The Death of Yugoslavia TV - BBC News online - Misha Glenny -
The conquering armies drove a new wave of Serbian refugees into Serbia and Montenegro. The Death of Yugoslavia VI: Pax Americana, BBC 1996
Montenegro emerged as a sovereign state after just over 55% of the population opted for independence in a May 2006 referendum.
The vote heralded the end of the former Union of Serbia and Montenegro – itself created only three years earlier out of the remnant of the former Yugoslavia.
The EU-brokered deal forming it was intended to stabilise the region by settling Montenegrin demands for independence from Serbia and preventing further changes to Balkan borders. BBC News online article
Throughout most of the 1990s Djukanovic’s country, Montenegro, with a population of just 600,000 (regarded by the rest of the Balkans as a legendary indolent people), was the focal point of a multi-billion-dollar criminal industry that generated income from America through the Middle East, Central Asia, the Maghreb, the Balkans and Western Europe.
Week after week, several tons of illegal cigarette shipments would land at the country's two main airports. Misha Glenny, McMafia
Washington was now telling him that if he wanted closer relations with NATO and the EU, it was time to get out of the cigarette business. ibid.
Montenegro’s entanglement with the mob was the rule, not the exception. More than in any other communist country, politics and organised crime were tightly intertwined throughout the former Yugoslavia as it descended into the most frightful fratricidal civil war at the beginning of the 1990s. Organised crime controlled dictators, opposition politicians, liberals, nationalists and democrats alike. ibid.