Bishops and politicians flocked to be seen at the war hero’s side. Middle-class intellectuals may fear or scorn him but in a macho society such as Serbia’s, Arkan’s reputation as conqueror in the bedroom and on the battlefield appeals enormously to the popular psyche.Serbs like his filial devotion to the Serbian Orthodox Church. His wedding in 1995 to a svelte Serbian folk singer, Svetlana Velickovic, known as Ceca, drew enormous crowds. His name may, however, be in the so-called “sealed indictment”, kept secret to lull the target into a false sense of security.In Belgrade, the podgy-faced 49-year-old is a working-class hero. One of the central allegations against the Tigers is that, using machine-guns and hand guns, they slaughtered 2,000 Muslims in a sports centre.In the earlier war with Croatia, Arkan displayed his talent for tormenting potential victims.

When his forces seemed poised to capture the eastern Croatian city of Osijek in 1991 he made a broadcast to the city on radio, announcing in his sinister, high-pitched voice that he would soon be their lord mayor. His militia also took part in the destruction of the neighbouring Croatian town of Vukovar, in November 1991.In spite of this litany of horrors, Arkan has not been publicly indicted by the United Nations Yugoslav War Tribunal in the Hague. A memorable picture showed one of these shaven-headed hulks, a cigarette in one hand, planting a jackboot on top of the body of a murdered Muslim.Yugoslav war crime investigators have dossiers on Arkan from the 1992- 95 Bosnian conflict describing him as acting “like a possessed man”, and claiming he often giggled as he massacred civilians. Arkan’s gory persona as a killer was further reinforced yesterday by George Robertson, the Defence Secretary, when he used the move as further justification of the Nato campaign.In April 1992 a Time magazine photographer captured the Tigers in action in the Bosnian town of Bijeljina, after they had stormed in to crush the town’s Muslims.

A group, possibly several thousand, would be sent soon, he said.
The offer is unlikely to be just a scare tactic. Zeljko Raznjatovic’s warriors, known as “Tigers”, spearheaded a campaign of terror against civilians in Serbia’s two earlier wars in Croatia and in Bosnia. Borislav Pelevic, vice president of Arkan’s Serbian Unity party, yesterday told Serbian television that a large group of volunteers from Jagodina, in central Serbia, and Belgrade would be heading south to “defend Kosovo”. “I would say 16,000 people crossing a border in a single day is a hell of a lot of people,” she said..

BELGRADE’S announcement that the paramilitary leader known as Arkan has been sent to Kosovo will make many Kosovars sick to the stomach with fear. They came mainly from border villages, which they said had been emptied and set ablaze by Yugoslav forces.Lyndall Sachs, a spokeswoman for the UNHCR, said the numbers pouring into Albania suggested a mass flight was under way. The Albanian government says that 20,000 crossed on Saturday.Braving snow and rain, smaller numbers of people also arrived in Macedonia, a tiny country which has already taken 20,000 refugees. A brother and sister near by said that their father had been shot in front of them by Serbs.But the evidence is not just anecdotal. Officials from the Vienna-based Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) spoke by satellite telephone to commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army at the weekend.The commanders, whose accounts the OSCE regards as credible, described a mass killing near Velika Krusa, in southern Kosovo, the burning of large parts of Pec, and the use of civilians as human shields to deter Nato attacks on Serb military installations.The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) predicted yesterday that more than 16,000 people would have entered Albania from Kosovo by the end of the day. Thousands of men are said to have disappeared.A middle-aged ethnic Albanian, wearing a traditional white felt hat, wept as he relived the trauma of his escape from the regional capital, Pristina.