SERBIA: Dubious Hopes From a Retired Big Brother

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Apr 24 2007 (IPS) - In talk of traditional friendships internationally, there is still talk in Belgrade of “Russia and Serbia, the long established allies.” What is right is another matter.

That kind of talk was revived last week when Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Belgrade, ahead of the adoption of a United Nations resolution on the breakaway Serbian province Kosovo.

Official Belgrade spared no effort to declare that the inevitable independence of Kosovo will be prevented through “the traditional friendly help of Moscow.” Serbia openly hopes Russia will veto the resolution.

But many analysts see little room for such hope.

“In recent and not so recent history, Russia backed Serbia when it served its purposes and did not when it did not serve its interests,” analyst Bosko Jaksic told IPS. “Furthermore, relations between Russia and Serbia were close to alienation, tension and near conflict in the recent past.”

Through the wars of the 1990s when many parts of old Yugoslavia broke away from Serb domination, Russia offered Serbia little help. All the UN resolutions setting out strict sanctions against Serbia were passed without any Russian objections.

Former Russian president Boris Yeltsin sent envoy Victor Chernomyrdin together with European Union envoy Martti Ahtisaari to Serbia in June 1999. Their goal was to convince former Serbia president Slobodan Milosevic that Serbia will be razed to the ground in continuing North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) bombing if he did not agree to the internationally sponsored proposal of allowing the UN administration to take over Kosovo. Milosevic gave in.

Ahtisaari is the UN negotiator who sketched an independence plan for Kosovo earlier this year.

Many Russian leaders have been far from supporting Serbia. Yeltsin was not well disposed towards Serbia, after Milosevic hailed the unsuccessful communist coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, when Yeltsin saved the former leader from being toppled from power.

Russia declined to help in 1999 when Belgrade asked for anti-aircraft equipment and military aid ahead of the NATO bombing.

“The fall of Milosevic in 2000 did not make this country any friendlier towards Russia,” historian Bosko Jovanovic wrote in the monthly ‘New Serbian Political Thought’.

“Russian investments in post-Milosevic Serbia are scarce and not welcome for many reasons, as this country has practically always reeled between Russo-phobia and Russophilia,” he added.

Cooperation was earlier mostly economic. “The former USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and former Yugoslavia cooperated successfully until both disintegrated in 1991,” economist Misa Brkic told IPS.

Brkic said Moscow owed Serbia almost two billion dollars for goods and services at the time of disintegration. The last part of this debt is due to be settled only by the end of this week.

The economic cooperation between former USSR and former Yugoslavia came because Yugoslavia then had wide economic ties with Western countries.

That was the consequence of a firm refusal by former Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito in 1948 to join the Eastern bloc of communist countries. His decision came to be known as the ‘historic No’.

Former Yugolsavia came to pursue a “neither East nor West” policy for decades. At the time of the USSR invasion of former Czechoslovakia in 1968, Yugoslavia backed Prague, itself fearing invasion.

Between the two world wars, former Yugoslavia was a kingdom with no diplomatic relations with communist Moscow. Travel to the USSR was banned.

The kingdom then offered refuge to more than 20,000 fleeing anti-communist Russians. Mostly engineers and architects, they participated in major construction works all over the country, mainly in Serbia. Serbs and Russian share the same Orthodox Christianity and use an almost identical Cyrillic alphabet. This made it easier for the Russians to fit in.

The traditional political support that the Serb government now talks of is dubious. There has been little of it in either the recent or the distant past.