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Serbian shells and mines, sold by a mysterious arms dealer, destined for Bangladesh, carried by a Ukrainian plane that crashes in Greece. Sounds like a moderately exciting political thriller. But it is a stark reality.
In the late evening of July 16, 2022, a Ukrainian Antonov An-12 transport aircraft crashed near the city of Kavala in northeastern Greece. All eight Ukrainian crew members lost their lives. The plane had departed from the city of Nis in southern Serbia and had loaded 11.5 tons of Serbian-made mortar shells and mines. Behind this business is said to be Slobodan Tesic, one of the biggest arms dealers in the Balkans, against whom US sanctions have been imposed for a long time. Official destination of arms shipment: Bangladesh.
Immediately after taking off over the northern part of the Aegean Sea, the pilot reported problems with the engine, but was unable to make an emergency landing. The crash near Kavala was devastating, even the next day there were continuous explosions of ammunition.
The largest arms manufacturer in the region
The accident is currently not only causing diplomatic turmoil between Greece on the one hand and Serbia and Ukraine on the other – because Athens apparently knew nothing about this delicate shipment and protested to both countries. The catastrophe also draws attention to a dark complex: the Serbian arms industry, which is constantly cited for corruption and illegal exports.
Serbia is one of the largest and most important arms producers in Central and Southeastern Europe, a tradition dating back to the days of Yugoslavia. The almost exclusively state-owned arms industry is an important branch of the economy for the Western Balkan country. Serbia can offer almost everything – from small arms and mines, artillery and tanks, missile systems, drones, fighter jets and electronic equipment such as radars. The Ministry of Defense in Belgrade estimates the volume of Serbian arms exports for 2020 at about 600 million dollars (about 530 million euros). This means about three percent of Serbia’s total exports for 2020. However, there are no certain figures.
Sending weapons to war and conflict zones
The most important buyers of Serbian weapons and military equipment are the United Arab Emirates, Cyprus, the USA, Bulgaria and Saudi Arabia. But the Serbian arms industry has clients all over the world and is not at all reserved in the elections”, political scientist Vuk Vuksanovic from the Center for Security Policies in Belgrade (BCBP) tells DW. “The Serbian state really wants to extract every possible dinar from this industry. However, the red line is that the exporting countries must not be under UN sanctions or have armed conflict.”
But Vuksanovic emphasizes that Serbia “does not always apply these rules”. In fact, during the last two decades, this Western Balkan country has continuously exported weapons to war and conflict zones or to countries that were under an arms embargo. In the fall of 2019, it came to light that Serbian weapons had ended up in the hands of militant Islamists in Yemen via Saudi Arabia. In the summer of 2020, the Azerbaijani military discovered Serbian weapons sold to Armenia in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. In February of this year, a network of Serbian investigative journalists revealed that Serbian weapons had been sent to Myanmar after the February 2021 military coup.
A name that keeps coming up
One person whose name keeps popping up in connection with the illegal Serbian arms business is Slobodan Tesic. The 64-year-old has been active in the arms trade in the Balkans for decades. From 2003 to 2013 he was on the US sanctions list for illegal arms shipments to Liberia. In December 2017, sanctions against Tesic were reinstated for many illegal arms businesses; they still exist today and include, among other things, a travel ban and confiscation of his assets in the US. There he is officially described as “the biggest arms and ammunition dealer in the Balkans”.
Tesic is also at the center of several corruption scandals in the Serbian defense industry, including the so-called Krusik affair, which came to light in the fall of 2019. The arms dealer’s profits are said to have bought the state-owned Krusik arms company, that produces grenades, mines and rockets, products below market value and sold them abroad at high prices – although in Serbia the state company Jugoimport-SDPR is actually responsible for the international arms business.
Financier of the ruling party?
The money from these businesses of the state-owned arms companies with private firms is said to pass from time to time to the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) of President Aleksandar Vucic. Tesic is considered one of the biggest financiers of SNS. According to Serbian media, he also has a diplomatic passport. Even the father of the current Serbian Defense Minister, Nebojsa Stefanovic, who has passed away, is said to have been involved in similar arms deals for years. Both Vucic and Stefanovic have denied the allegations for years.
Not surprisingly, Tesic’s name is now mentioned in connection with the actual shipment of weapons to Bangladesh and the downing of the plane. Apparently he is behind the company Valir, which is officially responsible for this business. Tesiçi himself does not comment on this or the accusations against him in general.
Is the policy of swinging between the two wings coming to an end?
It is also speculated that the weapons in the downed Ukrainian plane were not intended for Bangladesh, but for Ukraine. Both Serbian Defense Minister Stefanovic and the head of the Ukrainian company Meridian, which owned the downed plane, deny this. But political scientist Vuksanovic believes that unanswered questions remain. “The opinion needs to be clarified, why a Ukrainian plane is transporting Serbian weapons, at a time when the biggest international conflict is boiling on the territory of Ukraine”, says Vuksanovic.
The political scientist sees this affair as an expression of the fluctuating politics of Belgrade between different foreign centers of power. “On the one hand, this meant secret ammunition for Ukraine to satisfy the West, on the other hand concessions are made to Russia in Serbia. All this is part of the attitude of the elite of Belgrade, which fluctuates between different powerful foreign centers. For Serbia, however, the question arises, if at some point this policy will not be able to hold anymore, because one of the power centers will be very angry.”
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