Belgrade's Defence Strategy Tilts West

Monday, 21 February, 2005

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Daniel Sunter

In the first major redefinition of military doctrine since the collapse of Communism, Serbia-Montenegro is about to focus its defence strategy entirely on integration with the West.

Serbia-Montenegro's parliament is expected to pass a crucial defence document, the Serbia-Montenegro Union Defence Strategy, by July 5.

As the old hostility towards against political and military integration with the West – so much a feature of Slobodan Milosevic's regime in the Nineties - fade away, new imperatives are called for.

The new defence strategy, which IWPR has seen, stresses Belgrade's new determination to join NATO's Partnership for Peace and its support for Euro-Atlantic integration.

In place of the old threat of military invasion which underpinned the communist doctrine of mass public mobilisation to create a "nation in arms", the new document identifies terrorism and organised crime as the biggest security threats facing the state.

These altered priorities testify to the fact that the long-standing concept of an external military threat from west or east has been finally abandoned.

Serbia and Montenegro, says the strategy document, "reiterate their determination to join international security structures, above all, the NATO Partnership for Peace Programme and other European and Euro-Atlantic integrations".

In place of the long-standing isolationist policy, the paper says the state cannot achieve its security objectives through an independent national security policy, but only through the application of regional and global standards.

The defence paper states that the European Union, NATO, OSCE and United Nations are now key factors in the security equation - a radical change from the Milosevic years when NATO was seen as the enemy.

While the content and thrust of the document would not be novel for other ex-communist European states, analysts believe it marks an important step for Belgrade, which was at war with NATO over Kosovo only four years ago.

POSITIVE REACTIONS FROM INTERNATIONALS AND THE MILITARY

The new strategy and other reformist measures in defence have been warmly welcomed by the international community, local experts and members of the armed forces.

"The imminent adoption of this document is good news for both Serbia-Montenegro and the entire region," one western diplomat told IWPR.

"Belgrade thus proves it sees its future as a member of the European family of nations and as an integral part of Euro-Atlantic integration processes."

Members of Serbia-Montenegro's army also have high expectations of the new strategy and of the effort to redefine the military's place in society.

Several army officers told IWPR they expected the reforms to lead to the armed forces being restructured into an efficient modern state institution.

"This is the first step, after which we can define what kind of army this country needs and where we see ourselves militarily and politically in relation to the rest of the world," said one officer, asking not to be named.

REFORMING AND PRUNING THE ARMY

Apart from the overt pro-western strategy, reforms are also ongoing in the reorganisation of the defence ministry, the formation of a fund for army reform and in the first joint military exercises with NATO states.

Reform of the army and of defence policy began in 2003. They gathered steam this year after Prvoslav Davinic, a member of the reformist G17 Plus party who happens to be a former UN expert on disarmament, was appointed defence minister of Serbia-Montenegro, SCG, two months ago.

Serious reform is seen as urgent, as the army is burdened by the legacy of the Milosevic era, including its excessive size and outdated equipment, the unresolved housing crisis facing tens of thousands of officers, corruption, and the military's traditional distrust of civilian authority.

Speaking to IWPR, deputy defence minister Pavle Jankovic and Veljko Kadijevic, coordinator for defence reforms, said the ministry would reduce the number of “sectors”, equivalent to departments, from the dozens that exist now to just four, covering defence policy, human resources, material resources and finance.

At the same time, the general staff will be restructured along standard NATO lines, replacing the older, more complicated, chain of command.

"The ministry will start operating according to the new system in October while the restructuring of the general staff will be completed by the end of this year," Kadijevic told IWPR.

As part of the defence reform plan, Belgrade has started cutting the scale of military facilities, equipment and personnel, all of which are widely regarded as too big and too expensive for a state the size of Serbia-Montenegro.

According to figures obtained by IWPR, some 21 brigade-sized units and regiments will be disbanded this year, while tens of thousands of weapons will be withdrawn from service, including 131 old T-55 tanks, 108 howitzers and 60,000 infantry weapons.

These cuts mark only the beginning of a radical reduction of the entire armed forces, to take place after new military doctrines for the army and its branches are drafted.

At the moment, the SCG army numbers more than 70,000 soldiers and around 1,000 tanks, most of them obsolete. Experts say the country needs no more than half these troop numbers plus about 300 modern tanks to meet modern defence requirements.

The ministry's decision to set up a fund for army reform is seen as particularly important. Through modern management of army property and facilities, estimated to be worth several billion US dollars, this fund should raise the money needed to implement the reforms and address problems facing army personnel.

The fund will help ease the acute lack of housing for about 20,000 army servicemen, who are "either homeless or live in inadequate conditions", according to Kadijevic and Jankovic.

BOOSTING CIVILIAN CONTROLS OVER THE MILITARY

Analysts in Belgrade emphasise that the defence ministry has made significant progress towards strengthening civilian control over the army. Under the old regime the army functioned essentially as a state within a state, with minimal civilian input.

Under the new structure, the military security and intelligence sectors will by run by two designated departments which will be directly responsible to the minister of defence.

This is considered a crucial step, as the military security service has in the past been seen as a deeply conservative structure that has evaded transparent civilian controls.

