POLITICS-SERBIA: A Russian Non-Story Ends

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Jul 29 2003 (IPS) - Silently and without much fanfare, the last Russian convoy of peacekeepers in former Yugoslavia left last week.

They were a part of the United Nations (UN) peace mission in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo since 1999. Russian forces withdrew last month from a similar mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The Kosovo contingent had 650 soldiers, the Bosnian one comprised 320 soldiers. Both contingents were originally larger, but in the course of years they shrank from several thousand to less than a thousand.

The event made it only to news briefs in the local media. It was not the end of Russian influence; it was the symbolic end of a perception of Russian influence.

”It does not mean the end of an era, because Russian influence here was small,” says historian Bojan Dimitrijevic. Russia decided to end its peace-keeping missions in the Balkans in May. Russian defence minister Sergey Ivanov announced that Russia was withdrawing its soldiers for financial reasons.

”This does not mean that Russia lost interest in a peaceful solution to problems in former Yugoslavia,” Ivanov said in Moscow. He said his country would participate in all UN and Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) efforts to support peace in the area.

”Financial reasons are only a part of the story,” says Predrag Simic, a leading expert in international relations in Belgrade. ”Russia has noted the recent U-turn in foreign policies in the Balkans and the former Yugoslav countries. There’s no need for it to make an effort in this area any more.”

Serbia and Montenegro, two provinces still joined into a single country, have steered towards the European Union (EU) and the United States since Slobodan Milosevic fell from power three years ago. The same goes for all the countries of former Yugoslavia that fell apart in the bloody wars of the 1990s.

”The myth of the ages of brotherly and friendly relations between Orthodox Russia and Orthodox Serbia was a myth nourished by Milosevic’s regime,” says Vladimir Veres, an expert on Russian-Serbian relations. ”It was a propaganda story for the domestic public, exhausted by years of wars and isolation.”

Serbia under Milosevic was severely punished for its role in the wars in former Yugoslavia that took the lives of more than 200,000 people. The international community imposed two rounds of strict economic sanctions against the country. Milosevic’s oppression of ethnic Albanians brought on the 1999 bombing by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

In all those years, Russia expressed no public support for Milosevic, even though he posted his brother as ambassador to Moscow. Nor did Russia veto any UN decision against Milosevic’s regime.

Milosevic’s regime proclaimed in April 1999 that it was ”joining the Union of Russia and Belarus, as the third member state.” It was only a customs union, but Milosevic’s propaganda presented it to the Serbian public as ”a three-member new state, due to confront the EU and the West.” Moscow remained cold to this initiative.

”Milosevic was desperately hoping to use Russia to confront the West,” says Veres. ”He was spreading these illusions at home.”

But it was not just Milosevic’s regime that spoke of ”Russia, the traditional ally of Serbia.” Western media spoke the same language. But many Serbs knew this was simply not true.

”Through history, Russia backed Serbia when it felt like it, and did not when the circumstances did not suit her,” says historian Milan St Protic. ”Neither tsarist Russia, nor the former Soviet state, let alone the modern Russian federation acted as protectors of Serb interests. But for many desperate Serbs under Milosevic, it was good to hear that ‘there are allies’.”

The ‘History of Serbs’ written 70 years ago by Dr Svetozar Corovic says Russian tsars disregarded Serbs’ plea for help in the crucial uprising against occupying Turks at the beginning of 19th century. The help came from Austrians.

Between the two world wars, the former kingdom of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union had practically no relations.

Josip Broz Tito led the movement against Germans in 1941. He remained leader of former Yugoslavia until his death in 1980.

But Tito’s regime was at odds with the Soviet Union since 1948, when he led Yugoslavia out of Stalin’s orbit and turned to the West, building a brand of ”communism with a human face.” That brought among other things private property and freedom to travel.

Tito’s Yugoslavia strongly opposed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and itself feared Soviet military intervention. From then on, cooperation with Russia was confined to the economy.