| Daily: BIA preparing for overhaul |
| 4 July 2008 | 10:28
| Source:
Blic |
BELGRADE --
Daily Blic writes that the first task of the new security services (BIA) chief will be the arrest of all the Hague fugitives—first and foremost, Ratko Mladić.
The new BIA chief will also have to wring the changes in terms of personnel, replacing almost all of the current department heads.
“That post is under political patronage. The BIA director will have to do what he’s told by the party that put him there. His tasks are set by the person that puts him there, and since the DS is proposing him, and it is demanding Hague cooperation, which is Serbia’s only condition for EU membership, that means that this will be the director’s priority,” says former State Security Chief Goran Petrović.
He does not know who Saša Vukadinović, the leading contender for the position, is, but he is certain that the new director will be faced with a catastrophic situation within the agency—a ravaged directorate, with poorly-trained personnel.
Petrović says that outgoing BIA Chief Rade Bulatović is leaving his successor nothing but 100 or so operatives, whose only credentials are that they are all card-carrying members of the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS).
Political analyst Dejan Anastasijević says that if the changes are only effected in the personnel department, he does not expect any great progress to be made.
“We need a structural overhaul and a government policy in relation to the security sector, because the agency is barely more than a neglected criminal company. The arrival of a new director will mean nothing if other steps do not follow to put a stop to further abuses of authority. As long as parties continue to use BIA as a means of hanging on to power, nothing will change for the better, regardless of who is in charge. We need bottom-up reforms throughout the entire security sector,” Anastasijević believes.
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