In addition, Serbia-Montenegro's parliament set up a defence committee this year as a mechanism for civilian control over the army. This was previously a missing link in the chain of command.

Analysts warn that the fight with conservative circles in the army resisting the changes is not yet over. For this reason, they say, the series of major personnel changes in the army initiated in 2003 may soon resume. Dozens of generals - the SCG army has about a hundred of them - were retired last year alone.

That opposition to civilian control will no longer be tolerated was shown by the joint decision of the SCG state leadership and defence ministry on May 27 to dismiss Momir Stojanovic, head of military security.

Stojanovic strained relations between Belgrade and Brussels this spring by claiming that there were ethnic Albanian “terrorists” - and al-Qaeda members - operating in Kosovo. Officials of the NATO-led peacekeeping forces in the province dismissed the allegations as propaganda, saying there was no evidence al-Qaeda was active there.

WARM APPROVAL FOR RECENT CHANGES

Leading analysts and the international community have welcomed the planned defence reforms as the right steps towards a new defence strategy.

"Revolutionary steps have been taken in the past two months," Vladan Zivulovic, chair of the Atlantic Council for Serbia-Montenegro, a non-government organisation working on military matters, told IWPR. "The defence strategy has been adopted by the Supreme Defence Council and a new organisational system for the defence ministry on western models has been adopted.”

The Atlantic Council, which is close to NATO, acts to promote the idea of Euro-Atlantic integrations in Serbia.

Western diplomatic and military sources also praised the reforms in interviews for IWPR.

"Davinic commands respect as a former UN expert, but also as a defence minister determined to implement army reforms," a western diplomat told IWPR. "The minister and his entire ministry will enjoy strong support from the international community."

LEAN DAYS AHEAD FOR ARMS INDUSTRY

A major issue facing the authorities in Belgrade as they press ahead with reforms is the position of local arms and military equipment manufacturers, which have been in a particularly difficult position since the UN sanctions imposed through the Nineties and during the 1999 war.

Accustomed to large export arrangements with non-aligned countries before Yugoslavia disintegrated, and to protectionist backing from the Milosevic regime, these companies still expect strong state support.

But given that SCG's funds for the army are dwindling and military facilities, staffing and equipment levels are being downsized, arms producers can no longer expect to sell everything they make on the domestic market.

"We will not be trying to appease the workers in order to avoid social unrest,” Jankovic told IWPR. “We have told the directors of those companies they should focus on exports."

ENGAGING WITH THE WEST

The stepping up of military cooperation with western countries seen in recent months is viewed as a particularly important step forward in the integration of security and defence systems.

In May and June this year, for the first time in the history of Serbia-Montenegro's armed forces, military exercises were jointly organised with two NATO member countries - Romania and Italy.

A joint anti-terrorist exercise codenamed "Blue Road 2004" took place on May 29 on the Danube border with Romania, while a joint naval exercise Italy was organised on June 4 in the Adriatic Sea.

About 1,350 SCG soldiers and police took part in “Blue Road”, including elite commando units of the 72nd special brigade nicknamed the Sokolovi or "Hawks", and the gendarmerie. Serbia-Montenegro also contributed over 300 vehicles, seven helicopters and five naval vessels to the joint exercise, held around the Djerdap hydroelectric power plant on the Danube.

Only a few days later, the joint naval exercise with Italy took place. Operation "Joint Horizon" was carried out in international waters some 30 miles off the Montenegrin coast. The exercise scenario involved a ship in distress with Italian and SCG naval units conducting a joint rescue mission.

PARTNERSHIP FOR PEACE

Jankovic noted that once SCG is admitted to NATO’s Partnership for Peace, PfP, programme, both these military exercises will be recorded as part of PfP.

Whether SCG will be admitted to PfP, and if so when that will happen, remains unclear. The principal obstacle to progress is the outstanding matter of former Bosnian Serb commander-in-chief Ratko Mladic, wanted by the Hague war crimes tribunal to face genocide charges, and believed to be hiding in Serbia. Because of the continuing failure to deliver the general to The Hague, NATO's June 28-29 summit in Istanbul is expected to turn down SCG's application for PfP membership.

The continuing furore over Mladic, however, disguises the ever-growing and deepening co-operation between the SCG army and NATO, which is often ignored by the local and foreign media as they focus on areas of disagreement such as the war crimes issue.

Many army officers have already attended courses run by NATO countries both in SCG and abroad. Several seminars have been organised by NATO countries for the SCG defence ministry and army this year, with 27 more planned for 2005. These seminars will be jointly organised by the US armed forces, the defence ministry and the SCG military.

At a seminar on the legalities of civilian control over the army held in June this year, US chargé d'affaires Roger Moore said the event was a major turning point in bilateral security relations between SCG and the United States. Moore said the US seminar programme had already contributed to the successful reform of armed forces in 10 central and eastern European countries, and had formed an essential part of their preparations for admission to NATO.

IWPR has learned that several up-and-coming officers from the Serbian army and the police special forces attended a US military-run seminar this summer on the international “war on terror”.

