Montenegro: Saving a Mountain Pasture

Civic Initiative Save Sinjajevina is a grassroots environmental and social movement in Montenegro dedicated to protecting the Sinjajevina mountain pastures from the establishment of a NATO military training ground and weapon testing site. Montenegro joined NATO in 2017. A short time later parliament agreed with NATO to set up a military training ground on the grasslands of Sinjajevina Mountain.

The mountain pasture is a landscape of natural and cultural value, part of the Tara River Canyon Biosphere Reserve and is surrounded by two UNESCO World Heritage sites. Its pastures are used and managed communally by Montenegrin tribes. Parliament ignored public protestations, including over 6,000 signatures, and announced the establishment of a military training ground, without environmental, socio-economic, or health-impact assessments.

In November 2019, an international scientific research team presented its findings to UNESCO, the European Parliament and the European Commission, explaining the bio-cultural value of Sinjajevina.  Europe's second-largest karst plateau it supports traditional pastoral livelihoods. Known as katuns, pastoralism is rare on a continent where there is serious land degradation, increased urbanization and intensive agribusiness. Studies have estimated that rangelands like Sinjajevina may contain a good percentage of the world’s stored carbon. The region’s crystalline snowpack is a critical water source of the Tara and Moraca Rivers, which supply large reservoirs of clean drinking water. Sinjajevina’s extensive biodiversity earned it its 2016 designation as an Area of Special Conservation.

Farmers and supporters set up a protest camp in the highland pastures. and formed a human chain, standing in the way of the NATO soldiers to prevent them from firing and carrying out their drill. Farmers demonstrated at the doors of Parliament when they knew that the EU Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement was in the country’s capital.

The Save Sinjajevina movement, including farmers, NGOs, scientists, politicians, and ordinary citizens, has continued to develop local democratic control over the future of the mountains threatened by NATO. It remains vigilant to the danger of ongoing efforts to impose a base on their land. It has continued to engage in public education, nonviolent activism and lobbying of elected officials. and is a model for environmental defenders.

Through various networks it has offered its insights to those working in other parts of the world to prevent the establishment of military bases, which destroy indigenous and local communities’ ways of life. The Civic Initiative Save Sinjajevina is also making connections between peace, environmental protection, and local community building, and between peace and democratic self-governance.  

Their core goal is to permanently revoke the September 2019 decision by the Government of Montenegro that designated Sinjajevina as a military training area.

Another goal is to turn Sinjajevina into a protected regional nature park managed in partnership with local pastoralists, herders (katuns), and surrounding communities.

The initiative submitted its seventh official request to the Montenegrin government in June 2026 to annul the military range decision and they signed a cooperation memorandum with Piva Nature Park Ltd.

The pastoral communities that now govern the Sinjajevina mountain pastures on the basis of their system of collective grazing rights, tribal identity, and traditional governance, have full title to enjoy the protections established under the United Nation Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. They have a right to Full, Prior and Informed Consent processes before any major new initiative with potentially negative consequences is conceived, let alone implemented.  

Farmers, pastoralists, biodiversity lovers and allies of Sinjajevina are raising their voices to reach everyone who can possibly help. They need the support of the rest of the world to ask the Montenegrin state to reverse its destructive plan for Sinjajevina.