The army is not a toy, warned in an interview for "Vreme" more than two years ago, retired general, former commander of the operational forces of the Serbian Armed Forces, Dragan Kolundžija, commenting on the then announcements of the return of the obligation to serve in the military. "Known military experts", regular guests of regime television and tabloids, retired officers, experts in everything and anything put him in the picture.
His warning, however, was lightly brushed aside, because he Aleksandar Vučić and his henchmen needed a new topic for the front pages of tabloids and guest appearances in the morning programs of Pink and Happy and all-day performances on Informer television. Now, when Kosovo, in which every form of government of the Serbian state has been abolished, is irretrievably leaving, Vučić's foreign "spin masters" have found a new topic that they know the Serbs, as a people with a warrior tradition, will "get caught".
Start of spinning
The topic of re-compulsory military service, which was suspended in 2011, first appeared and was widely discussed in public in 2017, and then in 2018, when a research was published. Various officials and "experts" expressed their opinions, poured in from empty to empty, and then it all stopped.
Those "experts", as well as relevant ministers and most of the media, referred to "research" that almost three quarters of Serbia's citizens are in favor of military service. It's just that both the pro-state media and those who were against the government at the time skipped over one important fact - who conducted the research. It was published in 2017 by a non-governmental, and in fact a pro-government organization, some kind of Research Center for Defense and Security, referring to field research conducted on a sample of 1117 respondents in 11 municipalities and cities in Serbia, and through the organization's website to another 1382 of them. .
In June 2018, Center representative Jasmina Andrić said that 75 percent of female respondents and 77 percent of male respondents were in favor of introducing mandatory military service. It's just that the regime media kept silent about the fact that most of those who were in favor of introducing military service, 79 percent of them, were over 60 years old.
Many open questions
If we exclude the problems with financing and equipping the barracks, as well as the questionable length of military service of 75 days, at this moment, when Vučić unconstitutionally and illegally disclosed that decision, the question arises as to what needs to be done and arranged in order for recruitment and the start of military service of the first generation at the beginning of the following year functioned as it should. How can this be achieved?
The answer is - no way, the deadline is simply too short.
Because, how to make a selection of recruits, whether by age or in some other way, what to do with those who, when the proposal of the Government and the decision of the Assembly come into force, are a few months or half a year away from crossing the age limit (which is not yet known, and we are talking about 30 years), will it apply to them retroactively...?
It is also unknown who participated in that working group that prepared the decision, whether only officers from the General Staff and the Ministry of Defense, or some "experts" from the side, retired officers and people from Vučić's cabinet, such as a retired general, a regular guest television, "jacket wearer"? The professional public would be interested in seeing the biographies of those people.
Who will train these young people is a separate story, because the army lacks non-commissioned officers, who are the key to training. And those who have them are trained in some kind of courses and do completely different professional jobs. There is also Vučić's "5000 special forces" project, so we need to dedicate ourselves to the training of those people.
Sons of Guzonje
And when military service is introduced, the traditional Balkan pain will definitely be on the agenda - going to the army "through a connection", to serve in one's own town, or, if it is not possible, then in one as close as possible, "so that the child can come home as often as possible." ".
The author of this text served in the JNA in 1985 in Šabac, 600 kilometers from home, and there were also soldiers from Slovenia and Macedonia. There were three guys from Belgrade in the department with me - one was the son of a federal official, the other was a high-ranking head of the State Security (he later rose to the position of assistant chief), the third's father had a connection in the military department. Their parents visited them every weekend or they went home, they ran away from the barracks. It is impossible to count how many such connections there were in the entire former Yugoslavia. And it was a very organized country as far as the army was concerned.
What would happen now, when every little official of the ruling parties no longer begs for a "relationship" for his son, but can order people from the military departments? Can anyone believe that the son of an SNS official or state secretary, assistant minister, secretary in the ministry from Belgrade will be sent to Leskovac or Sombor? The connections worked and will work and it will be a joke.
Prime Minister Miloš Vučević himself indirectly hinted that recruits who graduated from electrical, mechanical and similar schools and faculties should serve military service in the Military Technical Institute and organizational parts of the army and the Ministry where greater technical and technological knowledge is required.
Too many vague words
There are many uncertainties, such as the question of how many leaves the recruits will have in those 75 days, whether they will have free weekends and who will bear the travel expenses, as well as what will be done by those who have opted for conscientious objection, a category guaranteed by the Constitution? Will there be cooks, painters, manual workers in the barracks?
The stupidity of military service without a weapon was shown even before its suspension was introduced - young men were engaged in the Belgrade Philharmonic, various theaters throughout Serbia, schools, city greens, depending on the connection someone had.
But the army will get free labor, which is very necessary, because professional soldiers or those under contract refused to clean the barracks from leaves, mow the grass, wash the floors in the corridors and dormitories... Now there will be "victims" for that, which will in the majority of young people, to deepen the aversion to the army in which someone in the information age separates you from your mobile phone or tablet and forces you to "physicalize".
The next factor is determining fitness for military service: how many will be declared unfit, exempted, and how much parental power, political or financial, will affect that. In 1990, on the eve of the war, Aleksandar Vulin was also declared "unfit" due to high diopters, so later he suddenly "saw" and goes to shooting ranges, shooting well. And some people with larger diopters served in the army.
Security and legal issues
The next problematic thing, not at all naive, is the multi-year propaganda of Vučić and his colleagues regarding Kosovo. Every now and then, tanks were fired up and it went to Raska or Kuršumlija, to the administrative line, combat readiness was raised... Many people who remember the wars of the nineties in such a situation will hardly decide to send their children to the army. Especially those who took part in those wars, from Krajina and Bosnia to Kosovo, know how they went and how the state treated them.
And finally, it remained unclear, and it will be seen when the Government's decision is announced and submitted to the Parliament, what will happen to young men with dual citizenship, because the regulations state that if in one of the countries whose citizens have been abolished military service, they are not obliged to serve it in the second, and not a single country in the surrounding area has mandatory military service (Croatia announces that it will introduce it, but that too is a long shot). Those young men can simply refuse to join the army. There are many members of national minorities in Serbia, so the question arises as to how to solve this problem.
Of course, there is also a security component, the influence of foreign intelligence services. If recruits are not deprived of their mobile devices for communication and not banned from accessing the Internet - they can send all the data in various ways to those who recruited them, especially young men engaged in the Military Technical Institute and sensitive units, such as electronic reconnaissance.
I guess Vučić's "experts", making another "charade" and throwing sand in the people's eyes, thought about all this.
Whether this project is serious will be seen at the adoption of the budget for the next year, when the figures of the military budget are looked at, and they should be drastically higher.
If military conscription is indeed introduced, caterers, restaurant and tent owners will be the happiest - they have a job to send them off.
