By Gordon N. Bardos* - Exclusive
Wednesday, December 20th, 2017 @ 7:13PM
For those who remember the sad spectacle of Colin Powell at the UN Security Council, promoting bogus intelligence alleging Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD,) recent statements by American officials such as vice-president Mike Pence and Senator John McCain about an alleged “Russian-backed-coup attempt” in Montenegro inevitably bring to mind Marx’s famous observation in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
Over the past few months, Pence, McCain along with several foreign policy “experts” and media pundits have been promoting a story about an alleged Russian-backed coup plot in Montenegro. While this allegation is on a different scale of Saddam’s alleged WMD, both incidents show the dangerous degree to which individuals (both foreign and domestic) are willing and able to deceive American gullible policymakers and the general public to achieve their particular objectives.
Hardliners in Washington argue that the fact that Russia tried to attack democratic Montenegro means we need to get tougher with Moscow. But what if Montenegro is not really a democracy and Russia didn’t try to attack it? The obvious point here is that mistaken understandings of what is really happening are driving us into an even deeper and more dangerous New Cold War while foreclosing potential opportunities for constructive engagement with an important regional power.
Speaking on the floor of the US Senate in June 2017, John McCain laid out the standard narrative of the events surrounding the alleged Russian-backed coup attempt in Montenegro:
perhaps the most disturbing indication of how far Vladimir Putin is willing to go to advance his dark and dangerous view of the world is what happened in October 2016 in the small Balkan country of Montenegro, when Russian intelligence operatives, in league with Serbian nationalists and others, attempted to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Montenegro and murder its prime minister on the country’s Election Day.[i]
A serious examination of the details of this allegation suggests something quite different took place. What should be worrisome for anyone concerned about how American foreign policy is conceptualized and formulated, is how and why leading US officials repeatedly accept and endorse the flimsiest of stories.
The Backdrop
Any determination of what might have happened in Montenegro on Election Day, October 16, 2016, has to take into account the country’s recent history; specifically, the nature of the regime, which has held power in the tiny Balkan country for decades.
Since 1989 Montenegro’s de facto ruler for twenty-five years has been Milo Djukanovic, whom a leading expert on Montenegro, Srdja Pavlovic, has described as “the longest ruling former communist in Eastern Europe.”[ii] In a unique feat in Eastern Europe, Djukanovic’s Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS, the renamed former League of Communists of Montenegro) has been in power continuously since 1945. From 1989, until he resigned 10 days after he failed to secure a majority in the 2016 elections, Djukanovic has served six terms as prime minister, and one as president.
Maintaining power for so long has depended on a keen sense for shifting political winds (foreign and domestic), and having a deft touch when it comes to controlling the levers of power in this small country. It has also required an abundant level of corruption and electoral fraud.
The political scientist Moises Naim, for instance, has defined Montenegro as a “mafia state” in which:
Government officials enrich themselves and their families and friends while exploiting the money, muscle, political influence, and global connections to criminal syndicates to cement and expand their own power . . . In a mafia state, high government officials actually become integral players in, if not the leaders of, criminal enterprises, and the defense and promotion of those enterprises become official priorities . . . [i]n mafia states, the national interest and the interests of organized crime are now inextricably intertwined.[iii]
For instance, one of Montenegro’s largest banks, Prva Banka (“First Bank”), owned by Djukanovic’s brother and sister, also happens to be the favored bank of many prominent Balkan criminals and drug lords.[iv]
In 2015, Djukanovic himself was named “Man of the Year in Organized Crime” by an international anti-corruption watchdog group. The announcement noted, “. . . this as a lifetime achievement award . . . Nobody outside of Putin has run a state that relies so heavily on corruption, organized crime and dirty politics. It is truly and thoroughly rotten to the core.”[v] None of this, however, prevented Djukanovic from getting the official U.S. stamp of approval by being invited to the White House in April 2014.
