“When the war started, the men who took up weapons were small time thugs and crooks. They -defended Sarajevo and became paramilitary forces. We called them warlords because they had created their own mini statelets, ruling by force and taking over organized crime. -Sarajevo, even under siege, could not be run by such guys. We had to do something”. Hence the decision to crackdown on them, Kemal Muftic, personal advisor of President Izetbegovic, -explained to me a few days after the operation was over. “They had appointed themselves “Commanders”, brought more violence into the city and would answer to no one. We had to get rid of this cancer…”

In fact, some of them have already disappeared from Sarajevo: “Juka” — Jusuf Prazina — was  driven out of town at the end of the summer of 1992, only a few months after the beginning of the siege. A troubled teen turned chief racketeer and king of the black market, he had appointed himself “Commander of the Special Forces”. A loose cannon, he continued fighting and -controlling the black market from the Igman mountains surrounding Sarajevo. A few months ago, his pockets full, he fled to Belgium where his wife Zaklina, a blonde, attractive woman whom I had met when she was still in Sarajevo, waited for him. Last week, Juka was found dead, two bullets lodged in his head. The investigation is ongoing.

Another character, Ismet Bajramovic, or “Celo” Ismet (“Celo” ie, “bald”, a nickname for former prisoners whose heads were shaven) also faced “early departure”. A petty criminal and rapist, he had spent a few years in jail in the mid-1980s, where he met Alija Izetbegovic, the future President of Bosnia and Herzegovina, imprisoned for “Islamic militancy”. Legend has it that Celo Ismet took “Alija” under his wing and became one of his closest men when the war broke out. As the self-appointed “Commander of the Military Police”, he controlled organised crime. He also ran bars including the only war-nightclub, “BB”, located in the basement of the “Hotel Belgrade” promptly renamed “Bosnia”.  He would drop by late at night, tall and striking, surrounded by his bodyguards. Last month, Celo Ismet was shot in the heart and flown out of town “to get treatment”; a strange departure thanks to a United Nations airlift.

By the end of last October, a few warlords were still alive and kicking, and enjoying the windfalls of the siege. Among them was the infamous Musan Topalovic, “Caco”, a cruel sadist, and a has-been rock guitarist turned “Commander of the 10th Mountain Brigade”. Based above the old Ottoman town, he controlled the hills of Trebevic, threatening a strategic Serbian resupply road. He had two pet hates: the Serbs, and women going out alone at dark. “They have no business being out at night; they should stay at home and wash the socks of their men while they are fighting on the front line,” he once told me. “No cheating in my neighborhood, it’s bad for the morale of the soldiers.”

Also revelling in the pleasures of Sarajevo, was his friend Celo Delalic, aka “Celo” Ramiz, “Commander of the 9th Mountain Brigade”, a chief racketeer worshipped by his soldiers. In March 1992, during the referendum on independence, Celo Ramiz shot dead a Serbian man whose daughter was getting married. The killing, a few weeks before the war, sparked three days of street fighting, turned Sarajevo into an embattled campground and a dress rehearsal of the future siege. “The wedding procession in the Muslim old town was provocative,” he said to me months later when I asked if he felt any responsibility in the war to come.

Up until last summer, these gruesome characters had maintained a firm grip on the capital. That is, until the government realised that the time had come to reassert control over Sarajevo. It was a matter of credibility in the eyes of the people, but also for “international friends” who would arm the nascent Bosnian Army. Not an easy task: warlords were not only looked upon as necessary evils but also as heroes.