Videnović: Milosevic’s politics are back in Serbia, tensions in the north are a consequence of Vucic’s actions

The political principles of the war criminal, Slobodan Milosevic, are still present in Serbia, says Ivan Videnovic, professor at the University of Belgrade, and adds that such politics have only returned in new international circumstances. He points out that the tensions in the north of Kosovo are a direct consequence of the actions of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic.

In the interview for The Geopost, Videnović examines the position of national minorities in Serbia, especially in the context of Albanians in the Preševo ​​Valley.

“The rights of minority peoples in Serbia are much worse than the rights of Serbs in the countries of former Yugoslavia where they live as minorities,” he says.

The discussion also touches on the strategies followed by the Serbian government, addressing the diplomatic and propaganda actions of President Aleksandar Vučić regarding Kosovo and regional relations.

“The politics of Slobodan Milosevic has actually returned to Serbia, whether we like it or not, we have to accept it. Some of the basic principles of Slobodan Milosevic’s politics are still alive and present, and to a good extent the very actors of the events in which he was the main culprit are present today in the Serbian public. Of course, that policy has returned today in new international circumstances and with a clear awareness that the way of implementing that policy was bad and ineffective… There is no difference between the government and the opposition, both are in identical positions. They differ only in that, therefore, they accuse each other of who would more effectively carry out the same policy, which is not at all in doubt.”

It underlines that Aleksandar Vucic is responsible for raising tensions in the north of the country, and shows whether Serbia has de facto recognized the independent state of Kosovo by accepting the Franco-German plan.

“The current tensions in the north are a direct consequence of Aleksandar Vučić’s actions… He is trying to play a cat and mouse game with Kosovo, or as he himself just quoted a line from the movie ‘I am a musician – no, no, I am not musician’. This is how he behaves in relation to Kosovo – that is, he recognizes Kosovo, and then he does not accept that he has recognized it. Then he accepts the Franco-German-EU plan for Kosovo, but denies that he has accepted it and that practically, as Europe’s highest officials have said publicly, it means de facto recognition of Kosovo’s independence. For this game of his, which actually serves so that the Serbs from Kosovo do not understand that he has actually recognized the independence of Kosovo, he also has the silent support of the international community, because they see it as politically necessary for him”, he says while adding that “this constitutes injustice to the members of the Serbian community in the north of Kosovo, as they are hostages and victims of his game”.

Full interview:

The Geopost: Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić announced that he will launch a “global diplomatic campaign for the rights of the Serbian people in Kosovo”. We often hear that “Serbs in Kosovo are in danger”. What is the position and rights of the Albanian people in Serbia?

Videnovic: The question of the danger for Serbs in Kosovo is now a hot topic. However, when you look a little closer, when you look at the whole situation with the rights of minorities in Serbia and compare by region, you actually realize that the rights of the minority peoples in Serbia are much worse than the rights of the Serbs in the countries of the former -Yugoslavia where they live as minorities. And, despite the general complaints about the danger for Serbs everywhere they do not constitute the absolute majority of the population, and have to coexist with other peoples.

If you look at Croatia and Kosovo, for example, you have a guaranteed number of parliamentary seats for members of the Serbian minority. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbs are a constitutive people, in Montenegro they make up about 30 percent of the population, which now holds 100 percent power through party combinatorics because everyone in the Montenegrin government declares itself as Serb.

While in Serbia that issue was resolved with the so-called natural registration – the electoral law, which means a natural registration of one percent. And now if you have more parties in that one percent, like you have more parties of Albanians or more parties of Bosniaks in Sanjak, then those votes are distributed and you actually end up in the situation we have now, which is that – the Albanians of the Valley of Preševo ​​in several election cycles in the past have only one deputy in parliament, the Bosniaks have two, they are divided between the two largest parties in Sanjak, the Croats from Vojvodina have two deputies, the Hungarians have six, because they have a very strong Democratic Hungarians of Vojvodina, who mostly win those mandates. But if there were another strong Hungarian minority party, there would be fewer of those MPs.

Therefore, the issue of the representation of minority peoples in the state bodies of Serbia is not well resolved and especially applies to the state administration bodies at the level of the republic, in the parliament there are some here and there, but in the state leadership bodies, you have almost no one, you don’t have participation quotas at all, like you have in Kosovo. So, you have no quotas at all for the participation of minorities in state bodies. And when you ask that question to the eternally disgruntled Serbian nationalists, what about minorities in Serbia and why aren’t they in the central government in Serbia, you usually get the answer that minority peoples are represented in local self-government bodies, and that’s it, and we’re phenomenal and fantastic, we have inherited that phenomenal policy of national minorities that was in place in Yugoslavia and now we have primary schools in the minority languages ​​and, among other things, we have short ten-minute news in each language, Hungarian, Albanian and Ruthenian on one of the totally free channels marginalized groups of Radio Television of Serbia.