The Djukanovic regime has never taken elections for granted. Indeed, the alleged October 2016 Russian-backed coup attempt is at least the third “attack on the state” that has happened in Montenegro on the eve of elections in recent years. For instance, in 1997, during a second round of presidential elections between Djukanovic and a former political rival, Montenegrin security forces arrested 11 people that have “infiltrated from Belgrade and Novi Sad.” They were accused of preparing a terrorist attack. Djukanovic won the runoff, but it would take five years for the Montenegrin Supreme Court to clear those arrested of any criminal responsibility.[vi]
Similarly, on the eve of parliamentary elections in September 2006, Montenegrin security services “uncovered” another budding terrorist plot code-named “Eagle’s Flight” that was allegedly planned by a group of seventeen ethnic Albanians. Pro-forma court proceedings resulted in the group being sentenced to a total of 51 years in prison; Several of the accused, however, went on to sue Montenegro before the European Court of Human Rights, alleging that while in custody they had been tortured and starved to extort their confessions.[vii]
Clearly, the Djukanovic regime has developed a well-honed technique for manipulating the levers of power to maintain control over the country. In the past couple of years, however, defections from his own ruling coalition and a more organized united opposition have begun to threaten Djukanovic’s decades-long grip on power. This was most evident in Montenegro’s widespread popular demonstrations in 2015, in which the political opposition was able to bring thousands of people onto to the streets for weeks-long demonstrations. Faced with such unprecedented opposition, Djukanovic realized that the outcome of the October 2016 elections could not be taken for granted.
October 2016: Coup or Hoax?
Extra help was thus needed to ensure victory in Montenegro’s 2016 elections, and it came in the form of what has become internationally known as a ‘Russian-backed coup attempt.’
According to the Montenegrin Special State Prosecutor, Milivoje Katnic, a few days before the elections he uncovered “an organized criminal group” that was planning on committing – in Katnic’s own words – an “unprecedented horror” on the streets of the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica, and that Montenegro would have been “shrouded in black as never in its history.” According to Katnic, several teams composed of dozens of people were supposed to wreak havoc in various cities in Montenegro, fire on crowds, attack military units, overthrow the government, and ultimately assassinate the prime minister. Some of these units, according to Katnic, were composed of former soldiers and police officers, although only one of the teams was ultimately identified.
Curiously, having discovered such a dangerous, nation-wide plot, which according to Katnic involved up to 500 people (many of which were unidentified and at large),[viii] Katnićthen kept quite. He did not inform the interior minister, Goran Danilovic (responsible for police forces), or the defense minister, Milica Pejanovic-Djurisic (whose military units were allegedly going to be attacked), nor the country’s Council for National Security about such an unprecedented threat to the country. Even the target of the plot, Djukanovic himself, said he only found out about the alleged affair from media reports.
This point deserves further examination. In comparative terms, populations, 500 people in Montenegro are the equivalent of 250,000 in the U.S. Can you imagine that a special prosecutor in the U.S. claiming that he or she has uncovered a foreign-backed conspiracy involving 250,000 people who were planning to kill people across the country, attack military units, occupy Congress and assassinate the president—but telling anyone about it? There would be only two logical explanations for this sort of behavior. Either the special prosecutor is a dangerously incompetent and treasonous buffoon or the story is a fabricated hoax and there never was any real threat, to begin with.
As Interior Minister Danilovic himself noted somewhat incredulously in the days after the alleged coup attempt was made public “There has not been a meeting of the government or of the Council for National Security, the state president has said that he does not want to comment, the prime minister said that he does not know anything about it or that he does not have enough information . . . I have to admit that this is a very specific ‘coup d’etat’.”[ix]
Furthermore, despite the fact that Katnic alleged that the plot was directed from neighboring Serbia, he did not inform his Serbian counterparts of this information or request their cooperation to disrupt the conspiracy. Even more curiously, despite the fact Katnic was apparently running a covert intelligence operation in a neighboring, sovereign country—carrying out surveillance of “coup plotters,” directing their actions, acquiring and transporting weapons across Serbian territory, etc., there
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