POLITICS-BALKANS: Armies Shrink on the Road West

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Sep 23 2003 (IPS) - Armies are shrinking in size all over the Balkans as governments and the military turn away from their communist past towards the West.

“By the beginning of 2004, our country will join the Partnership for Peace Programme (PPP) of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO),” Serbian Defence Minister Boris Tadic said last week in Belgrade. The PPP is the path that leads former communist countries into the NATO orbit.

Of the former communist East European and the ex-Yugoslav countries, only Serbia and Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina are still not members of PPP.

“We might be late in reforms compared with the others in the region, but this is the road that has to be taken,” Tadic said.

Tadic was addressing a conference unimaginable a few years ago. The conference on “Reforms of the Defence Systems” was organised by NATO at the elite military complex Topcider. The complex was partially destroyed in 11 weeks of NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999.

That bombing campaign was undertaken to end the repressive policies of Milosevic against ethnic Albanians in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo. Kosovo is now under United Nations (UN) administration. The regime that replaced Milosevic introduced a new policy of cooperation with the West, including a substantial reform of the army.

Within the adjustment programme that will lead it to the PPP, the Serbian army has already shrunk from 120,000 men in the Milosevic era to some 80,000. It will be further cut to a force of 45-50,000, for a country of 7.4 million.

“This army has to be relieved from the shameful burden of aggression,” Gen. Blagoje Grahovac (retd), military adviser to Serbia and Montenegro President Svetozar Marovic said in a recent interview. “From a threat in the region, it has to become an efficient cooperation tool with the rest of the world.”

When wars in former Yugoslavia started in 1991, what was then the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) took active part against the pro-independence forces of Croatia and Bosnia. The 1991-95 wars left some 240,000 people dead, one percent of the population of what was a single country.

The army also played a significant role in Kosovo in 1998-99, when more than 800,000 ethnic Albanians were evicted from the province. More than 10,000 died in what Milosevic’s propaganda described as war against terrorism.

The armies have shrunk with the collapse of an ideology. “Those were all communist-style armies, burdened with that ideology,” military analyst Stipe Sikavica told IPS. “Their task was to defend the homeland from a capitalist invasion from the West.”

The end of communism in the region has meant smaller armies all over the Balkans. Romanian armed forces have shrunk from 235,000 in 1994 to less than 100,000, says Cedomir Vojnov, Romanian military attaché in Belgrade. “By the time we become a full NATO member in the next couple of years, we’ll have an army of 75,000, which is enough for our needs.” Romania has a population of 22 million.

The pattern is similar in other countries in the region such as Hungary and Bulgaria, where the armed forces have been reduced to about a third of the strength of communist days.

In the ex-Yugoslav republics Croatia and Bosnia, the Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war with Serbia in 1995 limited their armed forces.

With a population of some four million each, they were allowed to keep 10,000 and 12,000-strong armies respectively. Croatia currently has a 21,000-strong army, and Bosnia an army of 16,600. The numbers are being reduced to meet the target strength.

In order to join the PPP, Bosnia last month cut the period of mandatory military service to six months. “This has a double aim,” Sikavica says. “On one hand, adjustment with PPP standards; on the other, preventing a repetition of the past.”

Slovenia, the first ex-Yugoslav republic that left the former federation in June 1991, has gone a step further. Its 20,000-strong army is now entirely voluntary. Draft was abandoned from this month. Slovenia is becoming a member of both NATO and the European Union next year.

But what is called modernisation of the armed forces, and cutting ties with the past has been harshly criticised by remnants of the old regime and by hard-line nationalists in Serbia. “NATO is and will always remain the enemy of Serbia,” says ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party leader Tomislav Nikolic.

But “there is no turning back once the process of joining PPP has started,” says military analyst Milorad Timotic from the Centre for Military and Civilian Studies. He points out, however, that the reform “will be costly by itself, and it will leave thousands of military professionals jobless.”

Hungary and Bulgaria have introduced efficient programmes to train officers for other jobs. “Serbia can be compared to Bulgaria in the economic sense and their experience is valuable,” analyst Veljko Kadijevic says.

Bulgaria found additional funding through foreign donations, and some of the money spent on the large army was used for re-training personnel. In Serbia funding could come from sale of surplus military hardware, Kadijevic says.

“That way we can avoid what happened in Russia,” he says. “Jobless military personnel roaming the streets as their world fell apart.”