Serb Volunteer Guard


The Serb Volunteer Guard, also known as Arkan's Tigers or Arkan's men, was a Serbian volunteer paramilitary unit founded and led by Arkan that fought in Croatia and Bosnia during the Yugoslav Wars.

History and organisation

The Guard was created on 11 October 1990 by twenty members of the Red Star Belgrade football club Ultra group Delije Sever. The Guard was under the command of the Territorial Defense, a regular military in charge of the territories of Croatia populated predominantly by Serbs during the first half of the 1990s. Serb Volunteer Guard was organized as gang of criminals and armed by Belgrade.
The Serb Volunteer Guard set up their headquarters and training camp in a former military facility in Erdut. It saw action from mid-1991 to late 1995, initially in the Vukovar region of Croatia. It was supplied and equipped from the reserves of the Serbian police force during the War in Croatia and Bosnia.

War in Croatia (1991) & Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992)

After war broke out in the former Yugoslav republic of Croatia in the fall of 1991 and in Bosnia in April 1992, Arkan and his units moved to attack different territories in these countries. In Croatia, the Tigers fought in various locales in Eastern Slavonia.
Serb Volunteer Guard under Arkan command massacred hundreds of people in eastern Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina while in the early
ethnic cleansing campaigns in eastern Bosnia this unit had a major role.
In autumn 1995, Arkan's troops fought in the area of Banja Luka, Sanski Most and Prijedor where they were routed. Arkan personally led most war actions, and rewarded his most efficient officers and soldiers with ranks, medals and eventually the products of the lootings. The Serb Volunteer Guard was officially disbanded in April 1996. Besides Arkan, a notable member of the Guard was his right-hand man, Colonel Nebojša Djordjević, who was murdered in late 1996. Another notable member was Milorad Ulemek, who is now serving a 40-year sentence for his involvement in the assassination of Serbia's pro-Western prime minister Zoran Đinđić in 2003.

War crimes charges

Željko Ražnatović was indicted in 1997 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for his command of the Guard, as the unit was allegedly responsible for numerous crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Convention and violations of the laws or customs of war, including active participation in the ethnic cleansing in Bijeljina and Zvornik in 1992.
The ICTY charged the Serb Volunteer Guard, under the command or supervision of Željko Ražnatović with:
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