In the course of the PACE Political Affairs Committee meeting, on 7 September, the Committee Rapporteur Pietro Marcenaro talked to representatives of the Democratic Party of Serbia (DPS) Deputy Group.

Milos Aligrudic, DPS Deputy Group Head and member of the National Assembly Standing Delegation to the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, and deputy Nikola Lazic talked to the PACE Rapporteur on the situation in the region and relations between Serbia and the former SFRY republics.

Milos Aligrudic stressed that the relations between Serbia and the other former Yugoslav republics have improved over the last years, but that many key issues such as the return of the refugees and their property, genocide suit filed by Croatia against Serbia and the countersuit filed by Serbia against Croatia and other are far from resolved. Aligrudic emphasised that establishing dialogue about the key issues between Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, is of particular importance, pointing out that establishing the truth about the victims suffered by all the nations is the precondition for reconciliation.

Aligrudic stressed that without a just resolution of the Kosovo-Metohija status “the story of reconciliation cannot fully develop” between the former SFRY republics.

Head of the Serbian Radical Party (SRP) Deputy Group Dragan Todorovic and deputies Natasa Jovanovic, member of the National Assembly Standing Delegation to PACE and Milorad Buha talked to PACE Political Affairs Committee Rapporteur Pietro Marcenaro at the National Assembly House today.

In the meeting, the SRP representatives listed all the important facts regarding the events on the territory of former Yugoslavia from 1990 to the present stressing that the UN Charter, international law and Helsinki Final Act have been all been completely trampled in the case of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. According to them, what is really important is that by instigating the bloody climax in SFRY, the EU countries and the US have committed one of the gravest crimes, the crime against peace. They also stressed that since the 1990s a double standard has been employed towards the Serbs and Serbia, that absolutely nothing is being observed and the rest are allowed everything.

They pointed out the criminal bombing of 1999, seizure of Kosovo-Metohija and continued breakdown of Serbia as this process will be continued by Vojvodina and the Raska area.

The SRP representatives fear that the resolution currently being drafted by the Council of Europe will result in accepting all the events in the last 20 years as a factual situation which would again damage Serbia. They emphasised that SRP and a vast majority of its voters would never accept an independent Kosovo-Metohija and would do all in their power to return Kosovo-Metohija into Serbia’s constitutional order and that they would never accept the occupation of Srpska Krajina in Croatia. Due to all this, the SRP does not accept EU ascension seeing how the European Union, as well as America, was one of the main factors in all these events.