Last October, on the Sinjajevina plateau in the mountains of northern Montenegro, a group of local activists huddled around a bonfire in the biting cold. Supported by ecologists, they were fighting to prevent the military from taking over this austere yet beautiful pastureland.
Milan Sekulović, who founded the Save Sinjajevina association in 2018, told us, ‘The last government wanted to use this area, around Lake Savina Voda, for military exercises and destroying obsolete munitions. The plan threatens around 50 family livestock farms when the number of smallholders is already falling because of a lack of government support, and investment in roads and electricity. We import 80% of our food, but we could develop livestock farming and self-sufficiency.’
The last administration, led by Milo Đukanović, who had been in power since the days of communist Yugoslavia, suffered a shock election defeat on 30 August 2020, but activists are still waiting for a firm commitment from the new government. It is underconsiderable external pressure: since 2017 the Montenegrin army has been part of NATO, whose secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg is equivocal. Last October he told journalists, ‘I’m... confident that there are ways to reconcile the need to protect nature and, at the same time, to exercise forces, which is important for all Allies’. It’s a sensitive issue because NATO bombed Montenegro, then still part of Serbia, during the Kosovo war in 1999. As well as smallholders and ecologists, it mobilises all who identify primarily as Serbs and object to the monopoly on power held for many years by those who identify as Montenegrin. (Some consider the identities to be very close, if not identical.)
Up on the Sinjajevina plateau, a giant in a cassock extracted himself from an all-terrain vehicle and walked briskly towards the activists, his beard blowing in the wind. It was Joanikije Mićović, bishop of Budimlje-Nikšić and number two in the Serbian Orthodox (...)
