Milo Djukanovic’s thirty-year-old authoritarian kleptocracy is killing Podgorica’s Democratic efforts.
Largely unnoticed in the wake of events in the Middle-East and the impeachment drama, another crisis is brewing in the Balkans. In Montenegro, thousands of people have been protesting a new law passed by the Montenegrin parliament and signed into effect by the country’s longtime strongman, Milo Djukanovic, which gives the government authority over properties that religious organizations in the country have been using for at least a century. Evidence of the problems the controversial new law creates can be seen in the widespread condemnation it has received from individuals such as Pope Francis, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kiril.
Djukanovic’s motives are fairly transparent. Economically, the new law allows Djukanovic’s kleptocracy to take control of hundreds of properties used by the Serbian Orthodox Church while simultaneously politically weakening the only organized institution left in Montenegro capable of posing a serious threat to his rule. (Public opinion polls show that the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro by far enjoys more trust than the country’s president, government, parliament or judiciary).
Ultimately, Djukanovic’s plan is to turn over church properties with no economic value to an uncanonical organization under his control, led by a defrocked charlatan fond of hitting old women.
The current protests in Montenegro, however, are only a symptom of a conflict that has been long in the making. Remarkably, NATO’s newest member is the only former communist European country that has never had a democratic transition. Even in Belarus and Russia communists have been out of power for at least one electoral cycle. But Djukanovic’s ruling Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS), which is just the renamed Montenegrin League of Communists, has been in power continuously since 1945.
To put this longevity in some perspective, Djukanovic’s DPS has been in power longer than the Bolsheviks ruled the Soviet Union, and Djukanovic himself has been in power longer than Stalin.
Djukanovic has managed to stay in power so long by constantly reinventing himself and changing with the times. In 1991, as a protégé of Slobodan Milosevic, Djukanovic ordered the bombardment of Dubrovnik. Yet today, there are people in Washington who hail Djukanovic as an “elder statesman,” and he is feted in Washington’s foreign policy salons. In 2014, Joe Biden welcomed him to the White House.
While enjoying so much popularity in Washington, however, Djukanovic has turned Montenegro into his feudal fiefdom. As a recent New York Times article put it:
[Djukanovic]. . . is now the longest-serving leader in Europe, in power longer than both Vladimir V. Putin in Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey . . . The president’s sister is the nation’s top lawyer, helping foreign investors join in the building boom sweeping across the coast. His brother owns First Bank, the country’s largest financial institution. His son runs the country’s biggest power plant. His nephew is involved in the country’s largest tourism projects.
Thanks to such machinations, as Moisés Naim has argued, Djukanovic has turned Montenegro into a “mafia state.” Thus, according to Naim, leading government officials are actually “integral players in, if not the leaders of, criminal enterprises, and the defense and promotion of those enterprises become official priorities . . . the national interest and the interests of organized crime are now inextricably intertwined.” Indeed, one prominent democratic opposition figure in Montenegro has aptly called Djukanovic’s system-of-rule “Montenegrin Putinism.”
In 2015, Djukanovic’s success in turning Montenegro into a mafia state led to his being named “Man of the Year in Organized Crime” by an international anti-corruption watchdog group. As the award announcement noted, “this as a lifetime achievement award.” Nobody outside of Putin has run a state that relies so heavily on corruption, organized crime and dirty politics. It is truly and thoroughly rotten to the core.
An audit of the Djukanovic family bank by Price Waterhouse Coopers has revealed one of the many mechanisms by which corruption in Montenegro operated. First, public funds were deposited with First Bank, which then provided loans to Djukanovic associates and well-known organized crime figures, such as Darko Saric, a prominent Balkan drug dealer. Another tactic has been for Djukanovic cronies to acquire state-owned enterprises, fleece them of their value, and then declare them legally insolvent. According to one report, by November 2015, 89 percent of the state-owned enterprises that had been privatized by Djukanovic had reportedly gone bankrupt.
Apart from financial corruption, Djukanovic has used various means of illegal electoral engineering to stay in power. These tactics have run the gamut from voter fraud to blackmail, demobilizing potential opposition voters, fear-mongering, threatening police violence, and outright vote-buying. Anti-corruption watchdogs believe up to 15 percent of the votes in the October 2016 elections were fraudulent.
