Why does Serbia hold onto Montenegro?

• General

Here�s a sobering article from Britain�s Independent. I am writing up a short opinion piece for StrategyPage based on this report. It should run on StrategyPage tomorrow (June 30).

Here�s the Independent�s lede:

Greece has launched a judicial inquiry to discover the extent of its involvement in the Srebrenica massacre, Europe�s worst atrocity since the Second World War.

An Athens prosecutor announced a preliminary investigation to find what role Greek volunteers played in the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men, women and children in the UN enclave in Bosnia in 1995. With the 10th anniversary of the massacre on 11 July, and Bosnian Serb authorities admitting the extent of the massacre, any confirmed Greek involvement would embarrass Athens seriously.

Greece was a staunch ally of the Milosevic regime in the Yugoslav wars of succession in the 1990s but the presence of Greek paramilitaries fighting with Bosnian Serbs has not been fully investigated. The part played by the so-called Greek Volunteer Brigade in the assault on Srebrenica was widely reported in Greece at the time but veterans of the brigade have gone to ground since the formation of the war crimes tribunal that indicted the former Serb and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.

The Independent adds:

Four members of the unit received medals of honour from the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, within a month of Srebrenica�s fall.

The Independent notes that it is relying on reports from the Greek press that appeared in 1995. The Greek newspaper Ethnos is specifically mentioned. The story says video footage proves that Greece shipped arms to Serbia in violation of weapons sanctions.

There were numerous rumors dating back to 1992 of �Orthodox volunteers� serving with Serb paramilitaries� Orthodox as in the �foreign� volunteer claimed to be a member of one of the Eastern Orthodox Christian churches. The rumors Jim Dunnigan (of StrategyPage) and I heard in the early Nineties suggested a few dozen �non-Serb� volunteers might be participating. Here�s the scenario I envisaged: A Greek �ultra-nationalist� who �hates Turks� decides to head north to Bosnia because he see �the Serbs are doing something about the Turks.� (In his mind �Bosnian Muslim� means �Turk.�) All this not-so-imaginary character has to do is take a bus from Athens to Belgrade and then ask for an automatic rifle. An investigation may reveal there were far more than a �few dozen� who took the bus to Belgrade (perhaps several hundred?).

If the Serb paramilitaries� use of Orthodox volunteers echoes Al Qaeda�s appeals to fellow Islamist radicals� guess what, it�s the same dark stroke, though there�s no evidence the Serbs were ever as well-organized as Al Qaeda in terms of foreign recruitment. Greece appears to be investigating it�s own citizens� possible participation in terrorist murder. When Saudi Arabia conducts similar prosecutorial investigations we�ll know the War on Terror has turned a major corner.