On the other hand, those people, like all of us, are bombarded daily with nationalist-clerical rhetoric, persecution of national traitors, invented holidays of national unity, the national flag, parties organized to celebrate sporting successes and, in general, the Serbian fair of kitsch and primitivism.

The Geopost: As a countermeasure to the indictment against Serbia for the terrorist attack in Banjska, Belgrade announced the formation of a prosecutor’s office to “prosecute the abuse and violation of basic human rights, usurpation of property, endangering the physical integrity and dignity of the citizens of Serbia in Kosovo”.

Belgrade also demands the holding of local elections in the north of Kosovo, which they have already boycotted once, and the return of Serbs to Kosovo’s institutions, who, according to Vučić’s dictates, withdrew from Kosovo’s institutions last year.

What is Kosovo really on the agenda of the President of Serbia and did Serbia de facto recognize the independent state of Kosovo by accepting the Franco-German plan?

Videnovic: The current tensions in the north are a direct consequence of the actions of Aleksandar Vučić that you mentioned. He is trying to play a cat and mouse game with Kosovo, or as he himself just quoted a line from the movie “I am a musician – no, no, I am not a musician”.

This is how he behaves in relation to Kosovo – that is, he recognizes Kosovo, and then does not admit that he has recognized it. Then he accepts the Franco-German-EU plan for Kosovo, but denies that he has accepted it and that practically, as Europe’s highest officials have said publicly, it means de facto recognition of Kosovo’s independence. For this game of his, which actually serves so that the Serbs from Kosovo do not understand that he has actually recognized the independence of Kosovo, he also has the silent support of the international community, because they see it as politically necessary for him.

But this is very unfair to the members of the Serbian community in the north of Kosovo, because they are hostages and victims of his game. It would be much more useful to talk openly with them and tell them that this is the situation, we have to do this and that, we have to behave this way or that way. I think that a large number of them on a personal level understood and accepted the integration into the Kosovar society, but as we have seen in the last days, the lack of clear, open and honest communication with them and the falsification of the Serbian state in the north of Kosovo leads to undesired consequences.

On the other hand, we have Prime Minister Albin Kurti, who, in my opinion, leads an uncompromising policy of clean accounts and full responsibility for political movements. If you ordered Serb policemen, prosecutors and judges out of Kosovo’s institutions, others will take their place. If you ordered the boycott of the elections, then the administration and municipal organization in the north of Kosovo will be imposed on you with three percent legitimacy. There is no way that Albin Kurti, as an experienced politician, does not know that such a situation is politically unstable in the long term. But his policy for me is quite clear – you want to interfere in the electoral processes and state affairs in Kosovo – then I will take it to the point of absurdity, so you will see that such a thing does not make sense.

When you asked about the formation of the special prosecutor’s office for: “Violation of the rights of Serbian citizens in Kosovo”, I am quoting you and I am also quoting the name of that institution, so it will be a special prosecutor’s office for everything that can be violated – that is, the rights of Serbian citizens in Kosovo.

I often ask myself but also ask questions publicly, what do these people mean, not only Aleksandar Vučić, but most of the politicians in Serbia, what do they mean by “our people in Kosovo”? If I would like to return Kosovo to the state-legal framework of Serbia and I would consider that the institutions of Kosovo are really temporary and illegal and that they commit terror against the citizens, I would establish that prosecutor to deal with the rights of every citizen of Kosovo, because I would consider all citizens of Kosovo who I want to return to the constitutional and legal framework of Serbia as my citizens, whose basic rights have been threatened by this government. In this way, it is completely clear that everything that is being done in Serbia only concerns 60, 70 thousand people in the north of Kosovo and nowhere else in Kosovo, so we have a silent recognition that Kosovo exists as an independent state and yes, we in the north of Kosovo have a community of people who are considered and feel like citizens of Serbia, and we have to somehow take care of them and agree with the Kosovo authorities on how to integrate them into the Kosovar society and how to improve it their status. And in this way, taking such measures practically means further delaying, making it difficult and introducing another obstacle to the mutual normalization of relations and in some way it will most likely produce the effect that if some people who want to participate in these police and prosecutorial processes, where the citizens in the north of Kosovo would be violated, may experience some kind of abuse and detention during the passage through Serbia, i.e. an unnecessary postponement of what is inevitable and will certainly happen more or less late.

The Geopost: In an opposition newspaper in Serbia, an article appeared that “Kosovo will always be dependent on Serbia”. The text is based on the thesis that Kosovo’s identity is based on “mere negativity towards Serbia”. Who really controls the media in Serbia and how do you see the media image in general?

Videnovic: In Serbia everything is a matter of agreement, in Serbia the market for everything is divided. You have several, say, TV providers that all work the same way. You have several trading chains that all charge exactly the same prices of products, you have several companies that deal in petroleum products also all charge the same prices, so it’s all a matter of some kind of cartel agreement. It is the same with the media in Serbia, you have a clear division between the media that are under the control of the state and those that are under the control of the competition to the state, and this is the other side, e.g. “United Media” and the newspaper and article you mentioned.

