Members of the Serbian Military Union and professional soldiers sent an open letter to the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, on the occasion of his address yesterday. In the letter, it was emphasized that the president of Serbia has a wrong perception of the army and that the incompetence, ignorance, arrogance and insolence of the superiors, who were immersed in crime and abuses solely for the sake of personal interests, completely made sense and destroyed the army as a whole.
We quote the letter in its entirety:
Mr. President,
In your address to the public yesterday from the Pasuljanska Livada training ground, you said that it is normal for soldiers to die and get injured, that it is normal for them to do horticulture work, maintain greenery and cleanliness in the barracks, instead of engaging in military training and maintaining fitness , that they should eat what is served to them and not protest, and that you resented the Minister of Defense because he will spend several million dinars from the budget to purchase containers for the accommodation of military personnel army. With such a hasty statement, you have publicly shown that you have a completely wrong perception of what an army is, especially a fully professional one and what it should look like today in the 21st century. But we don't blame you, Mr. President, but those around you whom you so blindly trust, and who are the biggest culprits for the complete destruction of what used to be called the Serbian Army. Yes, you heard correctly, the complete destruction and meaningless of everything that once made up the army in Serbia and what it was identified with.
The Serbian Army has been fully professionalized for more than a decade, and General Talian is right when he tells you that it is not normal for a professional, to whom you will now give a salary higher than a MIG 29 pilot, to hold a trimmer, a broom and a rake in his hands all day, instead of to maintain physical condition, shoot and practice tactical actions. Do police officers plant flowers, cut grass and clean toilets in and around police stations? Why don't you tell them that it's normal for them to do that? Why do you have cleaners and workers who maintain greenery in the presidency?
Those who should be held criminally responsible for failures in the functioning of the army have convinced you that it is normal for soldiers to die and be injured in the workplace in peacetime conditions. Since he paid you out of sight, we inform you that he is a professional soldier in an employment relationship and that the Republic of Serbia is his employer (Article 8 of the Law on the Armed Forces of Serbia).
As a lawyer, we advise you to also look at Article 410 of the Criminal Code, which stipulates as a criminal offense that a military officer who fails to take prescribed, ordered and other obviously necessary measures for the security of the unit, the life and health of the people assigned to him, is a criminal offense. entrusted, and as a result of which serious bodily injury or death occurs, will be punished with imprisonment for up to ten years.
Those of us who make up the Serbian Armed Forces and who know how big a sin it is in the army to disobey security measures, we wonder what happened before three of our colleagues were injured in the Pasuljanski meadows, what did the Operations Center of the General Staff do and whether it issued a warning and order to the units in the chain of command. should they undertake in the midst of the storm announced by the RHMZ?
What was the duty officer doing at the "Pasuljanska livade" training ground and why were the soldiers in tents during the storm and not in a shelter or other safe place. The same applies, Mr. President, to the situation with the crew of pilot Mehić, to the situation in which Dejan Stojković was killed on Pešter and before him our colleagues at the Technical Overhaul Institute in Kragujevac, and our colleague who recently crashed with a 40-year-old vehicle in a ravine and died, and other colleagues were seriously injured, not to mention more.
It is precisely in this that all the meaninglessness of what you said so casually yesterday without caring about our lives and the message you are sending to our families and to everyone you invite to become members of the army through advertisements, is reflected. All those whom you so blindly trust in the defense system, do not mean well for you or us, and keep that in mind the next time you need to take their side and not ours. You shouldn't blame the minister that he thought it was good to provide mobile containers for the accommodation of soldiers, this is normal today in all modern armies of the world. This is the work of modern military logistics and engineering. You also said yesterday that it is normal for the army to sleep in tents. Yes, we agree, but did they tell you how old the tents that the army uses today are and that the tendency in our army has been to put them out of use for a long time. Did Baća tell you when the army last bought tents, why the existing ones, from the JNA, are covered with nylons and similar hand-me-downs at every camp so that they don't leak?
We responsibly assert that the priority task of the highest military officers and managers in the defense system is exclusively to cover up their personal responsibility for the catastrophically bad situation in the Serbian Armed Forces, and the daily endangerment of the safety of subordinates. We responsibly claim that you are being falsely informed about the state of the defense system and the army. Although every superior is obliged to apply prescribed and necessary security measures for his subordinates, they managed to create a narrative that they are not responsible for deaths and injuries and that those who die and are injured are guilty because they complain. It is obvious that you do not know and do not understand what it means to be a soldier and what is the essence of that profession. What are the sacrifices of those people and their families in order to be dedicated to that work. Money is not crucial here, but love for the Motherland, face, honor, conscience, patriotism and dignity, which those you are surrounded by do not have a trace of.
Therefore, Mr. President, before you say something like this next time, keep in mind that we are not bothered by the rain and difficult working conditions that are in the description of the training places, but by the incompetence, ignorance, arrogance and rudeness of the superiors who are immersed in crime and abuses solely for the sake of personal interests and privileges which they will not give up at any cost and which have completely rendered meaningless and destroyed the system of command and subordination and the army as a whole, and by their personal example to all of us every day they show that it is normal to violate the regulations in the rudest way and harm the state and the army and unscrupulously trample on the people who are subordinate to you. For the sake of illustrating the blind servility of high-ranking military leaders and leaders, we will also tell you this.
You noticed that at the beginning of this letter we addressed you as Mr. President, without that Commander-in-Chief. This is because the Rule of Service of the Serbian Armed Forces (item 29, paragraph 2), which is adopted and signed by the President of the Republic of Serbia, stipulates that the President of the Republic of Serbia should be addressed as Mr. President. This small example best illustrates the amount of half-heartedness that senior military leaders and leaders are willing to indulge in. This time it's you, tomorrow it's someone else, and you can be sure that tomorrow they will be the first to betray you and Serbia, they betrayed us long ago and sold us "for a little char".
Professional members of the Serbian Armed Forces
ZS/Military Union of Serbia
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