DW: Antonov’s “secrets” and the Serbian arms lobby

Serbian weapons were sold by an unidentified dealer and loaded onto a Ukrainian plane to be flown to Pakistan, but never reached their destination as the plane went down and crashed in northern Greece. All this sounds like a movie thriller, but it happened in reality. The Ukrainian Antonov aircraft had taken off on July 16 from Nis, in southern Serbia, carrying 11.5 tons of Serbian-made mortars and grenades. The cargo is believed to have been sold by Slobodan Tesic, one of the biggest arms dealers in the Balkans, who has faced US sanctions for years.

The crash of the plane does not only cause diplomatic friction between Greece (which apparently did not know the dangerousness of the cargo) and Serbia or Ukraine. It also raises many questions about Serbia’s powerful arms industry, which has been accused of corruption and illegal exports. Serbia is one of the largest arms producers in Central and Southeastern Europe, a tradition that dates back to the time of unified Yugoslavia. It produces and exports everything from guns and mines to artillery systems, radars, electronic equipment, armored vehicles and fighter aircraft. The Serbian Ministry of Defense estimates the value of arms exports for 2020 at $600 million, or 3% of Serbia’s total exports. However, there is no absolutely reliable evidence.

Loads for crisis centers around the world

The main buyers of Serbian weapons and weapon systems are the United Arab Emirates, Cyprus, the USA, Bulgaria and Saudi Arabia. But the Serbian arms lobby has clients all over the world, points out Vuk Vuksanovic, a political scientist and fellow at the Center for Security Policy (BCBP) in Belgrade. “The Serbian state does not want to lose a single dinar from these exports,” he says. “A red line is, however, subjecting an export destination to United Nations sanctions or waging war on its territory.”

But Vuksanovic emphasizes that Serbia “does not always follow these rules”. In the past ten years, the country had exported weapons to war or crisis hotspots, which were subject to an arms embargo. In 2019, it was revealed that Serbian weapons had reached the hands of armed Islamists in Yemen, via Saudi Arabia. In 2020, the Azerbaijani military had found in Nagorno-Karabakh Serbian weapons sold to Armenia. In February, a Serbian investigative journalism network discovered that Serbian weapons had been delivered to Myanmar, even after a military junta was imposed in the country in February 2021.

A name that is constantly repeated

Slobodan Tesic’s name comes up every now and then when talking about illegal Serbian arms exports. The 64-year-old has been active in the arms trade in the Balkans for decades. From 2003 to 2013 his name was on the US sanctions list due to illegal exports to Libya. In 2017, new sanctions against Tesic came into force, which are still in effect today and include, among other things, an entry ban and seizure of his assets in the US. There, Tesic is officially described as “the biggest arms and ammunition dealer in the Balkans”.

At the same time, his name is at the center of several corruption cases in the Serbian arms industry, among them the so-called “Krušić case”, which came to light in the fall of 2019. Companies owned by this businessman are alleged to have bought weapons (shells, mines, missiles) at preferential prices, in order to resell them at high prices abroad, even though the state enterprise Jugoimport-SDPR would theoretically be responsible for the implementation of this transaction.

Financier of the ruling party?

These transactions of state-owned enterprises with private counterparts are said to have occasionally flowed into the coffers of President Aleksandar Vucic’s ruling Progressive Party (SNS). Tesic is considered one of the main financiers of SNS. According to Serbian media, he has a diplomatic passport. In similar transactions in the past, the father of the current Minister of Defense, Nebojša Stefanović, was involved. Both Vucic and Stefanovic have been denying the allegations for years. Unsurprisingly, Testic’s name has also been heard in recent days as he is said to be behind the company Valir, which officially launched the arms sales to Bangladesh. Tesic himself never comments on the accusations that are occasionally leveled against him.

The end of opportunistic politics?

There are even scenarios, that the weapons of the Ukrainian Antonov were probably not intended for Bangladesh, but for Ukraine itself – something which, however, is denied by both the Minister of Defense Sevros Stefanovitch and the Ukrainian company Meridian, which owned the Antonov . For his part, political scientist Vuk Vuksanovic believes that there are still open questions. “Public opinion should get an answer to the question, why a Ukrainian aircraft is carrying Serbian weapons, at a time when the biggest international conflict of our time is raging on Ukrainian soil,” says Vuksanovic.

In his opinion, the case of “Antonov” is a typical example of the opportunistic politics of Belgrade, which meanders between different centers of power. “On the one hand secret arms supplies for Ukraine, on the other hand concessions against Russia in Serbia itself,” says Vuksanovic. “All these could be examples of the behavior of an elite in Belgrade, which balances between different centers of power, with the aim of extracting the respective price. The question for Serbia is, will this policy collapse, should it anger one of these power centers too much.”

DW – Ivica Petrovich, Keno Versek/Yiannis Papadimitriou

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