SEECP adopts Ukraine document, Serbia "has reservations"

SEECP adopts Ukraine document, Serbia "has reservations"

“Our delegation had reservations about the part of the statement where annexation of Crimea is explicitly mentioned. We felt that this phrase was unnecessary, since the next stance speaks about Ukraine’s territorial integrity," Arsić told Tanjug over the phone late on Sunday.

He added that all the other delegations supported the adoption of the document.

It was the inaugural session of the SEECP Parliamentary Assembly on Sunday, and the Serbian delegation’s position was that such a document on the crisis in Ukraine should not even have been debated at the meeting of inaugural character, he said.

Arsić said that the draft statement was put forward - at the initiative by the holder of the 2013-1014 SEECP chairmanship-in-office, Romania - on Saturday, late in the afternoon, and the Serbian delegation neither accepted nor rejected the proposal at that particular moment because all parties could put forward their own drafts.

“Today we had a meeting where we tried to agree on a joint draft statement and we thought that that the first operative paragraph, stance five, was uncalled for, as another stance expresses support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity and international law,” Arsić said.

“We felt that this was tendentious, and as a delegation of the Serbian parliament, we expressed reservation about what we deemed unnecessary stance, but did not block the adoption of the document,” he said.

Tanjug has learned that there was disagreement about the document between most of the countries participating in the meeting. Certain reservations were expressed by Slovenia and Greece, Macedonia abstained in the vote, and the Montenegrin delegation was divided in opinion among themselves and eventually their representative left the session, avoiding making a relevant statement.

According to Tanjug’s sources, it was primarily Romania and Turkey that insisted on taking the strong position, "and the stance was triggered by the event on Saturday when Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin was stopped from leaving Moldova at the airport in capital Kishinev because he was carrying a petition expressing support for the self-proclaimed independent Transnistria province to join with Russia."

The SEECP member countries are Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Moldova, Montenegro and Slovenia.