By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Sep 29 2007 (IPS)

Visitors to Montenegro are welcomed by billboards in Russian, because so many Russians have bought property in this tiny Adriatic country. Many Serbs think similar signs might now appear at Belgrade airport.

“Russian investments are more than welcome in Serbia,” Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Bozidar Djelic told reporters earlier this week after a visit to Moscow. “Russia is a country deeply respected by Serbia; we succeeded in persuading the business community there that their investments are not regarded as second rate.”

Serbia has been mostly closed to Russian investment since the country turned to the market economy in 2000.

“All the governments until this one took the stand of ‘polite rejection’ of any Russian involvement in the economic recovery,” analyst Misa Brkic told IPS. “(Prime Minister Vojislav) Kostunica and his government have undertaken the task of changing the strategic mood among the public by bringing Serbia closer to Russia.”

Kostunica recently held private talks with Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska. A copper production complex in eastern Serbia worth more than 500 million dollars is widely expected to be sold directly to one of Deripaska’s companies.

Documents recently obtained by Serbian media show that Kostunica’s government also transferred state-owned shares in the Russian-Serbian gas distribution company Yugorossgas to Russian partners.

The Russian flag carrier Aeroflot has “expressed interest,” as Djelic put it, to buy national airline JAT. The airline is expected to be privatised by the end of the year.

Russian investors are also reported to be interested in the oil company NIS, to be privatised by the end of 2008. The assets of NIS are put at two billion dollars.

Many are unhappy over these deals.

“I grew up in a country that successfully refrained from entering the (former) Soviet orbit,” Belgrade teacher Sofija Milovanovic (55) told IPS. “It looks now that Kostunica’s government is turning the clock back. It also looks like he is really going to sell this country to Russians.”

Former Yugoslavia, and Serbia as its part, was under communist rule since World War II until its disintegration in 1991, but friendly ties with the former Soviet Union did not mean complete political or economic dependence. Generations of former Yugoslavs grew up looking to Western countries.

One of the remnants of those years is that Russian remains the least favoured foreign language to be studied at schools all over former Yugoslavia.

In the course of the wars of disintegration of former Yugoslavia, Russia verbally sided with Serbia, but made no political effort to help it in any way.

“The same mostly goes for the current situation,” law professor Vojin Dimitrijevic told IPS. “Russia is not helping Serbia for some unselfish brotherly reasons, but for its own interests. The interest of Russia now is to counter-balance the West, to show its new force in relations with the Western countries. Serbia is helping it with full force, as though we (Serbia) are to revitalise the Warsaw Pact.”

The Pact was the military alliance of the former Soviet Union and its communist Eastern European allies. It was dismantled after the fall of communism in the region and disintegration of the Soviet Union.

“This turn to Russia is the result of a lack of understanding on what is going on in the world,” historian Miroslav Prokopijevic told Radio B92. “First, our government has no understanding of the end of the cold war, which Russia lost; second, they don’t understand that Russia, compared to the developed countries like Britain, Germany and France has neither democracy, nor the market economy, nor a rule of law. The only future of Serbia is to be connected with the European Union (EU), and close ties with Russia are not the right step in that direction.”

EU membership is declared by the government to be its main political goal, but “this seems highly unlikely under the circumstances,” an EU diplomat in Belgrade told IPS on condition of anonymity. “Taking Serbia closer to Russia in the manner we see now speaks otherwise.”

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