Camouflage uniforms and military boots have been walking the streets of Serbia since the beginning of the political crisis caused by the tragedy in Novi Sad.
Both supporters and opponents of the government have their war veterans.
They follow students leading anti-government protests, and the mother of one of the victims of the Novi Sad canopy collapse, who is seeking responsibility for the death of her son and 15 other victims of the accident.
The government, which denies responsibility, responds with a tent settlement in the center of Belgrade (the so-called "Ćaciland"), where, among others, veterans of the "Red Berets" gather.
This unit was established in the 1990s by the State Security to participate in all wars in the 1990s. Its members were convicted of the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić and other political murders.
Who are the anti-government veterans?
In addition to former members of the controversial 63rd Military Parachute Brigade, which participated in the wars of the 1990s, and to which Radio Free Europe (RSE) previously wrote, the anti-government protests also include a group accompanying the mother of one of the victims of the canopy collapse, Dijana Hrka.
They call themselves "guardians of students and the people."
In public they are called veterans, and they present themselves as "fighters from Košare" in Kosovo in 1999.
The group does not have a formally registered association.
Nenad Stanić, who has been seen accompanying Dijana Hrka for months, is the one who most often addresses the public on behalf of the group.
He was with her in the tents near the Serbian Parliament where she went on a hunger strike for sixteen days in November, demanding responsibility for her son's death.
Stanić told the media in previous years that he had been a regular soldier in 1992 when the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina began, where he spent "three or four months", and that in 1999 he volunteered to participate in the war in Kosovo.
Links to Russian organizations
Stanić has shared photos on social media on several occasions with Albert Andiyev, a Russian volunteer who fought in the ranks of Serbian forces in Kosovo in 1999.
In his posts, he supported the leader of the extreme right-wing organization "People's Patrol", Damnjan Knežević, and on Instagram, along with the message "heavenly empire", he shared information about the death of Marko Matović, a member of "People's Patrol" who fought in Ukraine as a volunteer for the Russian army.
While Hrka was on hunger strike, information appeared on social media that he was connected to Russian security services and veterans' organizations there.
RFE/RL has not confirmed these connections, and Stanić states that the people he is participating in the protests with are "his comrades-in-arms", and not part of any movement or association.
"I am not a member of anything. The goal is to discredit us from all angles," Stanić said in a telephone interview with RFE/RL.
He also stated that he does not cooperate with veterans' organizations from Russia.
"All these insinuations that we are part of the Russian service are far from the truth. Everyone who says that is keeping us paranoid so they can do whatever they want," he added.
The group around Dijana Hrka included Siniša Jevtić, who also introduces himself as a "fighter from Košare".
Until November 2025, Jevtić was the director of the "Brother for Brother" foundation, which was established with the aim of providing assistance to the most socially vulnerable veterans.
The foundation was first named "Bojevo bratstvo", and its founder was the Association of War Veterans "Bojevo bratstvo Kruševac".
This association is a member of the "All-Serbian Federation of Fighting Brotherhood", which, according to previous RFE/RL research, is connected to the organization of the same name in the Moscow region in Russia.
The president of the Russian association, Boris Gromov, served as governor of the Moscow Region for several terms at the proposal of President Vladimir Putin's United Russia.
Among the vice presidents is Rashid Nastuev, a member of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).
This organization signed a cooperation agreement with the "All-Serbian Alliance" in 2017.
In addition to Siniša Jevtić, posts on social media show that other representatives of the "Bojevo bratstvo" association and alliance in Serbia also support anti-government protests, but they do not appear at them regularly and are not part of the group around Dijana Hrka.
In the 2024 elections, Jevtić publicly supported the then opposition, right-wing party Zavetnici, which is known for its pro-Russian stances.
Today, he says that he withdrew his support for this party when it joined the current government.
Arrest in Kosovo
Siniša Jevtić was arrested in Kosovo in May 2023, at the Jarinje border crossing.
Kosovo Police officers arrested him and another Serbian citizen after finding a baton, camouflage mask, hammer, knives, and the like in their possession.
The Kosovo Prosecutor's Office stated at the time that the arrested were in contact with Serbian demonstrators who clashed with KFOR soldiers in Zvečan on May 29th, opposing the entry of the Albanian mayor into the municipal building.
93 KFOR soldiers deployed in front of the Zvečan municipality were injured in the conflict.
Jevtić was sentenced to six months in prison, which was commuted to a fine, with a three-year ban on entering Kosovo.
In Serbia, he participated in demonstrations against lithium mining in 2021. At one of the protests, he was in a group carrying the banner "On the Defender of the Fatherland" alongside Nenad Stanić.
Although he is still in uniform and participating in anti-government protests, Jevtić is no longer in the group around Dijana Hrka, who, even after her hunger strike, is staying in a tent near the Serbian Parliament, demanding that the authorities fulfill her demands.
Nenad Stanić stated on Instagram that the conflict arose "over boxes of money from donations", and Jevtić announced on social media that he "does not trust Stanić", commenting that "some people want to engage in politics through veterans".
Who are the government veterans?
Along with the mother of the person killed in the canopy collapse, Uglješa Mrdić, a member of parliament from the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), also went on a hunger strike for about ten days in November, claiming that he too was responsible for the accident in Novi Sad.
Mrdić, who is also the chairman of the Serbian Parliament's Judiciary Committee, ended the strike on November 10th after he fell ill.
Several "veterans" of the wars of the 1990s were striking with him in the tent on the steps of the Parliament building.
