Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic warned Saturday that he will not hand over the country «on a silver platter» in reference to tensions related to the Serb minority in northern Kosovo, after Belgrade on Friday asked NATO for permission, still unanswered, to deploy Serbian police and army to the area.
«We will not hand over the state of Serbia on a silver platter to anyone for anything in the world because it belongs to its people,» Vucic said during a congress of the party he leads, the Serbian Progressive Party, Serbian media report.
Vucic has thus reproached the «lack of logic» of the latest events in Kosovo, particularly since the postponement last week of the local elections by order of the Kosovar president, Vjosa Osmani; a decision applauded by the EU as an attempt to reduce tensions that the Serbian leader has denounced as a political cover.
«These Western friends and partners of ours say that Pristina has reduced the conflict since they postponed elections and only 15 hours later they came with long convoys to occupy the four headquarters of the municipal electoral commissions in the north of Kosovo. Didn’t they know what they were going to do 15 hours before?», he asked.
Thus, he denounced that they are «arresting and harassing» Serbs, in particular two former Kosovo Serb police officers who left the force after the boycott declared by the Serbian List, the main Kosovo Serb party, against the Pristina government.
Vucic referred specifically to Srdan Trajkovic, who was arrested allegedly on suspicion of committing war crimes when he was a member of the Army of the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) during the Kosovo war.
«They say they are working on de-escalation and then in the morning they arrest Srdan Trajkovic accusing him of war crimes despite the fact that he worked for almost nine years in the Kosovo Police and now he is not allowed to communicate with his family and does not receive medication,» Vucic has reproached. These detainees are allegedly being subjected to «terrible tortures».
In the last hours it has been announced that Trajkovic will spend the next 30 days under detention, according to his lawyer, as well as former agent Dejan Pantic, accused by Kosovo of attacking state institutions.
«We have to save the country, we will manage to attract investments and increase the GDP and salaries and pensions, and increase the standard of living, but we have to save our country,» Vucic has added.
As for Serbia’s request to NATO to send its security forces to northern Kosovo, Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic revealed that so far they have not received a reply from KFOR.
Dacic has reproached the «reckless acts» of Kosovar Prime Minister Albin Kurti, whom he considers «the biggest obstacle to dialogue». «While people are on the barricades, while Serbs are arrested, it is difficult to discuss a permanent solution to the problem of Kosovo and Metohija,» Dacic said, using the historical name of Kosovo as a Serbian province, in statements to the Tanjug news agency.
Meanwhile, Serbs in northern Kosovo have maintained roadblocks with barricades for eight days to demand the release of the detained Kosovo Serbs (the two former officers plus an individual identified as Milan Adzic) and the withdrawal of the Kosovo Special Police from northern Kosovo.
It should be noted that, in the last hours, Pristina has denied the arrest of a third Kosovo Serb ex-agent, first identified by Serbian media as Zoran Mihajlovic.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
