The Montenegrin leader says that an almost $1 billion Chinese-built highway approved by his predecessor has badly strained the country’s finances. MATESEVO, Montenegro — One of the world’s most expensive roads slices through the mountains of Montenegro, soaring over deep gorges on towering bridges, before reaching its destination: a muddy field outside a hamlet with a few dozen houses, many of them empty. Mirka Adzic, a resident of the hamlet, Matesevo (population: around 15), said she was delighted there would soon be a modern expressway so close to home as it would save her from having to take a treacherous mountain track, previously the only access to the outside world. But, much as she likes the new Chinese-built expressway — which is supposed to open in November at a cost of nearly $1 billion after six years of hazardous work, two years behind schedule — she doesn’t really understand it. Struggling to support a family on her husband’s meager salary as a driver for the Chinese construction company that built the road, she is baffled that her country, one of Europe’s poorest, has committed so much money to a gargantuan, state-of-the-art engineering project. Montenegro is now saddled with debts to China that total more than a third of the government’s annual budget. Ms. Adzic is not alone. Montenegro’s new prime minister, Zdravko Krivokapic, who took over late last year from the government that signed the road and loan contracts with China in 2014, described the highway as a “megalomaniac project” that “goes from nowhere to nowhere” and badly strained his country’s finances. It has also plunged China into the convoluted geopolitical struggles of the Balkans. Montenegro, which infuriated Russia, a close friend of China, by joining NATO in 2017, is now struggling to balance heavy debts to Beijing with its ambitions to align more closely with the West. Hailed by China as an early triumph for its Belt and Road Initiative, a huge infrastructure program announced in 2013 by the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, the Montenegro highway fused China’s oversize ambitions with those of Milo Djukanovic, the Balkan nation’s prime minister when work on the road started. But, with Mr. Djukanovic’s party no longer in charge for the first time in 30 years after elections last year, the highway has become a lightning rod for accusations of waste, graft and bloated ambitions that are out of sync with economic reality.“I have no proof yet, but all this indicates corruption,” Mr. Krivokapic, the new prime minister, said in an interview in Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital. “From the economic side, this highway is probably not cost-effective.”Under the original plan, the 25-mile stretch built by China was to be part of a proposed 100-mile highway linking the port city of Bar on the Adriatic Coast to the border with Serbia.
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Article Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/14/world/europe/montenegro-highway-china.html
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