Environment Energy Mining Watch SEE|News|The inhabitants of the Montenegrin Sinjajevina protect the mountain from the army

The inhabitants of the Montenegrin Sinjajevina protect the mountain from the army

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Last year, the Government of Montenegro determined 7.5 thousand hectares for the purposes of the military range, which belong to the municipalities of Savnik, Kolasin and Mojkovac, in the peripheral zone of the landscape proposed for the Natura 2000 area and nature park. Resistance to the announced militarization of the second largest pasture in Europe has been going on for three years, and it intensified in mid-October, when local cattle breeders complained about the order of the Ministry of Defense to withdraw from the mountain.

The Montenegrin mountain Sinjajevina has been economically defended by its dependents for weeks with their own bodies. While support comes from expected allies, the authorities resort to common and destructive spins.

The Ministry of Defence claims that they have been looking for a suitable location in state ownership for years, and that the exercises will not endanger the environment or agricultural activities. Citizens are required to recognize the military as a guarantor of security from external enemies and peacetime disasters, and a strategic partner, who will improve local traffic infrastructure, making the mountain more accessible.

Environmental activists and locals, on the contrary, point out that the army does not have any evidence that artillery exercises would not harm the environment. The Law on Environmental Impact Assessment, unfortunately, does not require impact studies to accompany defense projects. The officers promise that an impact assessment will be done, but only later, when irreparable damage may be done to nature.

The attitude of the representatives of the Ministry of Defense is incomprehensible for activists and locals, and even somewhat offensive, as a repeated attempt to give military activities priority in relation to life-giving everyday life. The army’s claim that it is a protector against an external enemy sounds a bit unrealistic in the context of the fact that the Montenegrin army is small and poorly equipped; and the fact that Montenegro is a NATO member aimed at joining the European Union encourages citizens to wonder who would attack it at all.

This year, the people from katun were astonished by the “creativity” of the timing for the hurdle and the chaotically announced military exercise. “Well people can’t just pack in two knit bags and leave home the same day! For the uninformed: life in the katun is not an extended summer vacation “, announced Sonja Dragovic, an urban theorist from Sinjajevina, on social networks. Dragovic explained that the mountain huts are currently full of tubs and bags of cheese and crust, collected throughout the summer, which must not be transferred to the villages too soon, because it will spoil: “And it must not spoil, it should (for the most part) sold, so that the family would have something to survive the winter. Livestock farmers who keep sheep and goats in this period negotiate and wait for the purchase of lambs, which must be organized while the herds are still on the mountain. This is because there is not enough space in the village for the whole herd, nor should there be “, added Dragovic, wondering how it is possible that the army of the state” which is all from the mountains “knows nothing about the rhythm of life on them.

Mountaineer Mileva Gara Jovanovic explained similarly to the representatives of the Montenegrin General Staff in a television debate on this topic the other day. All apologizing to the audience for having only four grades of primary school, Gara presented an argument that the scholars could only envy. The heroine of the fight for Sinjajevina reiterated that the mountain whose treasures enabled her to educate her six children is not a wasteland, as the army declares it, but a landscape that many may have to, and may simply want to turn around in the coming period.

Jovanovic managed to problematize the strategic attitude of Montenegro towards agriculture and exports in just a few sentences, wondering why there are so few cattle breeders in Montenegro today, and meat is imported. According to the fighters for Sinjajevina, the investment in infrastructure should not be conditioned by the presence of the army.

The Coalition for Sustainable Development (KOR) sued Predrag Boskovic, the outgoing Minister of Defense, to the Supreme State Prosecutor’s Office for violating the Constitution and preparing several criminal acts in the field of environmental protection. Several environmental organizations from the region symbolically joined the activities of the KOR. The defense was also supported by URA, one of the coalition partners in the new government and a member of Green Europe. Its president, Dritan Abazovic, took part in the guards.

At the moment, citizens have many reasons to distrust the current authorities, incredibly talented in launching projects that are devastating to the economy and the environment at the same time, and the weight of existential problems pressing Montenegro is too much to ignore or successfully spin this winter.

Viewed extremely practically and on the ground, a military exercise should be prevented that would frustrate hundreds of families from the impoverished Montenegrin north from surviving the winter and prevent others from returning to traditional agriculture, and perhaps new-old forms of community such as common goods. The government cannot do that yet – because it is not consolidated. At such a moment, the most reasonable are those who behave extremely irrationally according to the criteria of this selfish capitalist cataclysm – local residents and activists who are still scurrying mortar pipes to the top of the ice.

Source: bilten.org

 

 

 

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