Serbian President Vucic announces difficult times for Serbia

On March 29, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic delivered an address to Serbs in which he explained what he meant when he warned of the difficult times ahead for the country.

Vucic called this the first challenge to Kosovo’s admission to the Council of Europe. The final decision on this issue is expected to be made in mid-May.

In his speech, Vucic spoke about the discrimination and repression of Serbs in Kosovo and Pristina’s failure to fulfill its obligations under previously agreed agreements, and he criticized those who support Kosovo’s accession to the Council of Europe in the international arena and in the region.

Serbia’s response to Kosovo’s possible accession to the Council of Europe will be strong and responsible, he said, noting that he did not want to say how Belgrade would act.

“We will continue to discuss, and I am ready to listen to the opinions of the parliament and the government. We will prepare and wait,” Vucic said.

The second challenge, according to the Serbian president, is the planned adoption of a resolution at the UN General Assembly in April to recognize the massacre of Bosnians in Srebrenica in 1995 as genocide. Consideration of this issue was initiated at the proposal of Germany and Rwanda.

The resolution will not be binding, but Vucic does not rule out that after the events in Srebrenica are recognized as genocide, the right to exist of Republika Srpska as an entity formed on the basis of genocide will be questioned.

In addition, in his opinion, “on the basis of only one non-binding verdict, war reparations will also be demanded from Republika Srpska.”

It is worth noting that in 2004, the killings in Srebrenica were recognized as genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the case against Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic.

In 2015, the European Parliament and the U.S. Congress recognized the massacre as genocide. In July of the same year, the United Kingdom submitted a draft resolution to the UN Security Council that recognized the Srebrenica massacre as genocide. However, during the vote, Russia vetoed the draft resolution at Serbia’s request, and China abstained.

For many years, Serbia’s position has been to recognize the Srebrenica massacre as a massacre but not as genocide.

“The Western powers want to put us in a difficult position. The collective West will be against us, against Serbia, together with a significant number of Muslim countries. But “we are small; all these forces are against us, but we will fight,” Vucic emphasized.

According to Vucic, “the pressure on the Serbian people” is, firstly, due to Serbia’s military neutrality. Secondly, because of its attitude toward the war in Ukraine—for its position that Serbia condemns the attack on a sovereign country but does not join the sanctions (against Russia, the aggressor in this war).

The third reason, he said, is that Western countries are under great pressure because of the advance of Russian troops.

Earlier this week, Aleksandar Vucic published an enigmatic post on social media about upcoming difficult times for the country and its people.

Later, it was reported that the political committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe recommended inviting Kosovo to join the organization, which opened the way for a vote on such a decision at the PACE session.