence, but with severely curtailed powers, reducing it to an appendage of the centralised state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Unlike Kosovo, however, it would be explicitly denied the right of secession.

The third important commitment to the detriment of Serbia which the  regime has undertaken to implement in return for Western toleration of its misrule, is to  enforce on Serbian territory the provisions of the 2018 Marrakesh Migration Agreement, euphemistically known as the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. The purpose of the Marrakesh Agreement, which was signed and ratified by Serbia, is to formalise the rules and procedures of population replacement, mainly in Europe. Under that compact, Serbia has agreed to admit up to a million migrants with the obligation of providing them with employment, social benefits, and schooling in their native language. These are onerous obligations for a small country of about six million inhabitants such as Serbia, which, should the terms of this agreement be enforced on its territory, would be flooded by culturally incompatible newcomers. But that is a price the regime is happy to pay for continued Western support, or at least toleration. Notably, five member-states of the European Union, which Serbia is not, whose governments are mindful of the national interest and responsive to the will of their people, have refused to sign on to the problematic Marrakesh Treaty. Those countries are Hungary, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Croatia.

But Serbia is not fortunate to have such a virile government.

The political strategy of the Serbian regime no longer is return to the status quo ante before the surge of mass protests led by the students, because it understands that this is impossible. The current, more realistic objective is to stave off abrupt collapse by bluff and bluster, maintaining the pretence of normalcy whilst negotiating the evacuation of the top echelon with as much loot as they will be allowed to keep by their Western curators after orderly departure and handover to the new set of quislings. To a certain degree that objective is shared by the regime’s Western sponsors. They are never inclined to sustain indefinitely a specific clique of collaborators but are focused exclusively on preserving in Serbia the system of neo-colonial subordination which has served them so well.

As the Serbian Batista is learning painfully, colonial administrators are replaceable; the only imperative is for the system in which they operate to remain intact.

*

Click the share button below to email/forward this article. Follow us on Instagram and X and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost Global Research articles with proper attribution.

Stephen Karganovic is president of “Srebrenica Historical Project,” an NGO registered in the Netherlands to investigate the factual matrix and background of events that took place in Srebrenica in July of 1995. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.  

Featured image source

Global Research is a reader-funded media. We do not accept any funding from corporations or governments. Help us stay afloat. Click the image below to make a one-time or recurring donation.