The Deputy Chairman of the Committee on the Diaspora and Serbs in the Region Radovan Tvrdisic and Committee member Dusan Maric met today with the member of the General Council of Italians Abroad Alessandro Boccaletti.
The officials exchanged opinions and experiences regarding cooperation between home countries and the diaspora, the rights that the diaspora exercises in their home countries, and above all, the strengthening of national identities in the globalist, corporate world.
Alessandro Boccaletti informed the members of the Committee on the Diaspora and Serbs in the Region about the scope of work of the organization he is a member of, as well as the size of the Italian diaspora in the world. He also spoke of the challenges that Italy faces in terms of migration, bearing in mind that the migratory waves from Italy, especially to North and South America, have been numerous. He stressed that his country deald with numerous requests for citizenship and spoke of the directions in which the state operates, above all to the need to amend the laws regulating the issue of citizenship. He said that the concept of the state will be lost if there are more citizens abroad than in the country itself. Therefore, Italy operates in three directions, the first of which is the acquisition of citizenship, which should be effective and affirmative, then the issue of voting rights, as well as the return of citizens to the homeland encouraged by tax breaks and the acquisition of citizenship on the basis of work permits, especially in the field of scarce professions. Boccaletti concluded that the issue of the diaspora should be a state issue, as well as an important source of resources for his country.
Radovan Tvrdisiv, Deputy Chairman of the Committee on the Diaspora and Serbs in the Region, expressed his satisfaction with the exchange of views with the representative of a political group with whom he shares basic values, especially in today's era of globalist trends. He spoke of the characteristics of the Serbian diaspora, which is the most numerous in the region, although in some of the surrounding countries it does not even have the status of a national minority, as well as to the vast diaspora in the world, which numbers between five and six million Serbs. Tvrdisic said that our area of activity is directed towards preserving the church and language, as the backbone of the life of the Serbian diaspora. He agreed with the view that the corporate world has not offered a concept of content in addition to the material concept, and that there is room to work on preserving national identity. He assessed the experiences of the Italian people in terms of diaspora networking as valuable, especially considering the friendly relations between the two peoples and Italy's support in preserving Serbian cultural heritage in Kosovo-Metohija.
Committee member Dusan Maric thanked the Italian army for protecting the Serbian population in Dalmatia and part of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the Ustasha persecution during World War II, as well as for the efforts of Italian soldiers to protect Serbian churches and monasteries in Kosovo-Metohija, and expressed his hope that Italy would continue to support Serbia in preventing Albanians from presenting the sacred Serbian cultural heritage in Kosovo-Metohija as their own. He added that between 50,000 and 60,000 Serbs live in Italy, and the Italian Government recognizes only Serbs from Serbia as members of the Serbian people, and expressed his expectation that it will also recognize Serbs from Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro as such. Mariv also called for the establishment of cooperation between Vicenza and Velika Plana, bearing in mind that a thousand Serbs from this municipality live in this Italian city, and used this opportunity to extend to the guest an invitation from the Assembly of the Serbian Diaspora in Italy to participate in the Assembly of Serbian Folklore, which will be held in July this year in Trentino.
