"Joint response" to participation in wars abroad

"Joint response" to participation in wars abroad

“It is not good for the country's interests to have Serbian citizens participating in various conflicts worldwide, so a legal mechanism has to be found to limit this as much as possible in the future,” Dačić told a news conference after the talks with Bosnia-Herzegovina Foreign Minister Zlatko Lagumdžija.

According to him, the problem of Ukraine is not the only one of this kind, where Serbian citizens are fighting on both sides, as participation of some Serbian citizens in clashes in Syria, Near East and Iraq as part of Muslim extremist groups is also problematic.

“We need to come up with a joint response together with the EU because the Union has similar problems and we need to find a mechanism to prevent this in the future,” he noted.

Lagumdžija said that the departure of people from the Balkan region to fight on battlefields worldwide is the result of local developments in the past 20 years and the atmosphere of warfare in which various ideologies of partition and segregation came into being.

“This is why an accelerated pace of EU integration for Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and the entire region is important, together with rooting out the problem. And the root of the problem lies in an ideology of divided societies instead of unity marked by variety which this region always stood for and on which modern Europe rests,” Lagumdžija said.

Injustice, poverty and lack of perspective both in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia are driving people towards to take this step, the Bosnia-Herzegovina foreign minister said.