By World BEYOND War, March 1, 2023
Our ongoing campaign to protect the mountains of Sinjajevina from a military training ground is here: https://worldbeyondwar.org/sinjajevina
We want to call your attention to two new related publications.
This one is mostly beautiful photos: “Sinjajevina, the threatened paradise: the shadow of a NATO firing range looms over an oasis of biodiversity.”
This one is in Spanish and has to be purchased: “Sinjajevina: una destrucción ecocultural en el contexto de la adhesión de Montenegro a la Europa verde.” Here’s a summary: The Sinjajevina-Durmitor massif in northern Montenegro is one of the largest mountain pastures in Europe, with a unique biodiversity that has co-evolved with local pastoralism over millennia. In 2019, only two years after its accession to NATO, Montenegro inaugurated a military training range in Sinjajevina with USA, Italy, Austria, Slovenia, and North Macedonia troops, without any public environmental, socio-economic, or health impact study, against the affected populations and a majority of the country’s public opinion, as well as against more than 20,000 signatures, and that reached in 2020 to leave the militarization project in standby until today. In fact, the Balkan country is also in the process of joining the European Union and is extolling its filiation with the new European Green Deal, which at the same time contravenes what it is doing in Sinjajevina. Thus, the EU and the current accession process seem for the moment to be the best guarantor of the present brake on the military project, while the case of Sinjajevina becomes a perfect example of the strength that affected local communities can take by connecting nationally and internationally.
