Same People, Same Policies

Dragoljub Ojdanic, the first general of an army in the history of the Yugoslav Army, has given up his position as Chief of the Supreme Headquarters of the Yugoslav army and has been appointed to the position of Federal Minister of Defense in the place of the recently murdered Pavle Bulatovic.  What will this mean for the Ministry, for the Supreme Headquarters   which will now be headed by the famous Lieutenant General Nebojsa Pavkovic   and for the Army as such?

Let us first take a look at the Ministry of Defense which was created in 1992 from the former Federal Secretariat for National Defense.  When VREME inquired of its knowledgeable sources what it is that this Ministry, which used to be headed by Pavle Bulatovic, did this year, the answer was uniform   an unknowing shrug of the shoulders.  However, there is no indecision as to what that Ministry should be doing.

"WE NEED A CANON": The Ministry of Defense is part of the Federal Government, and is its agency which monitors the situation in the area of defense.  It proposes laws to the government, and if they are adopted in parliament, it adopts regulations for their implementation.  It has no jurisdiction in regard to command over the armed forces.  The decision on whether the army should be deployed is principally a political decision in which the Ministry should have a say by pointing out the capabilities of the army.  However, once the decision is adopted, the command over the army and its deployment follows other channels.

In short, as a government resource agency with given jurisdictions, the Ministry should ensures the equipment of all members of the defense forces, their preparation for armed resistance, and at the same time it should act as a logistical factor which ensures that the army and other armed units have everything they need in order not to have to spend time on anything other then efficient preparation for the use of force   should that become necessary.

Theoretically (and elsewhere in the world, in practice also), the Ministry of Defense has two key responsibilities: to ensure the financing of the army and its manning.  The Army needs to be paid, supplied, armed, fed, medically treated, transported and propagated.  The Ministry must ensure the army with adequate technical facilities, with modern weapons, with necessary infrastructure, appropriate officers and salaries which will motivate people to join the Army.

The Army itself should be freed from the worries of supplies, manning and financing.  It should state its needs, synchronizing its needs with its abilities to do what is required of it.  "The job of the Army is to merely say: we need a cannon, and it is the Ministry's job to see to where that cannon will be procured from," a former minister of defense explained to us.

Furthermore, since war irritates everyone in the government, the government itself also needs to be ready and organized for war.  This is the civil aspect of defense which includes preparations of the economy, of government agencies, the population, protection and assistance for those who should alleviate the effects of war.  This also fall under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defense.

All this requires solid cooperation between the Army and the Ministry of Defense, as well as careful division of and respect for jurisdictions and authorizations.  It is precisely this division which is the key question in regard to the position of the Ministry of Defense.  Its principal job must be to ensure the efficiency of armed forces with regard to combat readiness, makeup of military units and manning   without the Army having to ask whether it will have enough money for salaries, as was the case in all the years that the Ministry of Defense existed in Yugoslavia.  The answer to what did the Ministry do and what is it doing is pretty well summed up in this fact.  After briefly considering this matter, a general who did not wich to have his name quoted, told us this: "Well, I think that Bulatovic was mostly responsible for the civil part of defense and that this is mostly what they worked on..."

POWERFUL SUPREME HEADQUARTERS: As far as the Supreme Headquarters of the Yugoslav Army are concerned, things are quite different.  The Supreme Headquarters, here and elsewhere, is in professional terms (not political!) an institution whose job it is to prepare the Army for war and to determine its use during war, its training, planning, formation and organization.  It has a standard structure: "the brain" or a central body which is called the primary directorate in some countries; the intelligence, or the second directorate which follows what other armies are doing and therefore what the implications are for its Army; a third, organizational-mobilizing directorate which "does not force anyone to serve the army   instead recruits come to army barracks, the Army takes them in, trains them and sends them back home," as one of our interviewees emphasized.  A subservient directorate is in charge of training determined on the basis of soldier utility.  Special sectors deal with administration, finance, relations with the public and the moral preparations of the army.

According to our sources, the Supreme Headquarters of the FRY is relatively independent and fairly powerful   scaled more like a ministry of war.  Some jurisdictions between the Supreme Headquarters and the Ministry of Defense overlap (like the manning of the Army, which is now under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Headquarters), with the Supreme Headquarters winning out.

In the previous Yugoslavia, the Supreme Headquarters was also part of the Federal Secretariat for National Defense, and the Chief of the Supreme Headquarters answered to the Secretariat, that is to say to the Ministry of Defense, under whose jurisdiction was command over the Army.  There is opinion that with the separation of the Supreme Headquarters, it was strengthened and only answered to one man, therefore practically beyond control.  However, this was not the official intention in separating the Ministry of Defense from the Supreme Headquarters of the Army, after the FRY Constitution was adopted in 1992.  At that time, modeled after many countries, a civilian (Pavle Bulatovic) was appointed to the position of Federal Minister of Defense (for the first time in the existence of Yugoslavia in any shape or form), with the President of the Federal Government being the Defense Minister's superior, with the latter sharing the fate of the Federal Government.  This was supposed to signify a reduction in the involvement of politics in the army, a greater onus on professionalism and the possibility of civilian control over the Army.  Until the expected appointment of Ojdanic to the position of Minister of Defense, it was initially supposed that he would be retired (he fulfills all conditions for retirement), and that he would then be appointed as a civilian to the position of Minister of Defense.  However, this did not happen, and we once again have a general occupying the position of Minister of Defense.  Hence the Glas javnosti daily ran the headline "Army Politicized, Government Militarized."

