Montenegro needs to right itself, now

Miodrag Vlahović, former Foreign Minister of Montenegro, writes:

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić should be gratified. Politicians close to him have finally become part of the 44th Government of Montenegro, Serbia’s neighbor to the southwest.

Others are not so pleased. The US Embassy in Montenegro has expressed concern that there are pro-Russian parties in the government. The EU Mission warns of hindrance to the European agenda. The new government uses European and NATO rhetoric, but their political practice and decisions follow the Belgrade-Moscow lead.

What happened

A Bosniak party enabled this governing coalition. It holds six ministerial mandates in the farcically cumbersome cabinet of Prime Minister Milojko Spajić. That is what it got to compensate for joining with parties that deny the Srebrenica genocide and treat war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladić as heros.

The new government has the two-thirds majority (54 out of 81 deputies) needed to enact significant legal and constitutional changes. They will want to enable dual citizenship and enact changes that would eliminate the civic concept of Montenegrin society. Already political leaders are presenting themselves as “the only authentic representatives” of their ethnic group. The dysfunctional Bosnian model of governance, based on ethnic group rights, is the daydream of ethnic nationalists in Montenegro.

But that is only one dimension of the new political constellation. The government includes no one who identifies as Montenegrin. The shrunken opposition includes parties of a civic, European and democratic orientation, but American and European diplomats have deemed them not “reformed enough.”

What it means

Spajić will allegedly try to implement the official European agenda and Euro-Atlantic policy. He will be doing this in cooperation with declared opponents of NATO, advocates of lifting EU-required sanctions against Russia, and parties that want to realize Greater Serbia. Mission impossible, but therefore desirable from the commanding heights of Belgrade and Moscow.

These same parties of the governing coalition, including Prime Minister Spajić himself, naturally look with enthusiasm at the possibility of Donald Trump returning to the White House. That shows precisely how little they are really oriented towards Europe, which Trump despises.

The Western policy of appeasement towards Serbia has now handed Montenegro to Moscow. The Biden Administration wasted four years pushing the anti-European project known as “Open Balkans.” That has enabled Vučić to meddle not only in Montenegro but also in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, with inevitable negative implications for North Macedonia as well.

Deliveries of Serbian arms and ammunition to Ukraine and mammoth contracts for lithium exploitation in Serbia have made this possible. They are both an explanation and a verdict. The EU’s continuing financial support for Serbia, regardless of Belgrade’s other behavior, reveals its true intentions, which condemn the rest of the Balkans to instability.

What needs to be done

Montenegro is on the brink. The Bosniak party is in power with nationalist populists and chauvinists from the Serbian-Russian milieu. A coalition of three nationalist parties presided over the beginning of the 1992 war in Bosnia. The Bosniak leaders who join this coalition will enable threats to Montenegrin sovereignty and independence.

The opposition parties need to answer the question whether this is a “point of no return” for Montenegro. There will be no help from the West. That makes the task of the opposition urgent and dramatic. Montenegro needs to right itself, now.