Serbia: An odd choice of peacekeeper

Date: 04/10/03

Serbia's offer to send gendarmes to Afghanistan may raise eyebrows

IF YOU can't beat them join them. The last time Serbian soldiers had serious negotiations with American ones was when they surrendered their province of Kosovo after the Americans had bombed them for 78 days. In recent weeks, however, senior officers from the army of what is now the loose union of Serbia and Montenegro have been in the United States to discuss sending as many as 1,000 men to fight alongside the Americans in Afghanistan.

No details have been announced, except that the men will probably be deployed around Kandahar, the old stronghold of the Taliban regime that was overthrown two years ago, again thanks to American bombing. Because these men must be the best that Serbia has to offer, they will come not just from the ranks of the army but also from an elite paramilitary police force, the gendarmerie.

After nearly a decade of war in former Yugoslavia, many of these men have a lot more experience of fighting than their new-found American friends. But, while the Americans will welcome the muscle they will bring to the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, they may not be so keen on the bad press likely to accompany them in the Muslim world. For many of these men will have fought against Bosnia's Muslims and Kosovo's overwhelmingly Muslim Albanians, and may well have been involved in “ethnic cleansing”.

Indeed, the head of Serbia's gendarmerie is General Goran (“Guri”) Radosavljevic (left), who is tipped to lead the force in Afghanistan. He and his men have been widely accused of atrocities in Kosovo but he has always denied them and has not been indicted by the UN's war-crimes tribunal in The Hague. But Natasa Kandic, Serbia's most prominent campaigner against war criminals, says that the general should not even still be a policeman in Serbia, let alone be considered for service abroad.

Serbia's parliament has yet to approve of the deployment but so far the idea has stirred little controversy bar some bitter suggestions that the Americans who bombed them should now stew in their own juice. Many men sound keen to go. But the people most worried are those who are supposed to secure southern Serbia against increasing attacks from extreme ethnic-Albanian nationalists. Such Serbs fear that pleasing America by sending their finest to Afghanistan may leave the country vulnerable to yet more Albanian attacks.

Serbia's offer to send gendarmes to Afghanistan may raise eyebrows.