Fears that Kosovo's Albanians are about to endure the same "ethnic cleansing" that Bosnia suffered earlier this decade have been fuelled by the arrival there of Serbia's most famous paramilitary general, Zeljko Raznjatovic, better known as Arkan.
"He's a man of horrifying background," said the British Defence Secretary, Mr George Robertson, yesterday. "It is one of the chilling bits of information that's come out that this man called Arkan is apparently near Pristina."
During the Bosnian war Arkan and his private army, the Tigers, swept through the prosperous Muslim areas of eastern Bosnia, killing, burning and looting. But Arkan is much more than the general of a private army: gangster, businessman, football-club owner, and through marriage to a famous pop star, a celebrity. He is also a wanted man. Interpol has warrants for his arrest for a string of robberies across Europe in the 1980s, and most famously, for shooting his way out of a Swedish courtroom.
Rumours - the key information source in the Balkans - say he was, under Yugoslavia's former communist regime, a hit-man for the secret service, with orders to bump off nationalist opponents living abroad.
By the turn of the decade he was already well known in the capital. He owned a pastry shop in a leafy Belgrade suburb which appeared to make world-record profits on its selection of bread and fine cakes, to judge by his extravagant tastes.
Arkan had another job: chairman of the supporters' club of Yugoslavia's top football team, Red Star Belgrade. Again, the rumour machine insists this is no coincidence - football had by then become a platform for Yugoslavia's emerging nationalist groups. Arkan's job was to ensure, for the communists, that Red Star was not infiltrated by Serb nationalists.
Then came Slobodan Milosevic. A second-string communist official, he transformed himself into the nation's leader after donning the cloak of Serbian nationalism at the turn of the decade. Arkan joined the rising nationalist wave.
Serbs had always considered themselves the first among equals in Yugoslavia. While other national groups had connived with the Nazis, Serbs had formed the bulk of the Partisan resistance.
When the other ethnic groups wanted to break away, the Serbs said, fine, but we take what is ours. This set the pattern for wars in Serb-held parts of Croatia, then the carnage in Bosnia as Serbs sought to "cleanse" Serb land of other ethnic groups.
Arkan became a willing recruit to the cause. Out of the fan club members, he recruited his own private army, the Tigers, which went into action in 1991 in Croatia. The following year the Tigers were the first into Bosnia, drawing the first Muslim blood with shootings in the streets of the eastern town of Bijelijna. Then they captured the strategically vital town of Brcko, with a particularly vicious bout of "ethnic cleansing", killing many of the Croat and Muslim population. The rest fled.
Together with other paramilitary groups, with exotic names like White Eagles and Serbian Chetniks (the name of the royalists), more than half-a-million Croats and Muslims were "cleansed" from two-thirds of Bosnia, with tens of thousands killed or interned. He diverted into politics, winning a senate seat with the votes of Serbs in Kosovo. But he did poorly in the 1993 elections, and moved into business.
The West's sanctions against Yugoslavia, imposed in 1992 and never totally lifted, had by then opened up an exciting business opportunity. This was smuggling. Bringing coffee, cigarettes, whisky and above all petrol in from bordering countries made him and others rich. Even as the economy proper fell apart and people's savings were drained, the smuggler-gangsters made huge sums, enjoying official patronage as they brought desperately needed fuel for the war machine.
And so Arkan glided from war, through business, to celebrity. In 1995, in Belgrade's wedding of the decade, he married the famously buxom pop singer Ceca, she in a revealing dress, he in the traditional Serb Chetnik uniform with distinctive square green officer's cap.
The Tigers pulled out of Bosnia when cleansing gave way to static unglamorous trench warfare, much to the annoyance of the regular Bosnian Serb troops. Arkan's men returned to Bosnia in 1995, rounding up deserters and "persuading" them to rejoin the crumbling front line, under attack by the Croats and Muslims.
After the war, he moved back into the world of football. His fan-club days were behind him, though. Now he could afford his own team.
He bought the Belgrade club Obilic. Nationalism, football and Arkan fused once more. Obilic is the name of a Serbian hero, who fought in Serbia's most historic battle, Kosovo Field, in 1389, killing the sultan in his tent.
Arkan brought his own distinctive management style to the team. After losing one away match, he ordered the team bus to stop 30 kilometres from Belgrade, and told the players to walk the rest of the way home.
But it worked: the team won the league championship in their first season, a feat made easier by the impoverished state of the rest of the league. This presented a new problem. Being a wanted man, trips abroad to watch his team in the Champions League against Germany's Bayern Munich and Scotland's Glasgow Celtic were out of the question.
Instead, he sent his wife, naming her club president. This delighted the fans: Ceca's fusion of pop and Serbian folk music - Turbo Folk - has won her a huge following. But dismay quickly followed when, in a TV interview before the Munich game she revealed she did not know the names of many team members.
Obilic lost its European matches, with the fans wondering if their success in Yugoslavia had been bought in bribes by Arkan. One mystery remains about Arkan. More than 70 men, mostly Bosnian Serbs, have been indicted for war crimes including genocide by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague. But Arkan's name is not among them. The tribunal, discarding the notion that justice should be seen to be done, has refused to discuss why, like Mr Milosevic, there is no arrest warrant out for him.
The rumour machine - in this case among the region's diplomats - thinks it knows the answer. Mr Milosevic is not indicted because his signature guarantees the Dayton Peace agreement which ended Bosnia's war. And Arkan was his lieutenant, a man quite capable of spilling the beans on Milosevic should he find himself in the dock.
He has even survived, so far, the new threat to the health of Belgrade's gangsters: each other. War, sanctions and corruption have ruined the city and even the gangsters are beginning to notice, with regular shootings punctuating the turf wars that have broken out. But Arkan remains aloof, his position apparently assured for as long as his patron, Milosevic, remains in power.