Another important step forward in international military cooperation is the foundation of the Centre for Peacekeeping Missions. This is headquartered in the Pancevo military base near Belgrade and was formed with the assistance of British officers who trained the first generation of SCG and gendarmerie training officers.

This centre is designed to enable SCG forces to take part in international peacekeeping operations across the world.

ARMY’S PAST LESS THAN AUSPICIOUS

The increasing cooperation now taking place between the SCG armed forces with its western counterparts - and the internal reforms of the military - seemed utterly impossible only a few years ago.

The Army of Serbia and Montenegro or VSCG, until recently called the Yugoslav Army, VJ, was the successor to Marshal Josip Tito's army, which constituted one of the main pillars of Yugoslavia’s socialist system for about 50 years.

When the Yugoslavia state disintegrated, its army generals sided with Slobodan Milosevic's regime in Serbia, under whose auspices the army maintained its rigid hierarchy and antiquated structure.

Many analysts believe the army was instrumental to Milosevic's war policy in Bosnia and Croatia, as well as to his political conflicts with regime opponents and dissidents, with the powerful military intelligence service playing a key role.

Belgrade's relations with NATO reached crisis point in 1999, when Milosevic launched a massive military and police operation in Kosovo, leading to a mass exodus of ethnic Albanians and prompting three months of NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia. In the aftermath of the NATO bombing, Kosovo became a UN protectorate.

At the point when Milosevic's regime collapsed in October 2000, the army still had its bulky, outdated facilities and equipment and around 80,000 soldiers. Members of the general staff continued to be appointed on the basis of their political affiliation and loyalty to Milosevic.

On the eve of the regime's fall, the general staff officers openly threatened that the army would side with Milosevic, though this did not come to pass because of resistance from many younger officers.

ARMY DRAWN INTO POST-MILOSEVIC POLITICAL STRUGGLE

The change of regime did not immediately lead to the hoped-for reforms of the army. Instead, the military was used as a weapon in the political clashes between the then two leading political figures in Serbia. The general perception was that President Vojislav Kostunica kept several arch-conservative, anti-western generals in key positions as part of his struggle against his rival Zoran Djindjic, Serbia’s prime minister at the time. Djindjic took a similar approach with the Serbian police.

The international community, particularly the Hague tribunal, repeatedly accused conservative circles in the army of providing assistance and protection to former General Mladic on Serbian territory, even though he had been indicted for war crimes.

Conservative circles were also behind the formation in 2001 of a military commission for cooperation with the Hague, analysts say. Despite its name, the commission brought together many senior officers loyal to the Milosevic regime who did not see it as their business to help the war crimes process.

Operating behind closed doors away from public scrutiny, the commission is believed to have fed information vital to the defence of Milosevic and his associates on trial in The Hague. The commission was abolished last year.

PACE OF REFORM GRADUALLY PICKS UP

Despite these problems, the first steps to improve relations with NATO began to be taken.

Yugoslav security forces stepped up cooperation with the NATO-led peacekeeping forces in Kosovo, KFOR. In 2001, in an action coordinated with NATO, Belgrade’s special forces captured the "ground safety zone" – a border territory between Kosovo and Serbia which many Albanian guerrilla fighters from southern Serbia’s Presevo valley had made their stronghold.

Members of the armed forces began attending the Marshall Centre for Security Studies in Germany, while Yugoslav special forces took part in a NATO-led PfP exercise in Austria in 2002.

Army reforms received a shot in the arm in 2003 with the appointment of Boris Tadic, the reformist leader of the Democratic Party, as defence minister of Serbia and Montenegro.

Tadic and his team instituted the first major clear-out of conservative generals, strengthened the powers of politicians and civil administration over the general staff, and gave a significant boost to international cooperation.

For the first time, the armed forces accepted advisors on army reform from NATO states, particularly Britain, which was designated to represent the Alliance’s interests in SCG.

SCG military officers began attending seminars in western countries and with the assistance of London, intensive English courses were organised for officers.

By winter 2003, according to analysts, Belgrade was on the verge of raising its relations with NATO, particularly the US military, to a substantially higher level.

Belgrade even offered to send elite troops to join the US-led war in Afghanistan. IWPR has learned that the preparations reached a point where an SCG liaison officer was stationed at US Army Central Command in Tampa, Florida.

Political conflicts in Serbia, fierce criticism from the nationalist parties, and the subsequent fall of the government of Zoran Zivkovic, Djindjic's successor, postponed implementation of the idea indefinitely.

The formation of a new Serbian government led by Kostunica – a heterogeneous coalition between his conservative Democratic Party of Serbia, the reformist G17 Plus, the monarchist Serbian Renewal Movement, and New Democracy - led to more changes at the defence ministry.

To replace Tadic, the new coalition appointed the career diplomat and UN disarmament expert Prvoslav Davinic. The move is judged by many as a good choice, since Davinic and his team of experts from the Atlantic Council and G17 Plus have continued and even stepped up Tadic's reforms.

One of the kingpins of the army reforms now under way will be the adoption of the new defence strategy – a document which makes it clear that Belgrade sees its future as lying exclusively within the western military alliance.