The trial began in Croatia this week of four men accused of carrying out an audacious and brutal murder that shocked this Balkan nation. Ivo Pukanic, owner of the weekly Nacional newspaper, was killed, along with a colleague, by a powerful bomb in October 2008.
The audacity of the murder, right in the middle of the capital Zagreb, has proven something of a wake-up call in Croatia, where the fight against criminal mafias has not always been fought with particular ardour. We looked at these issues on our journey to Croatia last month, when we reported on the presidential elections
Ivo Pukanic was a colourful man, and perhaps not everybody’s cup of tea.
He loved powerful motorcycles, and powerful people. He was friends with everybody; the great and good, but also many shady characters. But few doubt that he was killed because of Nacional’s ground-breaking reporting on organised crime and smuggling.
Nacional had fearlessly exposed what is common knowledge in the Balkans; that the countries of the former Yugoslavia may have split up amidst acrimony and bloodshed in the 1990’s; but the criminal mafias of Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia and Montenegro happily co-operate in their pursuit of profit. In fact, like no-one else, they keep the spirit of the old Yugoslavia alive.
One of the suspects in the Pukanic case, Montenegrin businessman Slobodan Djurovic, who has pleaded innocent, boasted to the judge at the opening of the trial that he had so much money he would be unable to spend it even "if I lived for another hundred years".
Last week, I was reminded again of the power of organised crime in the Balkans, when travelling through Serbia and Montenegro. I was doing a report on cocaine smuggling from South America, which I hope you’ll be able to watch on Al Jazeera English in the coming days.
In Belgrade, we were told by investigators how an enormous shipment of cocaine had been seized in Uruguay and Argentina in late 2009, that was destined for Europe.
The drug gang - a mixture of Croats, Serbs and Montenegrins - had hoped to smuggle the cocaine onto the coast of Montenegro, from where it would have been moved onto more profitable markets.
Some 2.8 tons of the white stuff, to be exact, with a street value of around 250 million Euros.
Now, just think of the corrupting power of that kind of money. A quick glance at my Economist Yearbook tells me that the entire GDP of Montenegro in 2009 was only 1.8 billion Euros.
In other words, this one drug seizure was worth more than 10 per cent of the country’s annual GDP.
You can bribe an awful lot of people with that kind of money "Don't worry", said an expert on narcotics in Belgrade, "they made this seizure, but a lot more is getting through".
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![[QODLink]](http://english.aljazeera.net/mritems/Images/2012/2/12/2012212114913931580_16.jpg "The miracle generation")
