By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Aug 31 2006 (IPS)

The full-page ad last week surprised many Serbian readers. On sale were 15 military office blocks, warehouses and other installations in five cities at a starting price of 1.8 million dollars.

The government has brought forward its plan to sell off surplus military estate and property by the end of next year.

“The plan includes sale of a total of 423 property items,” Serbian defence minister Zoran Stankovic told reporters after the ad was published.

Stankovic said the funds would be used for “modernisation of the army” and solving the housing problem for some 22,000 military families. Most of these are retired personnel who moved to Serbia after the disintegration of former Yugoslavia in the wars of the 1990s.

The total sale is expected to exceed 1.3 billion dollars.

“This finally closes the case of the former Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), notorious for its deeds in the wars of disintegration of former Yugoslavia,” military analyst Aleksandar Radic told IPS.

“It also brings the army closer to modernisation and the ambition of joining the Partnership for Peace (PfP) programme of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).”

In the process of disintegration of former Yugoslavia and creation of new nations in the wars in the 1990s in Bosnia and Croatia, what used to be the JNA sided with Belgrade.

It played its most notorious role in Bosnia. It was officially withdrawn from there in 1992, but it left almost all weapons, ordnance and other equipment to Bosnian Serbs.

The internationally sponsored Dayton Peace Accords brought peace to the Balkans in 1995. But later, Serbian army units took part in repressive measures against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Serbia was heavily bombed by NATO for 11 weeks in 1999 to end Belgrade’s repression in Kosovo province.

Changes later, mostly the ousting of former president Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 and the death of war time leaders Franjo Tudjman of Croatia and Alija Izetbegovic in Bosnia led to a reduction in the military strength in the region.

The dismantling of the Serbian army means far more than the sale of a billion dollars worth of property. It has led to a search for vital documents from military archives.

At the time of the bombing, these were packed into hundreds of boxes, and moved to dozens of different locations in Serbia. This might have saved some records, because NATO bombs destroyed the Belgrade army headquarters where they had been kept previously..

“In the era of computers, we are dealing with papers dispersed all around, with staff heading towards retirement,” head of Military Archives Dragan Krsmanovic said in a recent interview to Belgrade media. He appealed for better care for the archives with funds obtained from the sale of military assets.

Regardless of such problems, former Yugoslav nations are beginning to cooperate again in this area, Krsmanovic added.

The winding up of the old army has opened up pathways for a new kind of army; the Serbian army is now preparing for peacekeeping missions.

So far, Sudan and Liberia are on the list. The options are being kept open for Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It (peace missions) is the international responsibility of each UN member,” security analyst Zoran Dragisic told IPS. “As this country underwent a change from what it used to be in the 1990s, it is logical that the transformed armed forces contribute to international peace.”

On such missions Serbian soldiers might meet their neighbours – Croats or Bosniaks – who are participating in similar assignments, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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