DSS: Serbia should freeze issue of Kosovo

BELGRADE -- Leader of the opposition Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) Vojislav Koštunica has stated that Serbia should “freeze“ the issue of Kosovo.

Vojislav Koštunica (Beta, file)

He added that forming of new institutions in Kosovo would mean “the killing of Serbian statehood in Kosovo”.

“The only chance for Serbia to survive is to freeze the Kosovo issue because every solution that the EU and the U.S. want to impose now is leading toward independent Kosovo,” Koštunica told daily Večernje novosti.

He added that Serbia would have to give a chance to future generations to return Kosovo into Serbia's constitutional order in some more favorable time.

The DSS leader noted that Serbia was seriously threatened because the EU wanted to “tear it apart” and that therefore it could not be an unbiased mediator in the Belgrade-Priština talks.

“That is why it would be in Serbia’s deepest interest if the negotiations under the EU auspices failed in order to open real negotiations in the future under the UN Security Council mandate,” he explained.

Koštunica believes that the “killing of the Serbian statehood in Kosovo” was a red line that must not be crossed at any cost and that Serbia should finally turn to its own state, national and economic interests.

“It would be best if Serbia did not get a date (for the beginning of the EU accession talks) and if elections were called. It would be an opportunity to establish normal relations with the EU after the elections, in which we would have economic cooperation but in which the EU would not be our tutor or set any conditions,” he stressed,

He noted that it was most important to call elections in Vojvodina and remove the Democratic Party (DS) from power, adding that the DS was the main initiator of “Vojvodina’s unconstitutional Statute” and forming of a “state within a state”.