Dacic: Serbia wants to preserve peace in Kosovo and a political agreement on all open issues

The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia, Ivica Dacic, said today that Serbia was firmly determined to preserve peace and stability in Kosovo, as well as that it wanted a political agreement on all open issues, RTV reports.

At a conference with the Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs Peter Szijjarto in Budapest, he said that Serbia believed that the issue of Kosovo could only be resolved by compromise and that it was very sensitive to the fact that it was approached in accordance with the policy of double standards when it came to territorial integrity.

"Either territorial integrity is a principle or it is not, one cannot stand for it in one case and say something different in another case. When we talk about it, we think that everyone knows it, but maybe in Europe they don't know it, but maybe they do too; It doesn't matter that Yugoslavia was a federal state made up of six federal units and those six got the right to create their own states," Dacic said, Tanjug reports.

He reminded that the former SFRY had consisted of Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Slovenia and that Serbia had two provinces.

"It is clear to you Hungarians what Vojvodina is, and that is the same as Kosovo. According to the constitutional rights, how could someone declare the independence of Kosovo without the consent of Belgrade, it could not. It is illegal. Someone can accept it and but it doesn’t have to. At this moment, 106 countries in the world out of 193 do not recognize Kosovo. Kosovo can count on 84 votes at most in the UN General Assembly," Dacic said.

He pointed out that the Kosovo issue had not been resolved, but that double standards were wrong.

"When you say that we have the General Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, then you say according to point 1 Ukraine and the violation of territorial integrity in Ukraine, and you say that because of this, Russia should be condemned and sanctions imposed on Russia. And the second point is the admission of Kosovo into the Council of Europe so that it's not logical and it's not even normal, and that's unacceptable for us," Dacic said.

He emphasizes that until a political solution is reached, the admission of Kosovo to the Council of Europe is absolutely unacceptable because only states are admitted there.

"Otherwise, how can it be admitted to the EU when there are five countries that have not recognized it?" Dacic asked.

He recalled that when he had recently spoken with Szijjarto, he had told him that before an agreement had been reached, Hungary would not support admission to the Council of Europe and that he had assumed the same had been true for the EU.

"It is a status issue that should come after reaching an agreement," he said.

Dacic reminded that he had signed the Brussels Agreement in 2013 and that it had not been implemented for nine years.

"To create the CSM and now Kurti says that he doesn't think of implementing it. How can you talk about the next steps if you don't want to implement what someone signed, and the EU guaranteed. Secondly, then it was said that there was no coming of ROSU where only Serbs live - what is the purpose of arresting the Serbs and injuring Serbian children on Christmas Day. These are the reasons why Serbia asked for the army to be deployed to help ensure security. If there is no need for that, the responsibility lies with KFOR," Dacic said.