Serbian interior minister: Serbia cannot allow part of a sovereign state being alienated

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Russia is now protecting the international order, Serbian Interior Minister Dragan Jocic announced while being on visit to Moscow with a delegation of special representatives of the Serbian Democratic Party Vojislav Koštunica. As a REGNUM correspondent informs, during the visit to the Russian State Duma, Jocic said that Serbia cannot allow that “part of the territory of a sovereign state is alienated to make the sovereign state ask a question why another state is formed in the territory of the sovereign state.”

In his turn, commenting on introduction of the fourth resolution on Kosovo by the UN Security Council, Chair of the Russian State Duma Committee for Foreign Affairs Konstantin Kosachev announced that Belgrade insisted on peaceful settlement in Kosovo. “I do not see in the situation inside or outside Kosovo any extremist elements dictating necessity of settling the issue to some certain date,” Kosachev said. He noted that the status of North Cyprus remained undetermined within four decades. “Nobody threatens to apply force against anybody; thanks God, there has been no bloodshed for a long time, and the riots we saw two years ago are on the conscience of the Albanian population of the territory. The Serbian minority in Kosovo is now much more concerned by threats to its own security than the Albanian minority is within the single Serbian state,” Kosachev announced.

The MP stressed that the problem can be resolved only through talks. At the same time, according to him, Ahtisaari’s work cannot be called “organization of negotiations.” He proved his position by the fact that from 500 amendments submitted by Belgrade to the Ahtisaari Plan, during consultations, under Kosachev’s information, Ahtisaari agreed only to one. At the same time, Kosachev noted that the last draft resolution is a step forward in comparison to the previous radical approaches of the Western countries. “However, it is clearly not enough to take such resolutions as a basis for further work,” Kosachev said.

During the meeting, the sides agreed that the problem can be settled with the help of a compromise; at the same time, Jocic added that the compromise should be preserving the territorial integrity of Serbia.