Serbia Sends 37 Firefighters to Southern France

Interior Minister Ivica Dacic saw off a crew of 37 on Friday, July 31, bound for the south of France. Their destination is the town of Velo, their job is to back up French services on the fire lines, and the whole deployment runs through the EU Civil Protection Mechanism.

The crew is made up of 34 members of the Emergency Situations Sector and three staff from the Interior Ministry’s Occupational Health Institute. They travel with 15 vehicles: 13 fire and transport trucks, one ATV and one ambulance, plus two trailers.

The firefighters come from 11 towns and cities:

• Belgrade
• Novi Sad
• Kragujevac
• Sremska Mitrovica
• Zrenjanin
• Sombor
• Krusevac
• Subotica
• Uzice
• Jagodina
• Pirot

At the send-off, Dacic addressed the obvious question of why Serbia is shipping crews to countries whose civil protection budgets dwarf its own:

“We are helping much larger and richer countries, but that says something else. It says first of all something about our humanity”

There is a political reading of that line. This summer Serbia is not the country asking for help through the European mechanism, it is the one offering it, twice within a short stretch. Dacic said the ministry reached out to both Spain and France as soon as the requests were opened.

What went to Spain before France

The French deployment is not the first of the season. Serbia earlier sent 40 members of the Emergency Situations Sector to Spain with 17 vehicles and two trailers, and that ground contingent operates out of the city of Zamora.

A Super Puma helicopter went with them, carrying a crew of six, five pilots and one liaison officer. The helicopter is based at El Tietar airfield near Madrid and has flown five sorties over the Castile and Leon region so far. The Spanish team has not yet returned.

Add the two missions together and a figure appears that neither individual announcement shows: 77 personnel and 32 vehicles of the Serbian fire service are currently outside the country, in the middle of a season when Serbia has fires of its own.

How Serbia sends aid through the EU

Serbia takes part in the EU Civil Protection Mechanism even though it is not a member of the Union. The procedure never changes: the affected state files a request, participating countries report what they can actually supply, from personnel and vehicles to aircraft, and the coordination centre in Brussels handles the deployment. Part of the transport cost is covered by the mechanism’s budget rather than by the sending state.

The decision to deploy is taken inside the ministry, with no parliamentary step, which is why the public visibility of such missions is almost entirely a media matter. It is also why two deployments by the same service, to two countries, in the same month, are rarely read as a single move.

What comes next

No duration has been announced for the French deployment, and no return date for the convoy. With this kind of assistance the host country sets the timeline according to conditions on the ground, so the only reliable marker of the mission’s end is the vehicles arriving back at their home stations in those 11 towns.