Lastly, attacks on independent media and critical voices have also been a hallmark of Djukanovic’s system of rule. Djukanovic once said that investigative journalists should be “exterminated like mice,” and someone in Montenegro clearly got the message. In 2004, the editor of the opposition newsmagazine Dan was assassinated. In August 2013, investigative journalist Tufik Softic was the target of a bombing attack. In December 2013, an explosive device was detonated outside the offices of Vijesti, an independent daily in Podgorica. In October 2015, Jovo Martinovic, a journalist covering Montenegro’s organized crime scene, was jailed for fifteen months on trumped-up drug-smuggling charges. In April 2018, a car bomb exploded outside the home of investigative journalist Saed Sadikovic. In May 2018, Olivera Lakic, a journalist reporting on corruption, was shot outside her apartment in Podgorica.
Yet despite this organized terror campaign the country’s independent media, Reporters Sans Frontieres would note in December 2018 that “All of the attacks on journalists in the past two years have gone unpunished.”
Apart from outright physical attacks, Djukanovic and his surrogates also resort to various smear campaigns against their opponents. For people who think that Donald Trump’s comments about women are beyond the pale, Djukanovic takes things even lower. In 2015, Djukanovic launched an attack against one of Montenegro’s leading anti-corruption activists, Vanja Calovic, literally accusing her of having sex with dogs. To its credit, the U.S. Embassy in Podgorica named her “The Most Courageous Woman in Montenegro” in 2016.
As evident from the above, the nature of Djukanovic’s rule has ranged from the depraved to the corrupt. At times, however, it has also been farcical. The primary example of this was seen in the events surrounding the so-called “Russian-backed coup plot” in Montenegro in October 2016.
Indeed, the story of the so-called Russian-backed coup attempt becomes more absurd the more one analyzes it. It is worth noting, for instance, that the alleged coup attempt was at least the third such “attack on the state” that has happened on the eve of elections in Montenegro in recent years. And the absurdities just compound from there.
The alleged organizer of the coup, Sasa Sindjelic, was a high-school drop-out wanted for murder in Croatia who hadn’t been to Montenegro in fifteen years. Yet the GRU supposedly tasked such a marginal figure to organize a coup (on three week’s notice) against a regime that had been in power for some three decades. Not surprisingly, in March 2019, Sindjelic renounced his testimony altogether, revealing that the story had been coerced out of him after twenty-three days in solitary confinement and numerous beatings.
The other central actor in the alleged plot, Mirko Velimirovic also renounced his story in April 2017, after which he had a serious “car accident” and decided it would be better for his health to testify again. Yet under cross-examination his testimony quickly fell apart; Velimirovic, for instance, could not identify the weapons he had allegedly bought (and which have never been produced), nor could he identify the mysterious Albanian black marketeer he supposedly bought the weapons from.
The other alleged participants in this third-rate Balkan cabaret were similarly farcical; as one report put it, most of those arrested were “elderly and in ill-health.” The comedic highpoint of the proceedings came with the testimony of an alleged coup-plotter (in real life a self-confessed drug addict), who was tasked with breaking windows and throwing Molotov cocktails at a political party headquarters—but he got the address wrong. During his confused testimony, the alleged coup-plotter claimed, “Actually, I don’t even know what I was supposed to do. The only people I know here work for the government.”
Surprisingly, considering the supposedly grave danger facing the country, neither the interior minister, nor the defense minister, nor Montenegro’s Council for National Security were informed about such an unprecedented threat. Nor did Montenegrin officials inform NATO that they had discovered a Russian-backed plot against their country. Even Djukanović said that he only found out about the alleged affair from media reports. As Montenegro’s interior minister himself noted somewhat incredulously in the days after the discovery of the alleged coup attempt was made public “There has not been a meeting of the government or of the Council for National Security, the state president has said that he does not want to comment, the prime minister said that he does not know anything about it or that he does not have enough information . . . I have to admit that this is a very specific ‘coup d’etat’.”
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
Montenegrin Muslim Islamist Mirza Haklaj who appeared with other jihadists in an ISIS video. He is believed to have died during bombing in 2015
The Balkan Peninsula, together with the region of South-East Europe, historically has been one of the most important focal points of Russian foreign policy, cultural influences and attempts to spread an ideology of Orthodox solidarity and Slavic reciprocity.[1] These ideas are common to almost all trends of Russian public life in the past and very much today too.After Russia lost the Great Crimean War of 1853–1856 she intensified its cultural influence in the region of South-East Europe for the purposes of beating Habsburg (Roman-Catholic) rivalry and to spread an idea of the Pan-Slavism in this part of Europe.[2] However, the ...
Ukraine has a complex historical background and most people have little knowledge of this. The western part of Ukraine known as Galicia has an especially complex history. Going back for more than a thousand years, this region had been settled by Slavic tribes who formed the western extension of the Kievan Rus. To the west it had Polish, Lithuanian, Hungarian and Austrian neighbours. And to its misfortune, these neighbours took turns attacking and subjugating these early Ukrainians. It was largely Poland and Austria that took turns suppressing and occupying the region, economically and culturally. Because of this, although Galicia’s population ...
