Montenegro Force May Be More Than Beer, Bravado

Great hunks of barbecued lamb were chewed down to greasy bones, and a few cases of Niksic beer sucked dry, yet Bozidar Bogdanovic’s men were still far from satisfied.

On a wooded mountainside overlooking Cetinje, the former capital of Montenegro, Bogdanovic had mustered about 15 of his soldiers for their regular Sunday strategy session and barbecue.

While his drunken men argued over who would get more beer, and one popped the cork on a bottle of sparkling wine squeezed between his feet, the man they call general predicted a new war for independence from the ruins of Yugoslavia.

“The situation will sharpen up further because nothing can be solved by peaceful means,” Bogdanovic, 45, said through an interpreter. “Serbia is fascist, and the politics of [Yugoslav President] Slobodan Milosevic are the dirtiest of the 20th century on these grounds.

“The Serbs are genocidal as a people, a gang of thugs and cowards,” he declared. “They are only good at burning women, children and the elderly, and with this tactic they have lost all the wars so far.”

Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic, who has strong Western support in his role as Milosevic’s foil, wants to loosen ties with Serbia and give Montenegro virtual independence, with its own army, currency and foreign policy. Serbia and the much smaller Montenegro are Yugoslavia’s only remaining republics.

Milosevic’s government has ignored Montenegro’s demands, outlined Aug. 5 in a 15-page plan for the “Commonwealth of Montenegro and Serbia,” and Djukanovic is threatening to hold a referendum on independence if a deal isn’t reached by this fall.

But if Djukanovic settles with Milosevic for something less than independence for the economically fragile Montenegro, Bogdanovic warned that there will be war.

“If the present government accepts the ultimatum of Milosevic, we will continue to fight, both against Milosevic and our government,” he said. “The Montenegrins have not learned to live in slavery.”

It was difficult to hear Bogdanovic, let alone take him seriously, with music blaring through the open sunroof of a shiny new black Land Rover packed with singing men: the Lovcen brigade’s beer detail.

The noise also distracted the general, a bulky man with graying, closely cropped hair and Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, who was trying to talk a visitor through what he calls centuries of Montenegrin self-reliance.

“Why do you want more beer? You’re drunk already,” Bogdanovic hollered to his men from the picnic table, to little effect.

“Shut down the music, Pehrnan!” added one of his soldiers.

“Stop it now! Don’t start looking like those drunken Serbs--soft and dizzy!” shouted another.

While it would be easy to laugh off Bogdanovic and his men as paramilitary wannabes, weekend soldiers who know more nationalist songs than battle tactics, it also could be dangerous.

Many Montenegrins do dismiss them, often with a tired smile, as did an elderly villager living along the road to their camp who called Bogdanovic’s men a bunch of jobless kids with too much time on their hands.

But this is the Balkans, and young men with guns, fired up by alcohol and nationalist slogans, have done too much killing in the eight years of Yugoslavia’s disintegration to be written off with a snicker.

The Yugoslav army also appears to take Bogdanovic and his supporters seriously. During the height of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s air war in the spring, Yugoslav soldiers arrested him about 100 yards from a mountaineer’s cottage that Bogdanovic’s men use as a training camp.

He and two of his men were held for two hours May 31 before a protest by locals forced the Yugoslav army to release them in Cetinje, his hometown, Bogdanovic said.

“Because we are well organized, we quickly established contact with 700 of our soldiers in civilian clothes in Cetinje,” Bogdanovic said. “We called up 3,000 people, who blocked the road to Podgorica,” the Montenegrin capital.

Bogdanovic refused to be photographed and wouldn’t say whether, as most suspect, he is the Montenegrin militia’s overall commander. “Ranks are not important here,” he said. “Only serial numbers.”

General or not, Bogdanovic still couldn’t get his men to turn down the volume on their folk music.

“This is the filth of Montenegro!” he shouted at the men singing in the Land Rover. “It’s poison!”

Bogdanovic claims that there are 15,000 fighters in what he called the Montenegrin army, but outside experts say the number is closer to a few thousand men, armed with hunting rifles or assault weapons.

The Yugoslav army, which so far has remained publicly loyal to Milosevic, has an estimated 13,000 troops in Montenegro, where Djukanovic also can call on his own police force.

Bogdanovic runs the Gaeta Cafe in Cetinje. His military training consisted of one year of mandatory national service in the Yugoslav army and recent additional training at what he would describe only as a private facility in Germany.

“In each of the last four years, I received special training in Germany, for three months a year,” Bogdanovic said. “Our commanders all take courses abroad.”

With fewer than 700,000 people and an economy that survives on tourism, Montenegro can hardly afford Djukanovic’s long-running confrontation with Milosevic, much less loose talk of war.

The Sveti Stefan City-Hotel, a medieval town transformed into a luxury resort, once drew celebrities such as Sophia Loren, Sylvester Stallone and Dick Cavett to Montenegro’s Adriatic coast.

But after years of successive wars in the region and threats of more unrest, Sveti Stefan director Pero Radjenovic considers it a big day when a U.S. diplomat or two check in.

With NATO warplanes flying overhead during the spring on their way to targets in Serbia, Radjenovic didn’t bother opening the 125-room hotel for business until July. It was full within five days.

But relatively few of the guests are foreigners, who would spend much needed hard currency, so the hotel is still struggling to pay its bills and may have to close for the season early in September, he said.

Last year, 40% of the hotel’s guests were foreigners, mainly Russians. This year, the figure dropped to 20%, and Radjenovic has cut his staff from 200 to 120.

Radjenovic doesn’t like to talk politics, but he doesn’t hide his doubts about the costs of pushing too hard for independence when more money is what Montenegrins really need.

“The dollar has no smell to me,” he said, adding, “People are interested in the [independence] issue, but they are mostly concerned about living better, working better.”

Montenegrins also hope, he said, “that the world sees us in a better light, that they start coming and buying our property--that we buy their property.”