BALKANS: When the Cows Don’t Come Home

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Aug 19 2005 (IPS) - When two presidents witnessed payment of compensation for stolen cows, they were making history in more ways than one.

Over recent weeks, officials from Croatia and Montenegro worked out a Montenegrin payout for cows stolen back in 1991. When the money changed hands, they had done their bit to correct the past.

Experts at pricing cows determined that 650 cows stolen from a farm in Grude in Croatia in 1991 were worth 450,500 dollars. Officials from Montenegro, a small state now joined with Serbia paid that money back to Croatia last week at a ceremony attended by presidents of both nations.

Most people think a cow here is worth about 100 dollars. But in pricing them at an average of 692 dealers, experts might just have figured how much milk Croatia lost from those cows, and from more they bred.

“This is not about material values,” Montenegrin President Filip Vujanovic told reporters in the little town Cavtat in the Konavli region of Croatia where he attended the compensation ceremony with Croatian President Stipe Mesic. “This shows our desire to completely normalise relations with Croatia.”

It was the beginning of a Montenegrin process of paying war damages. The former Yugoslavia splintered into separate nations through a war in the 1990s.

Bitter memories linger on, and not just over stolen cows. Konavli, a narrow strip of land around the historic coastal town Dubrovnik was devastated in 1991 at the time of the war of Croatia’s independence from the former six-member Yugoslav federation.

The Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) then pounded Dubrovnik and its surroundings from the sea, and laid siege to the town. The infantry comprised mostly Montenegrins, many of them volunteers who enlisted to fight Croatia’s secession. The military operation led to extensive looting.

Equipment at the Dubrovnik international airport Cilipi worth 25 million dollars was removed to Montenegro. It included navigation systems, fire-fighting vehicles and airport lights. Some of the stolen equipment was installed at the Montenegrin coastal airport Tivat, 80 km south of Dubrovnik.

With the cows taken care of, Croatians are proposing compensation plans for that partially lost airport..

“We could agree to partial ownership of Tivat airport, and we’re ready to invest some five to seven million euros (six to 8.4 million dollars),” manager of Cilipi airport Tonci Peovic told Croatian media. He said Tivat can be an additional facility to Cilipi, a busy international airport on the Croatian coast.

“The benefit for the economy of both Montenegro and Croatia would be enormous,” Belgrade analyst Misa Brkic told IPS. “It would also mean the closing of some pretty bad pages of recent history.”

Compensation thoughts are turning next to the ‘removal’ of household contents and private boats and yachts to Montenegro. This was a prosperous area thanks to tourism on the Adriatic coast.

“The area of Konavli suffered more than 100 million dollars in damages in war,” municipality chief Luka Korda told Croatian daily Vjesnik. “More than 2,000 residential and office buildings were looted and devastated in 1991.”

But these compensation moves will not necessarily end the problem of war damages.

“This does not absolve Montenegro, as one of the parties, of the accusations before the International Court of Justice,” expert in international law Radoslav Stojanovic told IPS. “If the court decides that the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro is guilty of aggression and genocide in Croatia and Bosnia, there will follow a long process of defining the war damages.”

Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, two neighbouring states of Serbia and Montenegro brought charges against the state union years ago, but the international court based at The Hague in the Netherlands has yet to begin any procedure over those complaints.

Stojanovic believes that damages will be worked out at the negotiating table. “The climate is finally favourable for such solutions,” he said.

In new gestures, Croatia will build a supermarket in Montenegrin capital Podgorica. Montenegro will build a kindergarten school in Cavtat.