Belgrade - Serbian President Boris Tadic on Tuesday sacked
the army's top general, Zdravko Ponos, ending a rift that shook the
defence system last week.
Tadic, who as president also serves as supreme commander of the
military, appointed General Miloje Miletic as new head of the general
staff, the president's cabinet said.
Ponos, 46, last week publicly criticized Defence Minister Dragan
Sutanovac, accusing his ministry in newspaper interviews of
incompetence and corruption.
Tadic announced his decision a day after the supreme defence
council met in a marathon six-hour session to discuss the Ponos-
Sutanovac row.
The council is the top security body comprising the president,
defence and interior ministers, the chief of the general staff and
directors of the three civil and military intelligence agencies.
Sutanovac, who dismissed the allegations by Ponos, is the deputy
chief in Tadic's Democratic Party, which leads the pro-European
ruling coalition.
Some newspapers speculated that the row was orchestrated within
the growing friction between Tadic and his deputy Sutanovac, who
recently criticized the direction in which the DS was steered.
Sutanovac blasted Tadic's loudly advertised reconciliation with
Slobodan Milosevic's Socialists party and the nomination of Mirko
Cvetkovic as prime minster after the May poll.
Since the election triumph over the extreme nationalists, Tadic's
political influence vastly exceeds the formal power carried by his
office and Sutanovac is widely seen as his strongest challenger.
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