PRVOSLAV DAVINIC

I arrived in Stockholm on 7 January 1968 to become one of the 'early birds' at SIPRI. It was a sunny winter day, one of the many I experienced during the subsequent five years. I recall this date clearly. For the Serbs, who belong mainly to the Eastern Orthodox Religion, it was Christmas day. I was rather excited with this new challenge in my professional life, so much so that it took me one whole day to finally grasp the realities of winter life in Sweden.

From Arlanda airport I was taken to my temporary residence at the Wenner-Gren Center. A few hours later I went to a staff party given by the Director, Robert Neild, at his home. One of the questions Robert asked me was about the weather in Belgrade. I said that it was very pleasant that morning, with the temperature reaching an unusual 12 degrees. He said that it was 23 degrees in Stockholm. It was only the following morning, when the feeling of my personal excitement had reached a 'normal' level, that I realized I was talking about 'plus' and he was talking about 'minus' degrees. The difference in temperature that I experienced in one day without noticing it was, in fact, a full 35 degrees Celsius!

I realized quickly, however, that excitement was an operative word for the work at SIPRI. It represented a novel approach to dealing with the cold war era's problems of peace and security, with staff coming from countries belonging to all three political groups-East, West and non-aligned. These were predominantly young, eager, enthusiastic and able individuals who saw the SIPRI projects not only as personal challenges but also as of significant political importance for the international community in general.

We all felt that we had been given a unique opportunity to participate in making history and we were motivated to do our best. Some of those young enthusiasts later became famous worldwide and recognized authorities in their professional fields.

The main assignment I was given was to join the team working on the subject of the international arms trade, which a few years later resulted in the publication of The Arms Trade with the Third World, considered by many as the landmark work of research in this sensitive, secretive area of international relations.

The team was headed by an experienced and hard-working person, Frank Blackaby, who combined to perfection a great ability to lead with a firm hand and at the same time to instil in his colleagues a sense of their own importance and independence in forming their views. Other members of the team were much younger and he had infinite patience to give us all the time we needed to elaborate (what we considered as) exciting new ideas and to present the results of our research efforts with conviction. The team included Mary Kaldor, Eva Grenbäck, Signe Landgren and me.

I recall one of Frank's particular features, which in the beginning I and others did not quite know how to take. When we reported to him, Frank would often look somewhere in the distance and begin to whistle very quietly-so quietly, in fact, that it did not disturb what was going on but did make us feel that we had lost him somewhere in the course of the conversation. It turned out not to be true. On the contrary, it was his way of focusing fully on the subject in order to separate our 'enthusiasm' from undisputable facts and to lead us to the most probable conclusions, in an area where very little was known as established fact.

Frank Blackaby made sure that his team of young researchers had their 'feet on the ground'. Back: Hari Naidu, Frank Blackaby, Gunnel von Döbeln (who helped establish SIPRI's outstanding library) and Prvoslav Davinic. Front: Eva Grenbäck and Randy Forsberg

This was the main reason both for Frank, as the team leader, and us young researchers to stay firmly with our feet on the ground. There was an apparent lack of reliable sources of information to establish the database we needed in order to draw comparisons and conclusions about this most secretive area of relations between arms suppliers and recipients, in a world that was sharply divided politically, economically and culturally and, most importantly, grouped in two competing military alliances.

There was not much choice but to subscribe to as many sources of public information as possible, such as professional magazines, journals, periodicals, newspapers, books and so on. Inconsistencies and discrepancies in the available information regarding the number of weapons, their types, capabilities and delivery dates represented our most serious problem and challenge. Without establishing a meaningful database, our analyses would not be convincing when it came to assessing the eventual consequences of arms flows to various parts of the developing world. It was relatively easy to describe the overall political considerations motivating both suppliers and recipients to enter into various arms deals and to relate them to analyses of the security situation in the given region. But our ambition was also to determine whether or not these supplies, in addition to serving legitimate security needs, might also cause-inter alia because of the secrecy that surrounded them-an action-reaction phenomenon resulting in a spiralling arms race. At the time, the Middle East was a particular concern for politicians, diplomats, military, analysts and researchers alike; and the public at large was also concerned with the rising Arab-Israeli tensions.

Thanks to the extraordinary work and professionalism of the library and press-clipping staff, the arms trade team regularly received solidly prepared material. It required a very responsible approach and concentrated effort to determine what was credible information and discard deliberately misleading and propaganda-motivated reports. After months of sifting through all sorts of sources, the team gained considerable experience in rating the reliability of those sources and became able to quickly establish worksheets arranged by countries, types of weapons, their quantities and terms of sale (commercial sales, grants, military assistance, etc.). Besides gaining substantive information, we also came to realize that a lot of propaganda and counter-propaganda efforts were part of the setting. We sharpened our skills to make objective judgements in analysing, mainly, arms supplies to the Middle East. Typically, Israeli sources would claim significant deliveries of Russian weapons to Egypt, such as fighter planes, and Egyptian sources would attribute significant supplies of US weapons to Israel. As usual, the Russian sources did not say much, while Egyptian sources would refer to a visit by a high-level military delegation, acknowledging that an agreement was reached on strengthening cooperation in the military field. For us, this meant confirmation that a deal was probably real, but left speculations about the numbers. We would then consult US sources, but also those from other Arab countries, that we had often found to be quite reliable. By comparing them and analysing the technical capabilities of the Egyptian Air Force, including military airport facilities, we would determine that the number of planes most likely to have been delivered was between 30 and 50, rather than 150 as suggested in the Israeli media. At a later stage we would review the sources again and use additional cross-referencing before entering the information into the database.

This work, normally, was time-consuming and tedious. Even in a situation of great professional responsibility, however, the team found a way to carry its burdens in a relaxed and jovial manner. We would get together with all our papers and preliminary individual assessments and start discussions, which on occasions were argumentative and loud. Mary Kaldor always preferred to sit on the floor and whenever we reached an impasse she would roll over and start one of her many fantasy stories, which always involved arms supplies of the most fantastic capabilities forcing the adversaries in the Middle East to come to a peaceful resolution of their dispute. We would laugh and continue work until the late hours.

When the study was published, it received a great deal of attention everywhere and much praise, mostly in the West. I felt proud for having been a member of SIPRI's arms trade research team, but for many years I wondered about the accuracy of our database. Many years later, when the cold war had ended and the sources of information from the former Eastern Europe became more readily available, it turned out that we had done a darned good job.

I ended my assignment at SIPRI in April 1973 and returned to Belgrade to continue as a researcher in the Institute for International Politics and Economy. This did not stop my connections continuing, if not with SIPRI directly, with SIPRI-related personalities. I will mention only two because my association with them meant an extension of our work relationship to an even higher international level. In November 1976 I was recruited by Rolf Björnerstedt, then Assistant Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs, to work in the UN Centre for Disarmament (now the UN Department for Disarmament Affairs). When I first joined SIPRI, Rolf had held the post of the Deputy Director, and when he left SIPRI to join the UN, Jan Mårtenson took over that post. By a strange turn of events, when Rolf left the UN, it was again Jan who succeeded him. I continued working with Jan until he was appointed Director-General of the UN Office at Geneva. Eventually, in 1992 I became the Head of the UN Centre for Disarmament, a post which I held until 1998. From all this personal experience, I would say that SIPRI has made an impact on world affairs in more than one way.

Prvoslav Davinic was until September 2005 Minister of Defence of Serbia and Montenegro. He was a researcher at SIPRI from 1968 to 1973

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