Serbia troop offer and officer purges

Serbian news weekly “NIN,” dated August 14, 2003, comments on Prime Minister Zivkovic’s infamous troop offer:
“Given that government representatives first denied the reports from America, then methodically spun the tone of Zivkovic’s offer, and later hastily tried to legitimize it by a vote in the Council of Ministers and the Supreme Defense Council, one gets the impression that the offer of military aid to the US was not conceived before the visit to Washington, but made by the Prime Minister ad hoc, under the circumstances.”
NIN also addressed the recent purge of top Army generals, in light of their service in the 1999 Kosovo war…

“One should not forget,” writes NIN commentator Dragan Ciric, “that during the 1999 war the Yugoslav Armt managed to mount fierce resistance to NATO forces. This is most visible from the fact that the North Atlantic Alliance never seriously contemplated launching a ground invasion of Serbia. Furthermore, the withdrawal of armor from Kosovo showed that NATO air strikes had a negligible effect on Army abilities on the ground.”
[…]
“The methods of armor and radar camouflage developed by the Yugoslav Army before and during the 1999 war have been one of its greatest achievements, and many other militaries – especially Russian – have expressed interest in learning from it. The dismissal of officers with such experience will be a loss for not only the Serbia-Montenegro Army, but for NATO as well. No one else can point out the shortcomings of air strikes better than those who recognized and exploited them. Perhaps that was why they had to go.”

Original article at [url=http://www.nin.co.yu/2003-08/14/30366.html]NIN website[/url].