Parliament to receive Kosovo platform next week

BELGRADE -- The Serbian state platform on Kosovo will enter the parliamentary procedure on Monday, December 17, it has been confirmed.

(Beta, file)

The announcement was made on Thursday in Belgrade by the deputy head of the ruling SNS party parliamentary group, Zoran Babić.

"In accordance with previous announcements and agreements, the text of the platform will be presented at a meeting (with the speaker) on Monday, which will be attended by heads of all parliamentary groups, and then it will enter the parliamentary procedure," said Babić.

SNS MP and chair of the Committee on Kosovo and Metohija Milovan Drecun said on Thursday that he did not expect the Kosovo platform to offer "magic solutions", but rather to define the principles that will be the starting point for further negotiations with Priština.

"One principle that will be both the starting point, the irreversible basis, and the final point is - there will be no recognition of the secession of Kosovo and Metohija. That is something we must be reiterating everywhere," he told the Beta news agency.

Drecun added that Serbia must convince that part of the international community which is behind "the secession of Kosovo" that it "truly will not recognize the self-proclaimed independence of Kosovo, at any cost":

"I have no doubt that the ultimate purpose of this process which the Serbian prime minister started with (Hashim) Thaci is to resolve the status of Kosovo and Metohija. These are essentially political issues, but, among other things, they will contain some of our views on how to solve the so-called technical issues, regrading, for example, telecommunications, electric power system, and everything else on which people's lives depend."

Meanwhile, the head of the parliamentary group of the opposition Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), Slobodan Samardžić, commented by saying that the platform on Kosovo "must be radical in stopping the decline, that is, the handing over of Kosovo for nothing - not even a date to start negotiations with the EU".

Looking at the recent conclusions of the EU that the Serbian government welcomed as "good news", it becomes obvious that it "capitulated on the issue of Kosovo", he asserted.

Serbia, he said, was opening "border crossings in Kosovo", without receiving a date for the start of membership negotiations with the EU.

Samardžić added that the DSS would not want to speculate and would wait to see what's in the platform. The party will criticize it in case the document "does not represent the turning of a new page".

According to Samardžić, the platform should be based on the Constitution of Serbia and Resolution 1244 of the UN Security Council, and must point out to the need for rejection of all the acts of the international community, especially the Western world, which relentlessly violated international law and their domestic law in an attempt to take Kosovo away from Serbia.