Amid a divisive debate in Ukraine on state honors for nationalists viewed as responsible for anti-Semitic pogroms, the country for the first time observed a minute of silence in memory of Symon Petliura, a 1920s statesman blamed for the murder of 50,000 Jewish compatriots.The minute was observed on May 25, the 90th anniversary of Petliura’s assassination in Paris. National television channels interrupted their programs and broadcast the image of a burning candle for 60 seconds, Ukraine’s Federal News Agency reported.A French court acquitted Sholom Schwartzbard, a Russia-born Jew, of the murder even though he admitted to it after the court ...
The history of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is continued with Ilan Pappe’s recent work, The Biggest Prison on Earth. For those who have read Pappe’s earlier histories, it is clear the original Zionists recognized the existence of the Palestinian population and the resistance most likely to rise from it. Also recognized are the actions taken throughout the occupation and settlement that the Jewish settlers were intent on marginalizing, displacing, and cleansing as much of Palestine as they could of its residents.The revelation in this continuation of the history is the high degree to which these policies were officially planned ...
As some of you may remember I am compiling a criminal dossier on the western powers concerning, among other things, their preparations for Operation Barbarossa II, the term that I use for NATO’s build-up of forces in Eastern Europe threatening the security of Russia.In June, the BALTOPS 2017 NATO naval and air exercises were conducted in the Baltic Sea near Kaliningrad and the approaches to St. Petersburg simultaneously with the Saber Strike military ground exercises in Latvia and Lithuania.On July 11th NATO’s Sea Breeze naval exercises began in the Black Sea, threatening Russia’s southern flank. The NATO exercises are conducted ...
Yada…yada…yada. The discussion on the unprovoked and planned aggression by Georgia on South Ossetia is futile and moot because Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced last week that the Russian Government would recognize the independence and freedom of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. On August 25, 2008, both houses of the Russian Parliament or Duma voted unanimously to recognize the independence of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. On August 26, 2008, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced that the government of the Russian Federation officially recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.Save your rhetoric. Georgia has lost those areas permanently. Ossetians and ...
The American political theorist and Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University, Robert A. Dahl (1917−2014) left in his immense scientific writing opus considerable remarks on democracy. Here, I would like to summarize his theoretical approaches to democracy.Historical development of democracyAccording to him, democracy was created there, where existed the best conditions for its development. R. A. Dahl assumes, that this happened already in the time when people lived in a system of tribal bonds. He thinks, that democracy was the standard and universal form of the government in prehistoric society. Later, democracy was replaced by other political systems and ...
The following text was written in the immediate wake of the 1999 NATO bombings of Yugoslavia and the invasion of Kosovo by NATO troops.It is now well established that the war on Yugoslavia was waged on a fabricated humanitarian pretext and that extensive war crimes were committed by NATO and the US.In retrospect, the war on Yugoslavia was a “dress rehearsal” for subsequent US-NATO sponsored humanitarian wars including Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Syria (2011), Ukraine (2014).Who are the war criminals? In a bitter irony, the so-called International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague is controlled ...
Ema Miljkovic-Bojanic, M. A.Institute of History ofSerbian Academy of Sciences and ArtsBelgrade, 2000Malcolm’s Apology of the “Pax Ottomana” (Ab)using of historiography and historical facts for political ends is not a novelty introduced towards the end of the twentieth century. Its instances have been known throughout history, so that “practically there is not a single epoch of human history that was not controlled – by the Church, state, nation, party, leadership…” But precisely at a time when historiography seemed to be getting rid, at least partly, of the grip of “supervision” and when a critical approach was getting the upper hand, the ...
They could be found on the outskirts of Sirte, Libya, supporting local militia fighters, and in Mukalla, Yemen, backing troops from the United Arab Emirates. At Saakow, a remote outpost in southern Somalia, they assisted local commandos in killing several members of the terror group al-Shabab. Around the cities of Jarabulus and Al-Rai in northern Syria, they partnered with both Turkish soldiers and Syrian militias, while also embedding with Kurdish YPG fighters and the Syrian Democratic Forces. Across the border in Iraq, still others joined the fight to liberate the city of Mosul. And in Afghanistan, they assisted indigenous forces in various missions, just as they have ...
Did you know that Hamas, the Islamist terrorist organization whose militant wing has rained rockets on Israel, has the Jewish state of Israel to thank for its existence? Israel first encountered Islamists that would later form Hamas in Gaza in the 1970s. Back then they seemed focused on studying the Quran, not on confrontation with Israel. Israel realized that it could use the organisation to help splinter Palestinian society in the Gaza strip and hurt the Palestinian Liberation front which dominated Palestinian politics. So Israel helped and even gave funds to Hamas in the 1980s so it could establish itself ...
