Mercenaries in the Former Yugoslavia

This paper will discuss the involvement of mercenaries, especially Russian mercenaries, in the civil war in the former territories of Yugoslavia. The first part of the paper will describe the experience of the mercenaries fighting on the side of the Bosnian Muslims. The second part of the paper will describe the experience of the Russian mercenaries fighting with the Bosnian Serbs.

Mercenaries are a feature in any civil war, where one or both sides are willing to pay for military service and are not particular about where all of their soldiers come from. Soldiers of fortune are particularly attracted to conflicts where strict military discipline is not an attribute of the armies involved. In these situations, they are not closely supervised and are allowed to enjoy the ancient fringe benefits of warfare: pillage, and plunder. Such benefits are very accessible in chaotic settings, such as Bosnia. Although the Serbs inherited the trappings of the former Yugoslav army, organization and discipline quickly broke down, as Croat and Muslim elements in the military defected or were purged. In addition, the Bosnian Serbs who are engaged in most of the fighting do not belong to the Serbian army, but are led by their own warlords. Organization and discipline depend upon the whims of their leaders and there is no single Bosnian Serb leadership overseeing all of the Bosnian Serb military forces.

There are mercenaries fighting on all sides of

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ussian volunteers were fighting for "a purely symbolic wage" and that they were not motivated by money. They reportedly told the reporter that the Russian interests lay with the Serbs and that the world was wrong in condemning the Serbs for their "just struggle" (Choosing Sides, 1993, May). Other observers have also asserted that Russian volunteers are being recruited largely on the basis of nationalistic and racial feelings. Many of them, according to these accounts, have been attracted to the ultra-nationalist groups, who assert that the Serbs are engaged in a fight against the racially "inferior" Muslims to prevent the conversion Eastern Europe to Islam. This imparts a traditional spin on the Balkans conflict, portraying the civil war in the former Yugoslavia as part of the centuries-long struggle between the Orthodox Slavs and the Muslim "Turks." The recruitment process began early in the war and hundreds have since attended training camps sponsored by various nationalist groups (Alexiev, 1993, September 12). What is most worrisome to the Russian observers who claim that the Russian mercenaries are motivated by ideology rather than money is that the groups sponsoring these mercenaries are uninterested in the outcome of t

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