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– Belgrade’s Precarious Balancing Act Juggles Strategic Partnership with Russia and Integration with European Union
– Serbia’s “Ex”-Communist Deputy Prime Minister Portrayed Himself as “New” Josep Tito on 2004 Presidential Election Billboards
After an eight-year interregnum, prompted by the 2000 Bulldozer Revolution that ousted warmongering communist chief Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia’s “ex”-reds again hold key posts in Belgrade’s pro-European Union coalition government. Cadres of the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) in Prime Minister Mirko Cvetković’s cabinet include: Ivica Dacic, First Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia, Minister of the Interior, SPS leader; Milutin Mrkonjić, Minister of Infrastructure; Žarko Obradović, Minister of Education; and Petar Škundrić, Minister of Energy and Mining. Serbia is Russia’s number one ally in the Balkans, while the leadership of the SPS, formerly Slobodan Milosevic’s League of Communists of Serbia, is closely aligned with the Moscow Leninists.
As Interior Minister, the 42-year-old Dacic is in charge of law enforcement throughout Serbia, including local and federal police units, special police like the Anti-Terrorism Unit (PTJ) and Special Anti-Terrorism Unit (SAJ), surveillance and community relations, and martial law implementation. The Serbian Interior Ministry’s jurisdiction does not extend to Kosovo, which is administered by the United Nations and European Union although, ironcially, many UN and EU states do not recognize Kosovar independence.
Pictured above, right: Dacic attends press conference in Belgrade today, at which time, according to Serbia’s B92 news source, he commented on Friday’s police raids that led to the arrest of 10 former Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas in southern Serbia.
In 2004 Dacic ran for the Serbian presidency on the SPS ticket. Nenad Lajbenšperger describes Dacic’s attempt to portray himself as a new Josip Tito, the founder of communist Yugoslavia, during the campaign:
Ivica Dacic, candidate for president in front of Serbian Social Parti (SPS), had a different slogan: “In the name of all off us”. These words are from one very famous song in Serbia. They meant that the older generations should count on younger generations. Song was glorifying values of communism and devotion to Tito and our former communist country. Picture of Dacic on the billboards vas very interesting too, and it was strongly suggesting on Tito. It was remodeled so that looks like picture of Tito. Picture which was put on large boards. Signature of this candidate was referring to Tito’s signature too. It is very obvious that his campaign counted to attract voters who remembered Tito’s time as a good time.
For his part, PM Cvetković belongs to Serbia’s Democratic Party, itself a member of the Socialist International, the parties of which are unwavering in their support for European integration. Due to its warmongering in the 1990s the SPS, unlike other “ex”-communist parties in the Not-So-Former Soviet Bloc, was prevented from joining the SI until this year.
Following months of negotiations between Serbia and Russia, last week officials from both countries finalized a deal for Kremlin-run Gazprom to acquire a controlling interest in state-run Serbian Petroleum Industry (NIS). SPS cadres are intimately involved in handing over Serbia’s oil monopoly to the Soviet strategists. On November 26 Deputy PM Dacic led a delegation to Moscow where the Serbians hammered out the details of the Gazprom-NIS deal during two days of talks with Russia’s Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu and other representatives of the Russian-Serbian intergovernmental committee. Pictured above: The Russian delegation is seated on the far side of the table, with Shoigu second from right, while the Serbian delegation is seated with their backs to the camera, with Dacic apparently second from right.
On December 24, reports Reuters, Serbian President Boris Tadic and Energy Minister Skundric, like Dacic an SPS cadre, arrived in Moscow to actually sign the agreement.
Incidentally, “ex”-CPSU cadre Viktor Zubkov, father in law of Russia’s defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov, sits at the helm of Gazprom, while Shoigu is related by marriage to August 1991 anti-Gorbachevist coup mastermind Oleg Shenin. In short, Zubkov and Shoigu are well plugged into the neo-Soviet hierarchy.
