Journalists Matej Šurc and Blaž Zgaga spent
more than three years investigating and analyzing more than 6000 pages of
declassified official documents on the trade of arms in Slovenia during the
Yugoslav Wars. They obtained the documents through the Slovene Freedom of
Information Act. Journalists from six other countries cooperated in cross-border
investigation. The research was co-financed by a Journalismfund.eu research
grant. The findings of the investigation are chronicled in the trilogy In
the Name of the State, of which the last volume has now been completed. The
first volume, published in June 2011, focused on the sale of arms and ammunition
from the former Yugoslav People’s Army’s warehouses, which were seized during a
ten-day military conflict in Slovenia in 1991. It was called ‘Odprodaja’ or
Sell. The second volume, ‘Preprodaja’ or Resell, appeared in
October 2011 and dealt with the purchase of arms abroad and subsequent resale to
Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the UN arms embargo. The third and
final volume, ‘Prikrivanje’ or Cover-up, describes how the arms
smugglers managed to keep their activities largely concealed for the last twenty
years. It starts by bringing to light the conflicts between the Ministry of
Defense and the Ministry of Interior after the Brnik scandal, in which 460 tons
of arms, designated for resale in Bosnia and Herzegovina, arrived to Slovenia
only to be stored at Brnik airport for months due to problems with the intended
resale. Afterwards, the book examines the three parliamentary inquiries on the
arms trades that were initiated over the years and the intrigues and obstacles
that politicians put up to thwart them. The last of these parliamentary
inquiries was triggered by the biggest arms deal in the history of Slovenia – a
278 million EUR purchase of the Finnish armored vehicles Patria that was
concluded in 2006. The Patria case is under investigation in Finland, Austria
and Slovenia. Two dozens of suspects are on trial for bribery and industrial
espionage, one of them being the former and current Prime Minister of Slovenia,
former chairperson of the Council of the European Union in the first half of
2008. With the publication of this third volume of the trilogy, the research
project has reached its final stages as one of the most significant
investigations in Slovene history. It uncovered some of the country’s hidden
chapters had been kept under veil the past two decades.
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