Nebojša Pavković (1946-2025): Milošević's favorite general

General Nebojsa Pavković he died at the age of 79 in Belgrade.

Editor of TV Informer Dragan J. Vučićević declared that Pavković was "a hero, a hero, a great Serbian warrior, convicted without a single piece of evidence in the crazy Hague proceedings".

Vučićević assessed that Pavković "joins the ranks of the greatest Serbian generals, like Stepa Stepanović and Živojin Mišić", and criticized TV N1, Nova S, as well as the newspaper Danas, which "reported on him as a war criminal".

The former commander of the Third Army of the Army of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and chief of the General Staff, due to his deteriorating health, and at the request of official Belgrade, was released before the end of his 22-year prison sentence, which he served in Finland.

After the end of the conflict, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević presented Pavković with the Order of Freedom, while in 2003 the Prosecutor's Office of the Tribunal in The Hague indicted him for war crimes.

The trial began in 2006. In the first instance, in 2009, he was sentenced to 22 years in prison, and in 2014, the verdict became final.

From painting to general

Even within the gallery of highly colorful characters that the war in the former Yugoslavia pushed to high positions, Pavković represents something special. Born on April 10, 1946 in Senjski Rudnik, Ćuprija municipality, he grew up in Aleksinac, where he graduated from the Teacher Training School. His two greatest passions from that time were basketball and painting; however, instead of becoming teachers, athletes or artists, Pavković joined the army and graduated from the KoV Military Academy with excellent results, and he also graduated from the Command and Staff School of Opera with excellent grades. He served all over Bosnia - in Bileća, Mostar and Banja Luka - and for a time he was the head of opera at the National Defense School. In the television footage shown at the Hague Tribunal, he was seen in Vukovar in the company of Veselin Šljivančanin and Mile Mrkšić, who were later accused of the massacre of civilians and prisoners of war on the agricultural estate Ovčara, Dejan Anastasijević wrote earlier in "Vremen".

After Vukovar, Pavković as a colonel spent some time on cabinet duties, so he was in the cabinet of Vuk Obradović, but also of Milan Panić, at the time when the latter held the office of Minister of Defense in addition to the Prime Minister's. At the age of 48, Pavković received the rank of general and was sent to Kosovo as the commander of the Pristina garrison, and two years later he became the corps commander. In the midst of the guerilla phase of the Kosovo war, in the summer of 1998, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general, and before the beginning of the NATO bombing, he was promoted to the commander of the Third Army. He became the Chief of the General Staff in January 2000 and held that position until June 24, 2001, when he was replaced by the decree of the former President of the SR Yugoslavia, Vojislav Koštunica.

Eulogies to Milošević

It turned out, however, that a brilliant military career never managed to fully fulfill Pavković, who clearly had great ambitions in other fields as well. Women were one of his great passions, painting was another: he was married three times and had seventeen solo exhibitions, mostly in JNA homes in the places where he served. Even during his time as chief, he liked to take pictures for the newspaper with a palette and a quill in hand. "I like to paint trees, especially at different times of the year. Trees remind people," he explained in an interview. "My biggest passion is nightscapes, and that's not easy. Such landscapes are rare, woven from hints."

Eulogies to Milošević, as "the wisest, most honorable, best statesman in the history of Serbia", were something that is self-explanatory for Pavković, but who else would think to engrave his own image on a gun and present it to the President?

Proposing that the President be awarded an order is one thing, but only Pavković could order that 800 grams of gold be used for that coin. In addition, he knew that he had to be pleasing not only to the presidential ear but also to the eye, so he dyed his hair and went for complicated bio-cosmetic treatments. He didn't neglect his friend Mira Marković either, so he earnestly attended meetings of the Yugoslav Left, all in uniform, despite the ban on military personnel to participate in party activities in an official capacity. By the way, while he was in Kosovo, through his wife Gloria, he also maintained a parallel, personal relationship with the head of JUL, aware that Her word can mean more than His under the given circumstances.

The gold rush

Certainly, the most bizarre episode in Pavković's career was searching for gold near the village of Špaj, between Niš and Pirot, in the summer of 1999. Pavković was convinced by some supposed gold seekers that there was an unprecedented Byzantine or Roman treasure under a rock in that area, and Pavković managed to convince Milošević of the same, so the army drilled and mined the rock for months, all in the strictest secrecy. The rock was removed at enormous expense, and the gold was never found, nor were the "prospectors" who had paid their fees in advance.

Pavković served Milošević's successor at the head of the FRY, Vojislav Koštunica, no less zealously, although due to Koštunica's character and new circumstances, his creativity could not flourish to its full extent. In addition, he learned to be careful, and when he noticed that the balance of power was shifting in favor of Zoran Đinđić, he tried to realign himself. However, this somersault did not work for him, and he was fired when Kostunica doubted his loyalty. Pavković took revenge on his former commander-in-chief by going public with the affair about the planned invasion of the Serbian Government Information Bureau by the army, which exposed a lot of dirty laundry and caused considerable damage to Kostunica in the presidential elections in 2002. In the same elections, Pavković also ran, despite the difficulties with collecting signatures, and won a little more than two percent of the vote - a little less than Bata Živojinović, but still more than Banet Ivkovic.

The man who (allegedly) refused orders

Even within such an incredible career, Pavković will go down in the history of military science as a general who constantly advanced in his service - if we are to believe his word - by refusing to follow orders. At first, on October 5, he allegedly refused to bring tanks against the people, fired rockets at the "Beograđanka" building and threw poison on the plateau in front of the Federal Assembly. A little later, he boasted that in 1999 he saved the life of British Prime Minister Tony Blair when he refused Milosevic's order to fire rockets at the airport in Skopje during Blair's visit to Macedonia. And finally, he refused Kostunica's order to send military special forces to the Government and thus brought Serbia to the brink of civil war. Admittedly, Pavković never proved that those orders really existed, at least not in written form.

This is how we come to an order that Pavkovic carried out and which took him into custody. It was an order to provide Dušan Spasojević, known as Duća (and later Šiptar) and Vladimir Jovanović, known as Japanac, with a military helicopter, uniforms and false documents of the Yugoslav Army when they tried to kill Vuk Drašković in Budva on June 15, 2000. As "Vreme" learned at the time from sources close to the MUP, Pavković personally signed the order for the use of the helicopter, and he stated in the investigation that he acted on Slobodan Milošević's order, which he duly recorded in his official notebook.

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