More from the annals of foreign agency.
In the coming days we’ll be discussing the captivating tale of Richard A. Schechter and LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, L.L.P and their work on behalf Bogoljub Karic and the Karic Group of companies. Here’s a link to the Karic family foundation.
In the bastard form of crony capitalism which prevailed during Slobodan Milosevic’s decade-plus reign, Bogoljub Karic served as crony-in-chief. He rose to riches and fame under the Milosevic regime; he operated as Milosevic’s personal banker; he published Milosevic’s wife’s memoirs and loaned her his private jet. Karic even served in Milosevic’s cabinet during the Kosovo war and, according to the February 9th, 2002 Daily Telegraph, Serb authorities still believe Karic is serving as the Milosevic family’s banker.
Those fascinating documents are still to come. But for now let’s deal with some unfinished business, or rather, continue a story we started a little while back.
As regular readers will remember, on March 2nd we discussed the lobbying which Jefferson Waterman International did for the Republic of Croatia, particularly with regards to laying the media groundwork for their military reconquest of the Krajina region. There was also a follow-up on March 6th.
We don’t want to give readers the idea that the Croats were the only ones playing the foreign lobbying game in Washington in the 1990s. So today we have filings from foreign agents who represented the two pseudo-states Serbs carved out from Croatia and Bosnia — the Serbian Krajina, repped by Zoran Djordjevic, and the Republika Srpska, repped by Danielle Sremac.
In any case, the Serbs and the Croats both had folks working for them in DC. The basic difference seems to be that the Croats had a more professional operation. They had established firms — with no obvious ethnic connection to Croatia — working for them for big bucks. The Serbs tended to have Serbs or Serbian-Americans working on their behalf in DC. And often they were paid, at least in part, with funds collected from Serbian-Americans.
The really interesting figure here is Danielle Sremac.
Sremac made frequent television appearances in the 1990s as a supporter of the Serb position in the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts. More recently she hits the airwaves as the Director of something called the Institute for Balkan Affairs.
Seldom noted in these various media appearances was the fact that Sremac was the paid agent of the Republika Srpska (RS), the Serb secessionist pseudo-state ruled by indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic. And she signed on to represent RS, as these documents show, in July 1994, at what can only be called the era when the RS was committing the worst of its excesses, war crimes, and miscellaneous other crimes against humanity type activities.
