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Serbia Defence and Security Report 2012
Business Monitor International, Nov 2011, Pages: 90
Business Monitor International's Serbia Defence and Security Report provides industry professionals and strategists, corporate analysts, defence and security associations, government departments and regulatory bodies with independent forecasts and competitive intelligence on Serbia's defence and security industry.
BMI estimates that defence spending totalled US$1,080m in 2011, equal to 5.4% of overall government expenditure and 2.3% of GDP. This represented a 17.6% increase in defence spending in dollar terms. This figure is surprising given the fiscal retrenchment seen in 2010 and the long-term efforts by the Serbian government to limit and cut defence spending. Even in local currency, spending increased by over 9% in 2011. Nevertheless, this becomes less surprising when viewed in light of the fact that the Serbian economy has performed better than had been anticipated, removing much of the reason behind the sharp defence cuts which had been planned in 2010.
Serbia ended conscription on January 1 2011, after a parliamentary vote ending the practice on December 15 2010. Prior to the change in the law, young Serbian men had been drafted into the army for a six month period. Serbia was the last country in former Yugoslavia to abolish conscription. The plan was proposed by the defence minister Dragan Sutanovac, who intends to reinvest money saved by force reductions into better training and more technologically advanced equipment. However, the system has not been fully professionalised yet. The Serbian Army still maintains the right to conscript young men into reserve formations. These call-up notices have been unpopular, with many surprised that the Army is actually intending to use this power. These men will be given basic military training before being released into reserve units. Furthermore, a three-month ‘voluntary’ service will be introduced, which may become a pre-requisite for employment in other government security services.
Meanwhile, Serbia has provided a platoon sized unit for the UN’s peacekeeping mission in Cyprus. The troops left for Cyprus on September 23 2011 and will be under the command of their battalion head, Lt. Col. Miroslav Stefanovic. This unit will work closely with the Hungarian-Slovakian unit currently operating in Cyprus. Serbia has begun to make increasingly more important contributions to international military missions. While in 2002 Serbia only had three military observers in East Timor, the country increasingly views UN deployments as a way to improve its international standing and to ensure that its now professional army secures much-needed experience.
Ratko Mladic, the former military leader of Bosnian Serbs, was arrested on May 26 2011 and extradited to face trial in The Hague. Mladic was arrested by Serbian authorities in a dramatic raid during a visit by EU officials to Serbia. The ongoing fugitive status of Mladic was a running sore in Serbian-EU relations, with the capture of alleged war criminals such as Mladic being a key demand of the EU. Mladic became particularly notorious after his involvement in the Srebrenica massacre, where thousands of Muslim men were killed by Bosnian Serb forces. His trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) began on June 3 2011.
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