Regardless of whether you were born in Vienna or currently live and work in Rotterdam, if you are a citizen of Serbia and belong to the category of men who will be conscripted, you will be issued a call to serve mandatory military service! However, there are certain exceptions for the diaspora that can be used to avoid mandatory military service in Serbia.
Mandatory military service, which was suspended in 2011, is set to return to Serbia next September, as announced, and the first generation of recruits, born in 2006, will primarily be those young men who turn 18 this year, followed by 19-year-olds and those in the age groups that previously and most often went to barracks, both during the time of the Yugoslav People’s Army and while mandatory military service existed in the Army of Yugoslavia, or the Serbian Army.
Calls to serve, which will last 75 days, including 60 days of training and the remaining days of exercise, will be sent to all adult males aged 18 to 27 or even 30, but the upper age limit for future recruits will be known when the state parliament adopts the necessary law.
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Calls for military service also await men in the diaspora
Military service is therefore a legal obligation for all adult males in Serbia, but the question arises about those who live outside the borders of Serbia, or that population in the diaspora?
From a legal standpoint, the answer to this question is very clear – every citizen of the Republic of Serbia, if they belong to the age category of men who will be covered by that legal obligation, will receive a call to serve in the military, regardless of whether they currently live, for example, in Kruševac or Stuttgart in Germany.
“Every citizen of the Republic of Serbia of those specific years becomes a conscript, which means that this legal obligation applies to all our citizens, regardless of where they currently live. If we consider how it was before, or how our citizens whose residence was abroad were called up, I assume that our citizens will now also receive invitations through diplomatic and consular missions and according to the law they must respond to the call for military service like any other citizen of Serbia,” Zoran Dragišić, a professor at the Faculty of Security, explains for “Blic”.
For whom does this legal obligation not apply?
However, there are exceptions to this rule.
“The obligation to respond does not apply to those who also have citizenship of countries where there is no mandatory military service, and then they can invoke the citizenship of that country and have the right not to serve in the military in Serbia either. But if they have citizenship of a country where there is mandatory military service, then they have the option to choose – either to serve in the military in that country or in Serbia. Regardless, military service served in any country is considered completed military service here as well,” Dragišić specifies.
Our interlocutor points out that it is difficult to say how many potential conscripts from the diaspora there are, and as for the recruits who are in Serbia, he hopes that experts from the General Staff of the Serbian Army “have very clear figures on how many people they can count on to go through the future legal obligation of military training.”
Dragišić adds that there are many young people in our country who also have Croatian citizenship, where mandatory military service has also been introduced, but he also expects that most of them will choose Serbia as the country where they will have to serve in the military.
In addition to patriotism, the authority of the state is also important
Besides the feeling of patriotism that should be one of the main motives for serving in the military, both for young men who live here and for those in the diaspora, as military analyst Aleksandar Radić has already pointed out, the authority of the state is crucial when calling for military service.
“When it comes to a legal obligation, there is no desire there, you carry out the decision from word to deed. But that is precisely the question of all questions – whether the state of Serbia has a strong enough authority to force a young man to go to military service. Because we are talking about an obligation that was established with difficulty and when military service was introduced, even during the time of the industrial revolution. And when mandatory military service was suspended in Serbia on January 1, 2011, one mechanism was abolished that will now be difficult to repeat,” Radić told “Blic”.
Our interlocutors remain of the opinion that conscientious objection, as a constitutional right of every citizen of Serbia, will remain a key problem for the implementation of mandatory military service, given that in the last generation that had the obligation to serve in the military almost 14 years ago, the invocation of conscientious objection was represented in a huge percentage.
On the other hand, however, the Chief of the General Staff of the Serbian Army, General Milan Mojsilović, recently said that conscientious objection as a constitutional category “cannot be ignored”, but also that there are mechanisms that can still “take” those who invoke conscientious objection to the barracks.
“There are occupations and specialties in the military that do not require and for which you do not have to be trained to hold a gun. But even those recruits will be in training. Those who would not be trained to shoot would be in military service for a period of 155 days. There is no difference between religious and national elements in the military, so you can also be a firefighter in the military,” Mojsilović said.
Let us remind you that mandatory military service also exists in countries such as Greece, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Russia, and Turkey…
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Source: Blic
Photo: Tanjug