Letter sent by the employees in the Aeronautic Technical Institute to Federal Prime Minister, Milan Panic

At the beginning of October this year the Aeronautic Technical Institute was transformed into the Military Technical Institute of the Yugoslavia Army. Last Wednesday, the Chief of the Yugoslav Army Headquarters, General Zivota Panic, greeted, as host, the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic.

While Milosevic, according to Radio Television Serbia, the only team to follow this visit, was speaking of his own "satisfaction at achieved results" and directed the Military Technical Institute towards "open cooperation with commerce", a group of engineers in the Institute were sending an open letter to the Yugoslav Prime Minister Milan Panic, along with an invitation for him also to make a visit.

The letter differs greatly from the normal, dry and demagogic reports about Milosevic's visit, and VREME presents it to the public. After some introductory notes about capacity and number of employees and the budget of nearly a million dollars per year which the state puts aside for this and other similar institutions, the engineers say: "The institutes are set up with the aim of carrying out technical projects and scientific research for the JNA. This would assume that they have an elite cadre of engineers, and that they be governed by a working atmosphere in which creativity and independent project and research processes have complete expression.

However, our military institutes are organized as classical socialist military collectives, on the principle of typical military and party hierarchy with centralized rule and subordination. The administration personnel are educated in military schools and so based only on superficiality. Due to this, "promotion at work", that is, moving to the top of the ' hierarchical ladder, is conditioned not by expert and scientific results, but on loyalty to the present ruling military group.

Civilians, though a majority, are placed in a second-rate position and even discriminated against. Civilian engineers, kept on by the JNA, were forced to align their careers to officer buffoonery. Because of accommodation, which could not be measured against that of officers, but which was solved quicker than in civilian institutions, and because of monthly salaries which sometimes, like in March of this year, didn't even amount to 20 marks, civilian graduates in the JNA got used to the role allotted to them, showing infinite obedience and blind submission towards the ruling group of officers.

As a result of the above, the civilian cadre fluctuated, the most competent were retained by the JNA not longer than a few months, and fraud, speculation and corruption became accepted and desirable forms of behavior. All this has resulted in the Institute representing a mere semblance of a scientific research institution, which, as such, won't be able to survive anymore in conditions of widespread poverty, or conditions of market economy. But the Institute (along with the other military institutes) now has the opportunity to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of its existence thanks only to the method of financing. The secret of its survival has been in that money was not earned, but unconditionally allotted out of the state budget. Monthly salaries are guaranteed and are determined, not by work, but by position...

The Aeronautics Technical Institute has been managed in the last decade by active military personnel, led by General-Major Sava Pustinja. In this period, to put it lightly, the ambitions of the ATI have exceeded its material, personnel and organizational potential.

Sometime in 1980 the main preoccupation of the ATI was work on a supersonic aircraft, for which around 20 millions dollars were needed, and of which there is now not a trace. The funds given by the JNA to the project leaders were used for them to go round the world, time and time again, and involved in the project were to be found entire families (in the underground legislation there was an article whereby members of the families of active military personnel were given precedence in gaining employment in the JNA), so that the number of employees grew to 1,000.

All the same, nothing was done in the Institute apart from signing buying and selling contracts. Although it was possible to have made a hundred teams of ten people each, the ATI's excuse for not working on concrete things (regarding the supersonic aircraft) was that there were not enough personnel!

To make things more complete, the Institute was working at the same time on the modernization of aircraft that were already in the "armament" of the Air Force and Air Defence. These aircraft now function on improvised repairs, i.e. they have by-passed all present international automation processes.

Now these old projects have been stopped, there are no new ones, and there is no money, not even to purchase paper. The financial position of employees, particularly civilians, is awful. At the same time a number of officers from the Institute have just moved into new three- and four-roomed flats, and there are more and more "refugee" officers.

The Institute is thus in the phase of "bankruptcy", and the man who has been its director for the last seven years (and high up in management in the ten years before that), General-Major Sava Pustinja, has just been given an order for a position in the Yugoslav Army Headquarters, a fate similar to that which the present "bankruptcy manager" will have."

At the end of their letter to Milan Panic, the group of engineers say: "Research and projects are free-thinking intellectual activities, which can be developed for maximum results only in conditions of free competition, and the hierarchical system amongst its subjects can only be established on the basis of actual work, and not on the basis of formal position and military rank.

We see the future of the Institute in the urgent liberation from military management and redirection of the Institute's officers to JNA units; the gradual move from budget financing to market economy (over a period of two to three years); privatization of the Institute's property; close cooperation with international companies, which understands the bringing in of international experts in management, marketing and certain scientific fields; the preservation of personnel and equipment which together could be competitive, in the first phase because of the price of work, and later because of quality and volume of service.

As we are sure our wishes and ambitions are not in disagreement with those of the Federal Prime Minister Milan Panic, we think that the Institute would welcome assistance from respective groups of government experts, in which internationally renowned experts from the field of technology would be included."