"Time to also examine responsibility for 1999 NATO bombing"

"Time to also examine responsibility for 1999 NATO bombing"

A special government commission recently established that Britain's decision to militarily intervene in Iraq, along with the Unites States, was made before exhausting all peaceful alternatives.

"Iraq should not be the only thing considered, it is time to examine the responsibility (for) and justification of the 1999 intervention. However, this has nothing to do with our path toward the European Union," said Dacic.

As he stressed, Serbia and the EU hold "different views of some things" - and this is well known "both in Moscow and in Beijing - where it is also known that the EU is Serbia's strategic goal."

Dacic also stressed that "common denominators need to be found for the path toward the EU, that will not lead Serbia toward not having aligned foreign and internal policies."

"I think the time has come to also reexamine what was done in Serbia in 1999, and not only in Iraq, because if one country's policy has been to invest in Kosovo's independence for 20 years, then I think the mistakes must be sought not only in our system," said Dacic, who was today taking part in the "European Union’s Global Strategy on Foreign and Security Policy and the Western Balkans" conference, also attended by EP rapporteur for Serbia David McAllister.

Dacic added, "There is a stance that Slobodan Milosevic was to blame, but there are other things that represent crude manipulation, untruths, and lies, as had been the case with the invasion of Iraq, something determined by the British commission."

According to Dacic, "everyone knows it well that in the village of Racak in Kosovo, where a crime allegedly occurred that was the immediate cause for the bombing of the SRJ (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro), some civilians are not buried in that place, and when one asks the villagers they say those are (buried) in a military cemetery."

"How is it, then, that civilians had been killed?" asked Dacic.

"17 years after the bombing we cannot say just like that, that we will align completely our foreign and security policy, because everyone in the EU is our friend. I must say that, unfortunately, it's not quite like that, and that's a fact. We want to take our part of the responsibility and carry our cross, but we can't be the only ones," he said.

Dacic pointed out that the desire for compromise is often interpreted as weakness, while there's the attitude that Serbia, "which is now being lectured about respecting human rights by Turkey," should be moved against.

As for Serbia aligning its foreign policy with that of the EU, the minister said he hoped the level of alignment "will be back to 90 and something percent in the coming years."

He then explained that his hope is based on "(EU's) relations with Russia normalizing - and then there will be no reason not to agree with some European positions and resolutions."

Serbia's stance on anti-Russian sanctions has also been mentioned in the context of Kosovo. According to Dacic, "friends of Kosovo's independence and those supporting some things against Serbia cannot expect Serbia to close the door on, and impose sanctions on its friends."

"That is not normal, no country in the world would do that, so Serbia won't, either. If Russia and China are the ones preventing the issue of Kosovo's independence, and Serbia's territorial integrity, from being resolved in the UN Security Council by outvoting, then we have a national and state interest that certainly requires carefully approaching these topics, and I know very well that your countries are conducting a similar policy," Dacic told the conference in Belgrade on Thursday.