Full Description:
Irregular armed groups operating alongside or independently of official armies during the Yugoslav Wars. Notable examples include Arkan’s Tigers (Serb), the Škorpioni (Serb), the Croatian Defence Forces (HOS), and various Bosniak mujahideen units. Paramilitaries were often composed of criminals, ultra-nationalists, and mercenaries, and were responsible for the most brutal atrocities, including mass rapes, summary executions, and the Srebrenica genocide.
Critical Perspective:
Paramilitaries were the id of the Yugoslav Wars—the violence that official armies pretended to condemn while quietly arming and directing. Serbian paramilitaries were famously deployed by Milošević to carry out “plausibly deniable” ethnic cleansing. Croatian paramilitaries were absorbed into the army when convenient. The existence of these units proves that the wars were not “chaotic” but contained a deliberate outsourcing of atrocity to men without uniforms, allowing political leaders to claim their hands were clean. The paramilitaries’ symbols—tiger patches, skull insignias—have become neo-fascist icons across the Western Balkans.