SPS founder Milosevic, who was also formerly president of Yugoslavia and Serbia, died at The Hague in March 2006 while on trial before the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Milosevic groupies insist their leader was murdered. This is possible, although we would speculate that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB/KGB), rather than NATO or the ICTY, was the culprit. If that is so, then it may be that the Kremlin feared that Milosevic, wittingly or not, would expose the long-range Soviet strategy for the Balkans under interrogation. Upon learning of Milosevic’s death, Dacic lamented, “Milosevic’s death is a great loss for Serbia, for the entire Serb nation and for the Socialist party. Milosevic was carrying out not only his own defense but also the defense of Serb honor. The entire country must thank him for this.”
In February 2008 then Serbian Justice Minister Dusan Petrovic signed an extradition request for Milosevic’s family currently living in Russia. The ex-president’s widow, Mirjana Markovic, known as “The Red Witch,” and son, Marko Milosevic, are wanted in Serbia for organizing a cigarette smuggling ring in the early 1990s, which investigators charge netted the family several million dollars. Milosevic’s brother Borislav, who was Yugoslavia’s ambassador to Russia, also lives in Moscow. “Taking into account that Milosevic and Markovic were granted political asylum in Russia, the justice minister decided to send a request for their extradition,” Serbia’s Justice Ministry related in a statement.
Pictured here: Dacic walks past a portrait of his predecessor at an SPS congress.
In another story that exposes Dacic’s ambivalent attitude toward Yugoslavia’s communist past, this past summer the newly appointed interior minister admitted that the State Security Agency (SDB) protected Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic during part of his 12-year run from international justice. According to Axis Information and Analysis, Karadzic obtained a false identity from the SDB in 1998. The founder of Bosnia’s Serbian Democratic Party was finally arrested on July 18, 2008.
“Karadzic’s arrest,” explained AIA in another story, “placed Dacic, the interior minister and head of the late president Slobodan Milosevic’s Socialist party, in an awkward position.” Appearing eager to wash his hands of the matter, Dacic was quoted by the Belgrade Daily Press as saying: “BIA had protected him and BIA has now turned him over.” The Serbian Intelligence Agency, or BIA, is the new name that the SDB adopted in 2002. The AIA continues: “Dacic seemed to blame former Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, who was ousted by president Boris Tadic’s pro-European coalition in the May election for dragging his feet on arresting Karadzic.” “What Dacic says is basically right,” analyst Misa Brkic informed Inter-Press Service, continuing:
The secret police that provided Karadzic with a false identity, and his financial supporters were slowly leaving him since 2000. They were apparently the creators of the myth that Karadzic hid in the eastern Bosnian or Montenegrin mountains for years. It is only the secret police that could have given him the new identity, places to work, a magazine to write a column in. Until the coming of the new government, there was no political will in Serbia for the arrest.
Like the deceased Milosevic, Karadzic is now awaiting trial before the ICTY. Former military commander Ratko Mladic, one of Karadzic’s colleagues and an ardent communist, is still on the run.
In reaction to the February 2008 declaration of Kosovo independence, Dacic called for a ban on all political parties and non-governmental organizations in Serbia that recognize Kosovo’s independence. According to BalkanInsight.com, “Dacic singled out Natasa Kandic, a human rights activist and director of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, who attended the Kosovo Parliamentary Session where ethnic Albanian leaders proclaimed independence last Sunday.”
Seeking reconciliation with the West and participation in a new government, in May Dacic modified his rhetoric and travelled to Athens to meet Socialist International President George Papandreou. The latter is also president of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, Greece’s main party of the democratic left. In Athens Dacic indicated that his party was finally ready to join the SI, a request that was received favorably by Papandreou. Earlier this month, reports B92, Dacic airbrushed his party’s communist legacy by supporting Serbia’s bid for integration into the EU:
I don’t think that the SPS’s acceptance into the Socialist International is of seminal importance, but for us it’s symbolic. We belong there, not with the right-wing or communist parties. If there’s no room for us in the world family of socialist parties, then the essence of our existence, as a socialist party in this country, is pointless.
[EU Enlargement Commissioner] Olli Rehn told us that the EU supported the European path that the SPS had taken and our membership of the Socialist International, regardless of the fact that Rehn is not a socialist. After many years, an SPS official was in Brussels, in the EU, which was certainly a historic moment for the SPS.
