[LINK] "Serbs Turn Back to Arms for Money"

[rfmcdonald]

Serbia's arms industry is flourishing, Inter Press Service's Vesna Peric Zimonjic reports.

A long-running joke in Serbia goes that the country’s most successful export products are berries, grains, maize, and world-renowned tennis players like Novak Djokovic and Jelena Jankovic.

But things appear differently when one takes a look at the country’s economic statistics, which show that there is one profoundly stable and steadily rising industry in Serbia: the military industry, which has witnessed an export growth of 30 percent annually, providing jobs for close to 9,000 workers.

"We've sold this year's production of our sniper rifles in advance," Rade Gromovic, head of the Zastava weapons factory, told IPS. The factory is situated in the central Serbian town of Kragujevac and specialises in rifle production for both military and civilian purposes.

"Our prime export items are machine guns, submachine guns, automatic rifles, CZ 999 pistols, and automatic or semi-automatic snipers," he added. The factory has been licensed by the United Nations (UN); most of its products are used by UN peace-keeping forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and several African countries, Gromovic said. In several meetings with journalists earlier this month, Serbian Defence Minister Dragan Sutanovac explained that the major export products of the military industry are "ammunition… M-92 automatic machine guns and M- 84, gunpowder, rocket fuel, explosives, bullet-proof vests and protective body armour, and the training aircraft ‘Lasta’ (sparrow)."

Sutanovac stated that the annual figure of exports rose from 75 million dollars in 2007 to 183 million dollars in 2008, and again, to 246 million dollars in 2009.

During the Cold War, the Yugoslav People's Army was quite large, with some of the largest ground and air forces (regular and reserve) in Cold War Europe, and possessed a very large industrial base in keeping with Yugoslavia's doctrine of military self-sufficiency. Interestingly, it appears that future Serbian arms exports will depend on the restoration of those same pan-Yugoslav military industries.

This year may witness big ventures for Serbia: it is close to signing a 500 million dollar agreement to build a military hospital in at least one Arab country; three military factories are to be built in Algeria; and Sutanovac said that he hopes Serbia will win a 400 million dollar contract to modernise 150 M-84 tanks that Yugoslavia exported to Kuwait in 1991.

The tanks were typical of former Yugoslav cooperation, as they were assembled in Croatia from components made throughout the federation. Now the ties are being restored, and Serbian, Bosnian, and Macedonian arms companies are working together. A Serbia-Croatia defence agreement signed in June also envisages co-operation.

If Serbia wins the Kuwait contract, Sutanovac said, some of the work will most likely be shared between Bosnian, Croatian, and Slovene companies - a cooperative effort that looks forward, to the future.