Serbia’s Defense Minister Dragan Sutanovac said that Serbia’s increasing cooperation with NATO is in no way a violation of the national law which stipulates that Serbia remain a militarily neutral country.

“The moment we joint the Partnership for Peace [PfP] in 2006, we decided in favor of Euro-Atlantic integration. The decision by the Parliament on neutrality pertains on the part that deals with joining [military] blocs but it has no limits on cooperation,” explained Sutanovac.

Minister Sutanovac during in an interview for Novosti.

Sutanovac said that there is lot of room for cooperation between Serbia and NATO and that the possibilities are large because Serbia was the last country in the region to join the PfP and only recently opened its office at NATO in Brussels.

“It is a misconception that Serbia is militarily one-sided and that it wants cooperation with the western countries only,” said Sutanovac.

Sutanovac noted that, besides recent visits to the USA and Canada, he was in China and that the chief of the Russia military was recently in Belgrade.

“We desire that our country becomes the main engine of the region, that our army becomes a factor of stability and economic prosperity,” Sutanovac says.

NATO and the US remain highly unpopular in Serbia. US led NATO forces bombed Serbia in 1999 because of its crackdown on Albanian Muslim terrorists in Kosovo. The subsequent forced pull-out of Serbia’s security forces from Kosovo exposed the Serbian population to the extermination efforts by the organized violent Albanian gunmen who now dominate the political landscape in this Serbian province.

A recent Gallup Poll found that NATO is considered the least trustworthy in Serbia. Gallop also found that Sutanovac’s government ranks second to last just above NATO.

“Of course that is not pleasant,” remarks Sutanovac on the Gallop findings.

“But, the same research also shows that the Military is for the first time ahead of the Church in terms of trustworthiness which means it is the institution in which they have the most trust,” Sutanovac said.

The minister also remarked that Serbia has a legacy where any government intervention against Islamic separatism in Serbia is viewed as violation of human rights and that such legacy constrains government’s ability to deal with recent escalation of violence and violent Islamic rhetoric in the south of country and by an Imam in Sandzak.

“Fortunately, all those incidents in Sandzak did not find support among the citizens. We strive that our defense system has more members of ethnic minorities so that  we can show that we are the army of all citizens of Serbia,” said Sutanovac.

November 26, 2010
SERBIANNA

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