A Key General in Montenegro Reportedly Out

The top Yugoslav defense body has replaced the chief of the federal army in the republic of Montenegro, in the first removal of a senior military figure since the ouster of President Slobodan Milosevic, a Montenegrin source said Tuesday.

“Yesterday’s session of the Supreme Defense Council decided to replace top Yugoslav army officers in Montenegro,” the source in the Cabinet of Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic said.

He confirmed a report in a Montenegrin daily that said the council, chaired by new President Vojislav Kostunica, decided Monday in the capital, Belgrade, to replace three senior military officials.

The daily Pobjeda said the three were 2nd Army commander Gen. Milorad Obradovic, navy chief Adm. Milan Zec and military airport commander Col. Luka Kastratovic. It quoted what it described as well-informed sources in Belgrade.

Kostunica’s office had no immediate comment on the story or a similar report in another daily.

An army spokesman was quoted as saying that Obradovic was going to take up a new post and that he had not been dismissed.

“This has nothing to do with a sacking,” Col. Miroslav Djurovic, army information assistant in Montenegro, told the Fonet news agency. “Gen. Obradovic is leaving the 2nd Army as part of a regular rotation of officers.”

The removal of the officers would appear to be in response to demands by Djukanovic’s independence-minded government, which had increasingly strained ties with the army when Milosevic was in power.

Montenegrin officials often accused Milosevic of using the army presence in the coastal republic, the junior partner to Serbia in the Yugoslav federation, to intimidate the population.