In the same breath, Dacic’s continued sympathy for the Milosevic clan, though, is evident in the following comment:
Mirjana Marković’s request to inherit Milošević’s pension is not an issue of a pension, per se, because it is a symbolic issue. We believe that regardless of the person in question, the law needs to be respected, and the issue should be resolved as soon as possible. She, like any other widow, has a right to receive her late husband’s pension, if it’s larger than hers.
Only two weeks later, reports B92 in another story, SPS official Branko Ružić revealed that despite his party’s attempt to cozy up to the EU, the Serbian government’s foreign policy will remain staunchly pro-Russian:
The SPS has never turned away Russia, and I think that we have proven the wisdom of our insistence the whole time on maintaining good relations with Russia. By returning to Russia, we are returning balance to our foreign policies. If the Russian Federation and the EU have a common denominator which is mutual interests, why wouldn’t we satisfy our interests with both Russia and the EU.
Russia has never questioned, indeed it has always strongly affirmed Serbia’s wish to join the EU, and the EU has never questioned the need for countries to protect their individual state and national interests, or to focus on partners that are most compatible for achieving these interests. The gas-energy agreement is not just an economic issue, but also a political and security issue.
Thus, we see that Russia supports Serbia’s absorption into the EU because the federalization, socialization, and neutralization of Europe was, as we documented several years ago, a project of the Moscow Leninists to begin with. At the time we quoted former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky as revealing:
In 1992 I had unprecedented access to Politburo and Central Committee secret documents which have been classified, and still are even now, for 30 years. These documents show very clearly that the whole idea of turning the European common market into a federal state was agreed between the left-wing parties of Europe and Moscow as a joint project which Gorbachev in 1988-89 called our “common European home.
Once Upon a Time in the West 
>Now that’s no major surprise of Moscow, helping out its traditional allies in the Balkans. They’ve been doing it even before the rise of Communism under the Czar which was it’s believed that Czarist subversives within the Balkans, via Black Hand may have had a hand in provoking World War I with the assassination of a top Royal Family member of the Austria-Hungary Empire.
>It also seems like Serbia is certainly going to be another trojan horse into the European Union/revived Roman Empire. Aside from Serbia, “ex”-Soviet Republics of Eastern Europe have already done so and many of the neo-Communist leaders have been lobbying Turkey’s entry into the EU.
>I’m also wondering, PT if you could comment on my recent entry regarding the number 44, which in Chinese for which I’m part Chinese myself it means “double death”.America’s enemies that supported Comrade Barry into power wouldn’t mind back-stabbing the 44th President of the USA, nor care about his policies would sink the USA further into debt. Disgraceful I might say, but I guess that’s what socialist-Marxist scum are all about and what they can do to each other.Just ask how Stalinists killed Leon Trostky or how Adolf Hitler betrayed Stalin and attacked Soviet Russia even though the two countries started the world war to begin with, with invading Poland.
>You may also wish to watch out on the economic crisis on pro-totalitarian parties making gains in recruitment.From our usual open Communist parties, to open neo-Fascist and neo-Nazi parties have now also recently made gains due to the economic crisis. The British National Party, a neo-Fascist anti-Semitic party in Britain has touted it has made recent gains in voter registration and also the German-based neo-Nazi National Democratic Party has been openly applying Marxist-Leftist style recruitment tactics in targeting poor neighbhoods in Germany.Something to think about on how similar, not different on how Communists, Fascists and Nazis are, along with “moderate” Leftist radicals also using similar tactics of recruitment.This is something to certainly look into if you wish to do another EU File with this in mind, along with any other neo-Nazi or neo-Fascist group following in the footsteps of using Marxist-Leftist style tactics of recruitment other than the two examples detailed.
>I wish all of Serbia would go up in flames, but the Communist Milosevic — as I understand things — was defending against impending jihad after the declaration of sha’aria law by Bosnia. If Dearbornistan declared sha’aria, we Americans should be so lucky as to see it bombed flat.That said, if and only if you doubt my position on this issue, please read my entry “Serbia Is Russia”.