ENVIRONMENT-YUGOSLAVIA: Danube Commercial Traffic to Flow Again

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Nov 2 2000 (IPS) - People in the second largest city of Serbia, Novi Sad, use this joke to describe their town: It’s the only one in the world where a river flows over the bridges.

That river is the Danube in Novi Sad, where three major bridges over the river were destroyed during the air campaign led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) against Serbia in 1999. That bombing sent some 7,000 tonnes of debris into the water, and the water bed.

Unexploded ordnance remains at the river’s stretches at Novi Sad, as well in the area around another five bridges along the Danube in Serbia that were severely damaged too.

The Danube is an important continental artery, a 3,500 km long river that goes from Germany to the Black Sea. But since April 1999, no commercial shipping traffic has gone from Novi Sad onwards.

That is because the river that used to serve as a major economic passageway for 11 European countries, transporting river traffic of at least 100 million tonnes of goods a year, has been closed since last year.

But now, efforts to clear the Danube are underway after the change of the regime in Yugoslavia on Oct. 5, when mass protests forced President Slobodan Milosevic and his government out of power.

Milosevic had

After his overthrow, one of the first European moves to work on the re-opening of the Danube for commercial traffic.

A sum of 22 million U.S. dollars was immediately allocated to the Danube Commission for the cleaning of the Danube river bed in Novi Sad, and experts arrived to assess the possibility for commercial traffic.

“The work will last at least another three months.” Johann Spitzer of Danube Commission told journalists last week. “After the cleaning of river bed, there will come the assessment on what bridges might be reconstructed,” he added.

Work on cleaning the riverbed is expected to start in December, despite the harsh weather conditions when the winter starts here.

According to Helmut Strasser, head of the Danube Commission, “It would be realistic to say that the whole Danube river will be open for traffic in the summer of 2001.”

“Cleaning of the riverbed is just the first step,” he added. Several international companies are expected to take part in the task, he said.

The Danube Commission, an organisation of countries that use the river, estimated economic loss from the cut-off in river traffic in 1999 at 325 million Euros (285 U.S. dollars). The economic damage can be put at double that when the year 2000 is taken into account, commission experts say.

Using huge river barges to transport truckloads of goods is 14 times cheaper than ferrying them by road, and five times cheaper than by train. A barge can carry up to 100 huge trucks.

Since the NATO air campaign, pressure from European business interests to get commercial traffic reopened along the Danube restored has yielded no results.

The Milosevic regime had turned down negotiations on the subject, demanding that the NATO countries first rebuild the bridges on the Danube.

During a meeting of the Danube Commission in August, its Yugoslav member Radisa Djordjevic repeated the stand of the Milosevic government: “Clearing the Danube without rebuilding our bridges will not happen.”

Now, there are signs that real work will soon be underway.

In Novi Sad, local Danube experts expect Serbian companies to be included into the enormous task of clearing debris from the river. According to Zoran Vapa of the local waterways administration, there are three Serbian bridge building companies that could help in the job.

“With the help of Mostogradnja, Ivan Milutinovic and Pinki companies, the job could be properly done, as they have cranes that can carry several hundreds of tonnes of concrete out of water,” Vapa said in an interview. “But, it’s urgent that some bigger companies from Germany help, as we might need cranes that can carry at least 1,000 tonnes.”

Like other Danube experts, Vapa thinks that the construction firm Ganz from Hungary will take part in the project because it was involved, together with Serbian construction firms, in the building of Novi Sad bridges in the past.

“Besides the enormous parts of bridges that remain invisible in the water, there are unexploded rockets too,” Vapa said. “For that, we’ll need additional help.”

For the time being, there are no indications on who might be involved in that task, Serbian experts say. They also hope that substantial sums of money will come for the other task after clearing of debris from the bombing campaign — the rebuilding of bridges.

“European companies played a large role in building the bridges and will be needed to rebuild them in the future,” said Goran Pitic, an analyst with the independent Economic Institute in Belgrade.

“The whole Danube infrastructure is, essentially, European infrastructure and it is good that Europe is back here with this important project,” he added.

His first estimates put at 13 years the time it would take Serbian firms alone to clean the Danube and rebuild its bridges — assuming that the country had the money to pay for this job, which it does not.

But besides the cleaning of the river, much more is needed before road traffic can flow across the bridges again. The total price for rebuilding and repairing all eight bridges destroyed or damaged in NATO air campaign is estimated at up to 100 million dollars.

So far, Serbian Danube experts say, there is no project for that.

“This is just the first step, to reopen the Danube for traffic,” said Zarko Milosev of the Novi Sad port authority.

Added Milosev: “It is so important because so much of European and Balkan industry and infrastructure lies along the river’s banks — rail yards, steel mills, oil refineries, cement plants, ship builders and petrochemical installations. The re-building of bridges can come later, step by step.”