The marginalisation of the Ministry of Defense can also be seen in another aspect: even with regard to the media the Ministry did not present the system of defense, nor did it explain the steps taken by the army.  This task was taken over by the Supreme Headquarters of the Yugoslav Army, with its chiefs having taken active interest in politics (Lieutenant General Pavkovic expressed the loyalty of the Yugoslav Army to President Milosevic on many occasions and announced that the Army will return to Kosovo).
It is highly unlikely that the military reshuffle which brought generals Ojdanic and Pavkovic into new positions will change the present situation appreciably.  If it is known that Pavle Bulatovic was a soft spoken individual whose principal characteristic was that he was not fanatical about his job, it is known about Ojdanic that he has very close ties to JUL and is probably the first Minister of Defense anywhere in the world who has been appointed to that position and is at the same time wanted for war crimes.  Judging by his track record, Lieutenant General Pavkovic is not a man who will inquire of himself of others how come it came to pass that the FRY President took over exclusive command over the Army.

CONFUSION: When everything is taken into consideration in the area of defense of, command over and deployment of the Army, the same confusion characteristic of the FRY as a state can be observed.  According to the constitution, the Federal Government is authorized to set and carry out domestic and foreign policies, and as a matter of course, also to set and carry out defense policy.  It should therefore have established a long time ago who are our allies and our opponents are.  And as General Perisic aptly put it, "one cannot wage war without any allies."  As far as is known, the Federal Government failed on all of the above scores, and during all the years of war there were no indications that it ever dealt with defense and the Army.  In short, the FRY is a state in which the position and the concept of the Army has not been clearly defined.  It is a state in which no one has said, we want the army to be this, and for its jurisdictions to be clearly marked.  "There is no strategy.  The country is isolated from outside and very unstable within.  Since there is no basic concept, everything is subject to chaos in the are of defense also.  Pebbles are being arranged, but no one knows in relation to what," one of our interviewees pointed out.

Neither is the Constitution clear in this regard.  The highest legal act in the state considers the Army exclusively (defining it as "an armed force which defends the sovereignty, the territory, the independence and the constitution of the FRY"), while it is only one segment of total defense; and even this part of the constitution dealing with the Army was tucked in at the last minute by the authors.  Even such as they are, the constitutional guidelines do not obligate anyone.  Let us take for instance the supreme commander.  Some time during the war with NATO, top officers of the Supreme Headquarters began addressing the FRY President, Slobodan Milosevic, as the "supreme commander" of the Yugoslav Army.  Radio Television Reports on the appointments of generals Ojdanic and Pavkovic also included mention of the "supreme commander."

The problem is that according to the Constitution the FRY President is not the "supreme commander."  Admittedly, "in war and peace he commands the Yugoslav Army," but according to Article 40, "only in accordance with decisions adopted by the Supreme Defense Council."  And since the Supreme Defense Council has decision making powers, that can only mean that the Yugoslav army has a collective supreme commander.  However, it is a well known fact that the Supreme Defense Council (made up of the presidents of the FRY and the member republics) did not meet since the Fall of 1998 only because Slobodan Milosevic considers the President of Montenegro, Milo Djukanovic, as his political opponent.  During all that time, including the war with NATO, the Chief of the Supreme Headquarters communicated directly with the FRY President   against all regulations.  Miodrag Vukovic, Advisor to the President of Montenegro, noted that by appointing Ojdanic to the position of Minister of Defense, the FRY President had broken the Constitution (because Ojdanic is not a civilian), and that the appointment of Pavkovic without a session of the Supreme Defense Council merely proves that Yugoslavia as a state does not exist.

WAR AND THE INDIVIDUAL: "We do not have a defense policy, a developed position toward war and peace, toward military alliances.  This is the only way it became possible for the President of the Supreme Defense Council to make independent decisions on such capital issues as entering into a war with NATO, or about military engagement of the Army.  This is the only way that one man was able to decide that we should wage war with the most powerful military machine in the world which includes 19 of the most developed countries which have in their control 80 percent of the world's wealth.  A politically isolated, economically looted and destroyed country without a single ally entered into a war with this military machine.  This would not have been possible in a state which has a clearly defined defense policy.  That is why one of the key task of the future democratic government is to formulate a clear defense policy," states General Vuk Obradovic, President of Social Democracy, in his conversation with VREME.
This party has a very clear idea on how it would position the country's defenses and how it would approach the Army if it were to come to power: it would abrogate the constitutional decree according to which the Army "defends the constitutionally established order in the FRY," because this implies political allegiance of the Army; the Army would be de-politicized, de-ideologized and efficiently placed under the control of the civil authorities; the Army would be made professional; in five to ten years it would number between 30,000 to 40,000 people, and in the mean time military service would be reduced to six months and would mostly be served in the same communities in which the recruits hold permanent residence; the size and the organization of the Supreme Headquarters would come under review and the portion of the national budged allotted to defense would be reduced...

Who knows who will live to see that day?