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Former JNA general advisor to coalition forces in Iraq, says Belgrade daily

BELGRADE, March 13 (Hina) - Veljko Kadijevic, a retired general of the former Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), former Yugoslav defence minister and cadet of the US military academy at West Point, has been hired as an ad hoc advisor by the US-led coalition forces in Iraq, the Belgrade-based Blic daily reported on Tuesday.
BELGRADE, March 13 (Hina) - Veljko Kadijevic, a retired general of the former Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), former Yugoslav defence minister and cadet of the US military academy at West Point, has been hired as an ad hoc advisor by the US-led coalition forces in Iraq, the Belgrade-based Blic daily reported on Tuesday.

Kadijevic does not have a permanent office at the Pentagon, a source for the daily close to the Military Security Agency (BIA) said.

"The information he is providing is not of crucial importance. Nevertheless, that type of services can bring an income of up to 1.5 million euros," the daily reports.

The daily claims that Kadijevic has been living in Florida since 2003 and that he was expected to help the coalition forces find former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's secret military bunkers in exchange for immunity and protection against possible prosecution by the Hague war crimes tribunal, the German news agency Dpa reported earlier.

The source for the Belgrade daily claims, however, that the Hague tribunal was not interested in Kadijevic and that he did not need asylum in any country.

The daily also says that Kadijevic has never commented on reports of his cooperation with the Pentagon. Since he moved to Florida, he apparently has not visited Serbia nor has he explained the reason for leaving the country.

"I haven't heard of or seen him since the 1990s. Nobody in the circles I move in knows where he is or why he left," Branko Krga, former Chief-of-Staff of the Army of Serbia and Montenegro said.

Krga also said that Kadijevic was never said to be America's man although in the 1960s he was one of the six army men former Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito chose to attend West Point.

Blic reports that Kadijevic did not prove himself a great military strategist while he held the office of the federal defence minister at the start of the war in Yugoslavia and that many were wondering why the Hague tribunal did not call him to account over the JNA's operations in Vukovar and Dubrovnik.

Hague tribunal indictee Veselin Sljivancanin used to be Kadijevic's body guard and in 1991 he was directly subordinated to Kadijevic on the Vukovar battlefield. At the end of the three-month siege of Vukovar, Kadijevic promoted Sljivancanin to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, Blic reports.

A month later Kadijevic resigned, citing illness as the reason.

Blic also recalls media reports about Kadijevic's meeting with a US delegation in late December 1991. Congressman Jimmy Moody and military attache Richard Herring privately visited Kadijevic at the headquarters of the National Defence Secretariat at the time. Moody was an influential member of Congress who spoke Serbian and used to work in the US Embassy in Belgrade in the 1980s.

Retired general Ninoslav Krstic told Blic it was possible that Kadijevic "had been recruited in some way" at the time and that this was used at some moment before and during the war in Iraq.

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