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STRATFOR.com
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THE INTERNET SOURCE FOR GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE
If it’s in the news, it’s too late...
Serb Arrest Points to Coup Against Djindjic
March 16, 2002
Summary
Yugoslav military security service personnel arrested Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Momcilo Perisic March 14 on charges of espionage. The move was likely part of an effort by Serb nationalists to depose pro-Western Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. Djindjic will probably be able to foil the plot, if he can survive the weekend.
Image Credit: l'Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Analysis
On the evening of March 14, Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Momcilo Perisic was having dinner with John Neighbor, an official from the U.S. Embassy and two other Serb citizens. At some point Yugoslav military security service personnel arrested the four, and after 15 hours ultimately released Neighbor, although they denied him contact with the embassy during his incarceration.
The U.S. State Department, "shocked and outraged and … protesting like hell" according to a spokesman, lambasted Belgrade for its treatment of U.S. personnel, especially as Neighbor was at one point reportedly held with a plastic bad over his head. Shortly thereafter, a military court in Belgrade announced that Perisic had been detained on charges of espionage and revealing military secrets.
STRATFOR sources in Belgrade report that the charges ring true. They contend that Perisic has been a U.S. contact for at least the past three years, and has proven instrumental in keeping Washington abreast of what the various players in the Yugoslav government and army are up to. It is highly likely that some of the information he passed to the United States also proved useful to prosecutors in the war crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
(The Rest of the Story)
(c) 2001 Stratfor, Inc.
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Dan
Serb Arrest Points to Coup Against Djindjic . . .