...this time in Yugoslavia
Besides a huge information war which went on before, during and still goes on after the Kosovo war of 1999, the Yugoslav authorities decided to turn their heads toward Romania.
Last year, Yugoslavia threatened Romania with "repercussions", which is quite funny if you think about it. Yugoslavia, a poor country with an Air Force of 65 lowtech fighters, poorly trained soldiers and a sabbage civil war, threatens Romania, with a military three times as large, much better trained and equipped, and with an Air Force of over 600 fighters, most of which are more advanced than the Yugoslav's birds.
However, it is to be noticed that Yugoslavia threatened Hungary with an invasion, while in the case of Romania, it did not do that, but quite the other way around: it stated that Romania is planning an invasion of Yugoslavia. Which means that the Serb leaders did not completely disregard the large differences between the two countries, and still have enough rationality to realize who has the power to invade who.
Belgrade's paranoia comes from the whole series of NATO-Romanian military exercises which are taking place in Romania right now. What Belgrade's intelligence services did not notice is that those NATO-Romanian exercises have been taking place here since 1996, so they did not start now, all of a sudden, with the reason of preparing an invasion of the neighboring country.
Besides, it is at least weird that the Serb regime can even take such a scenario seriously, considering that ever since the Serb nomads invaded the Western part of the ancient Romanian state of Dacia (they are actually sitting on our teritorry), strangely enough, the Dacs/Romanians and the Serbs have always been trusted allies. The Serbs, which came to Eastern Romania 1,000 years ago, had their traditional enemy in the Croatians, the a traditional ally in Romania.
It is therefore a wonder that the Romanian authorities took that statement seriously and spent days and weeks trying to convince the dictatorial regime in Belgrade that Romania has absolutely no intention of "invading" anybody at all, it never did and it never will.

Copyright ©2000 by Sorin A Crasmarelu

1st of November 2000