almanac on security sector oversight in the Western Balkans

adical SSR, but also the main threat to the power and lives of democratisation
agents in Serbia. 202
In the second half of the 1990s, while Milošević was preoccupied with Kosovo and
with preserving his power, Montenegro was laying foundations for its future independence.
This was the objective that Milo Đukanović had in mind when he started
to gradually transform the local police forces into an internal army meant to prevent
potential military intervention by Belgrade (Radević and Raičević, 2011, p.16).
In conclusion, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro got on the reform track no sooner than
2000, by which time Albania and Macedonia, together with Bosnia and Herzegovina
(after it was designated a protectorate of the international community following the
1996 Dayton Agreement), had already started with its reforms. Kosovo joined the
reform track later, and its security institutions were shaped under the patronage of
external actors after 1999. Regardless of timing, the normalisation and stabilisation
phase began in all these countries, during which legal, systemic and political conditions
were set for the reform of inherited state security institutions.
4 . Patterns of democratic accountability of statutory
security actors
The analysis now turns towards existing patterns of control and oversight of security
actors in the countries of the Western Balkans, and on the methods for the
establishment of their accountability. The findings of the case studies in the chapters
above suggest that state security actors in the Western Balkan countries are
structured in accordance with democratic principles of developed societies. The
Western Balkan countries have amended old and/or adopted new constitutional
and legal solutions. It is also evident that they are rapidly abandoning state-centric
security concepts. In other words, they are gradually adopting the concept of
security as a public good, and accordingly shaping the security sector in a holistic
manner. Consequently, the sector’s structure has been considerably modified in
the past ten years, though to a different extent in each individual country. Nevertheless,
each sector now has a very diverse and complex structure, as some public
administrative bodies have been added to the traditional security forces (Annex,
Table 2).
Structural changes are also the result of a simultaneous diversification and specialisation
of the old and emerging security institutions. These trends were spurred by
radical changes of the security context on global, regional and national levels in
the past twenty years. In particular, they were spurred by the emergence of a new
political and security configuration on all levels, which gave rise to the develop-
202 The undeniable proof is the assassination of the Prime Minister Đinđić (2003), committed by members
of the secret service and criminal formations.
222