The 70 Years of NATO: From War to War,by the Italian Committee No War No NATODocumentation presented at the International Conference on the 70th Anniversary of NATO, Florence, April 7, 20191. The operation conducted by the USA and NATO in Ukraine began in 1991 after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Warsaw Pact, which was a part of the Soviet Union, also disintegrated. The United States and its European allies moved immediately to take full advantage of the new geopolitical situation.2. Ukraine – whose territory acts as a buffer between NATO and Russia and is crossed by energy corridors between Russia and the ...
State frontiers are established by human beingsand may be changed by human beings.Adolf Hitler. Mein KampfDiplomacy, with all the conventions of its forms,recognizes only real facts.Charles de GaullePart OneAll of Adolf Hitler’s actions, from the time he rose to power in 1933 until 1939, could be described as one triumph after another. He met each challenge he faced: he took over as head of the country, returned Germany’s lost territories without a struggle, and was given permission from England and France to rearm. But one further task lay before him, and failure now would make his previous achievements almost pointless. ...
The ongoing crisis in Ukraine and unseemly role of Poland in its instigation and development makes us take another look at the historical context of the Polish-Ukrainian relations. We will focus on dramatic repressions of the Ukrainian minorities in Eastern Poland in 1921-1939 at the territories annexed by Jozef Piłsudski’s government from the Soviet Russia according to Peace of Riga 1921, which eventually triggered ultra-Nationalist Ukrainian terror against the Poles during the WWII (culminating in massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943-1944).Poland, which used to be a part of the Russian Empire, emerged at the European political map in November ...
A massive destruction of the Ottoman (Orthodox Christian) Armenian population in 1915−1916 is probably the greatest atrocity committed during the WWI and for sure a first 20th century case of the genocide as up to 1.500.000 ethnic Armenians were executed by the Ottoman authorities and their collaborators (the Kurds). As a consequence, the survivors are scattered across the globe. Today it is already a century old event, but the issue of the 1915−1916 Armenian Genocide is undoubtedly still alive and divisive political issue firstly between the Armenians and the Turks[1] but also and among the western “liberal democracies” on the ...
According to a number of global mainstream media sources, the Pentagon is covering up a disturbing video that was never made public with the rest of the recent torture report.According to various well respected journalists, including Seymour Hersh, the appalling video was recorded at Abu Ghraib, the notorious US torture dungeon in Iraq that made headlines roughly a decade ago, when the inhumane tactics being used at the prison were exposed.Sadly, it seems that the evidence released years ago was only scratching the surface.While the video has remained under wraps thus far, Hersh says it is only a matter of time before it ...
Following the death of President Tito in 1980 the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia slid towards chaos. In the 1990s the plunge accelerated into civil war and one of the regions most affected was Kosovo from which Serbia withdrew after a NATO bomb and rocket offensive from 24 March to 11 June 1999. That blitz involved over 1,000 mainly American aircraft conducting some 38,000 airstrikes on Yugoslavia that killed approximately 500 civilians and destroyed much of the economic and social infrastructure of the region.NATO said its air bombardment was essential to halt repression of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and justified the ...
Unlike a regular corporation, the corporations that manufacture and sell weapons to their government are virtually 100% dependent upon their government and its military allies, for their own success; their markets are only those governments, not individuals (such as is the case for normal corporations). Consequently, either their government will control them, and those firms won’t have any effective control over their own markets, or else those firms will, themselves, control their government, and thereby effectively control their markets, via the government’s foreign policies — not only via expanding its military alliances (those firms’ foreign markets), but via its designating ...
The two most militarily powerful nations in the West, both free to project naval power and maritime domination anywhere in the world, get together to punish and overthrow regimes they find guilty of human rights abuses and political repression in the name of human rights and promoting democracy: What could possibly go wrong?It is of course NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s new call for NATO, which has already over the past decade exercised its nation-building and promotion of enlightened regime policies with such brilliant success in Ukraine, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan to spread its mantle of protection, enlightenment and peace over ...
Destroyed Serbian Orthodox church in Kosovo by local Muslim Albanians after 1999In 2000, when George W. Bush was elected president in a controversial and hotly disputed election, all the experts and pundits predicted that there would be a philosophical sea change in US foreign policy in the Balkans, and in Kosovo in particular. In my 2000 analysis of the election of Bush and US foreign policy in Kosovo, however, I concluded that the George W. Bush Administration represented the same old same old and business as usual. In my viewpoint, absolutely nothing would change in the US foreign policy stance ...