At a rally of government supporters on November 2, Mrdić presented them as "heroes" who "bleeded defending the Republic of Serbian Krajina (a part of Croatia controlled by Serbian forces in the 1990s) and the Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija and southern Serbia."
One of them is Miodrag Repija, a former member of the disbanded Special Operations Unit (JSO), and later the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Bosnian entity Republika Srpska.
Repija is mentioned in the Hague Tribunal's verdict against former Serbian State Security Chief Jovica Stanišić, as one of those present at the opening of the Unit's training center in Kula in 1997.
There were two other hunger strikers in the JSO - Janko Kereš and Slavimir Mitrović Pop.
Today, Keres and Repija own a private security company called "Vuk Security Solutions".
The company, according to data from the Business Registers Agency, was founded on November 28, 2024, at the beginning of anti-government protests in Serbia.
Along with the ruling SNS MP Uglješa Mrdić, Nenad Jovanović, who in recent years has often accompanied Hague convict Vojislav Šešelj, also went on hunger strike, facial recognition tools show.
In all available photographs, Jovanović is in close proximity to Šešelj, often in poses that may suggest that he is a member of his security.
Janko Benak is also a member of the "Red Berets" Veterans Association and can be seen in photographs with the President of Serbia on October 22nd in front of a tent settlement of government supporters, along with a group of men in uniform.
Aleksandar Vučić posted the pictures on his official Instagram account when he visited the tent city after the fire and shooting, in which one man was injured.
In 2012, Benak announced on the social network X, then known as Twitter, that he was a member of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party.
A year later, on the same network, on the anniversary of Zoran Đinđić's assassination, he wrote "God bless you, friend of Zvezdana Jovanović."
Former JSO member Zvezdan Jovanović is serving a 40-year prison sentence as the direct perpetrator of the assassination of the Serbian Prime Minister.
In March 2025, when the anniversary of the assassination of Đinđić was being marked, other veterans of the "Red Berets" were also in the tent city.
They were led by former JSO member Živojin Ivanovic and former Serbian Gendarmerie commander Goran Radosavljević Guri, whom the United States has linked to the murder of the Bytyqi brothers after the 1999 Kosovo war.
The ruling party then stated that they did not see a problem with their presence.
Former Yugoslav Army general Vladimir Lazarević, who was serving a 14-year prison sentence in The Hague for war crimes against Albanian civilians in Kosovo in 1999, was also in the tent settlement in March.
Who are war veterans according to the law?
There are no official data on the number of people in Serbia who participated in the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo in the 1990s.
The Law on the Rights of Veterans states that a veteran is a Serbian citizen who, as a member of the Serbian armed forces, performed military or other duties in war or armed actions undertaken in peacetime "for the purpose of defending sovereignty and constitutional order."
Although the army of the once-common state, rebels and paramilitary formations were under Belgrade's control, the state leadership claimed that Serbia did not participate in the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Croatia. It describes the war in Kosovo as "defense of its territory."
"A huge number of these people had nothing recorded in their military records, especially when they went outside the borders of Serbia, because in this way Serbia hid its rather large participation in the wars," says historian Dragan Popović.
According to data from the non-governmental organizations Documenta from Zagreb, the Humanitarian Law Center from Belgrade and Pristina, and the Association Transitional Justice, Responsibility and Memory from Sarajevo, more than 100.000 people lost their lives in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, more than 17 in Croatia, while more than 13 people went missing or were killed in Kosovo.
What is the role of war veterans?
Historian Dragan Popović assesses that veterans on both sides are part of the struggle for symbols and narratives of who represents the state and nation, who has the right to wear the uniform, but also to use the legacy of the past.
"And one of the things this protest has shown us is that Serbia still lacks the maturity to question it," Popović told Radio Free Europe.
As one example, he cites the war in Kosovo, whose independence Belgrade still does not recognize.
"Neither the student movement nor anyone else is moving away from the mantra that Kosovo is part of Serbia and the role of veterans is very much connected to that story. It is a narrative that will have to be dismantled in the future because it is dangerous," Popović says.
He sees the role of veterans at government gatherings as even more dangerous, where, in addition to former members of the "Red Berets", those convicted of war crimes also appear.
"What the government is doing is, on the one hand, instilling fear, and on the other, showing a fairly clear continuity between the politics of the 1990s and today," Popović said.
What happened at Košare?
In the conflict between the military forces of Serbia and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which took place from April to June 1999 on the border of Kosovo and Albania, dozens of soldiers on both sides were killed.
In Serbia, this conflict is referred to as a "heroic battle" of soldiers who "defended the border and prevented the entry" of KLA members from Albania into Kosovo.
The fact that young recruits of the then Yugoslav Army, and the least experienced officers, participated in the fighting is put in the background.
"The entire Battle of Košare is a myth. It's an event where the leadership of (then-President of Yugoslavia Slobodan) Milošević sent 18, 19-year-old children to defend some mountain in a senseless war, and to die," says historian Dragan Popović.
"Instead of using this event, which was not the only one, to show what the war was for, it was used to make a myth about heroism and sacrifice," Popović adds.
The role of the JSO in the wars of the 1990s
The special operations unit, better known as the "Red Berets", was founded by the State Security Department, headed by Jovica Stanišić, one of the closest associates of then-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević. His right-hand man was Franko Simatović.
Stanišić and Simatović were sentenced to 15 years in prison each in The Hague in 2023 for aiding and abetting war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992.
Although the Tribunal established that the JSO participated in war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, none of its members have been prosecuted in Serbia to date.
It was disbanded in 2003 after the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic.
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