Serbia backs UNGA president's debate initiative

BELGRADE -- Serbia’s PM Ivica Dačić has announced that Serbia will fully support UNGA President Vuk Jeremić’s initiative to hold a debate on the Hague Tribunal.

Ivica Dačić (Tanjug, file)

“Serbia will not build the Berlin Wall over the Hague injustice but we will do everything in our power and use all available mechanisms to protect our national and state interests,” Dačić stressed.

“This is not easy at all today because anyone can do anything to Serbia today,” the PM told daily Večernje novosti.

Jeremić scheduled a public debate for April 10, 2013 that will look into the issue of ad-hoc tribunals.

Dačić stressed that the acquittal of Croat Generals Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač was not about Croatia’s success but about “its big brother” that helped carry out the Operation Storm and in whose interest it was to acquit all the perpetrators.

He said, commenting on the acquittal, that he would not “just sit and do nothing” and that, if nothing else, Serbia needed to support its citizens who had filed various charges against Croatia, including over the Operation Storm.

The prime minister said that Serbia “should not do a nationalistic chest-thumping but play it cool and wisely instead”.

“This is a decision that makes all the Serb victims meaningless and valueless. It turns out that there are people in Europe you can expel and kill and not be held responsible for it. I have spoken to EU representatives and I can tell you that they are pretty shocked and surprised as well,” Dačić was quoted as saying.

When asked whether he expected former commander of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) Ramush Haradinaj, who is charged with crimes against prisoners in a KLA camp near Dečani in 1998, to be acquitted, the Serbian PM said that “unfortunately, anything can be expected from the Tribunal”.

Commenting on a solution for the Kosovo issue, he said that he did not see why a Dayton-like agreement was not possible for Kosovo.

“I still think that this solution should not be rejected in advance. The agreement maybe has some flaws but I do not believe that anybody, after so many years, could write it any better,” Dačić was quoted as saying.

When asked about a platform for Kosovo, he said that it would be presented to the public after New Year.

“Until then, Serbia should clearly define what it wants to achieve in terms of the final solution,” Dačić concluded.