What we must understand as a background to all this is, first of all, that the politics of Slobodan Milosevic has actually returned to Serbia, whether we like it or not, we have to accept it. Some of the basic principles of Slobodan Milosevic’s politics are still alive and present, and to a good extent the very actors of the events in which he was the main culprit are present today in the Serbian public. Of course, that policy has returned today in new international circumstances and with a clear awareness that his way of implementing that policy was bad and ineffective.

In this sense, when we look at the return of the Milosevic era, in Serbia you have no conflict between the government and the opposition on issues of basic political principles – on the issue of Kosovo, on the issue of BiH, Montenegro, on the issue of war crimes, relations with Russia, relations with the West, NATO membership. According to those basic, general issues that define a policy, there is no difference between the government and the opposition, both stand in identical positions. They differ only in that, that is, they accuse each other of who would more effectively carry out the same policy, which is not at all in doubt. In my opinion, they are more like factions of the League of Communists than the government and the opposition. There is no fundamental difference in attitudes.

The text you mentioned was written by one of “Danas” editors, I’m not mentioning names and we jokingly call it ” Gjillas’s Mila Stula”, so this tells you more or less what we think, who Danas belongs to, which part of the media cartel belongs to Danas. I don’t know how much your viewers and readers know that Mila Shtula was one of the pillars of Milosevic’s propaganda at that time and was a very characteristic character for that time. When you read that text, you have a flashback, a flashback to the brochures from “Politika” and “Politika Ekspres” that were published in the 1990s, in which it was said in exactly the same words, in the same way, about Slovenia and Croatia will forever remain dependent on Serbia as Croatia in particular has no state and national identity and actually builds it on denying the impact of Serbian identity on the Croatian space. The author has a special statement, she said that Kosovo actually defines itself as “anti-Serbia”. I have said it once publicly in one of my posts, if this is the case and considering how the process with Slovenia and Croatia ended, I can only say: keep going Kosovo, anti-Serbia is the proven right path to follow.

The Geopost: Serbia signed a strategic partnership agreement with the EU. A day ago, the agreement for partnership in the field of energy between Serbia and the USA was signed in Washington. Do these agreements mean that Serbia is getting closer to the West, and do you expect protests to be organized because of the energy agreement with the US, like lithium?

Videnovic: All these are elements of Vucic’s “catch all” political game, he has something for the East, something for the West, for China, Russia, the EU and Washington, so these are elements of his game, for which he considers himself to be a great master, the same game that Tito played, that Slobodan Milosevic tried to play, that he (Vucic) is trying to play now, there is nothing new there, so it is complete absurdity that once again highlights an extraordinary part of Serbia, we are here as a bridge between East and West. We are the East in the West, the West in the East, whatever you want to call it. All of these are meaningless and all lead Serbia to a hopeless position in which we have been fighting for 25 years, almost since the democratic changes and since the beginning of European integration.

So, it is possible that in this case Vučić overplayed his hand, because the agreement he signed with the EU in particular – the Memorandum on Critical Raw Materials – is an agreement that strategically links Serbia to the West. And not only that, he is a step above. In my deep conviction, Serbia has the importance that the Treaty on the Coal and Steel Community of 1951 had as the seed of the creation of the European Economic Community, and then the European Union. That 1951 Agreement resonates with this Critical Raw Materials Agreement that has just been signed.

You should bear in mind that 25 years have passed since the beginning of the European integration of Serbia, that the process is very long, reluctant, that Serbia has not built a national consensus on the need to join the EU, some of the main Serbian institutions are openly anti-European and openly anti-Western. That very long process led to the disappearance of the original communicative interest in Serbia that Europe had, you remember the Thessaloniki agenda from 2003, which was particularly pronounced. Meanwhile, that interest of Europe has disappeared, alternative routes are open, now communicate with Southern Europe through Serbia is not necessary.

After a long time, this agreement recognizes a strategic interest that Europe has for a closer connection with Serbia and its integration into the European space. I am convinced that in the future the EU will establish partnership relations with the political forces in Serbia based on their attitude towards this strategic document and that those who reject and condemn it will have nothing to seek in the relations of partnership with the EU. Among other things, this is the reason why Europe can and has an interlocutor in Serbia in Aleksandar Vučić, and not in the opposition forces, because they oppose every move of Aleksandar Vučić, even when such opposition is openly anti-European behavior and attitude and take the point of view of Russia, in this case, which has a long-term interest in this part of Europe not being part of the EU and the Euro-Atlantic community.

At the same time, these agreements are a chance for the entire region, because we know that the main link and obstacle in the integration of the entire region in the Euro-Atlantic area is actually the integration of Serbia. If Serbia experiences and walks the path of these integrations, then we will share not only a common environment, which is in the interest of all of us, but also common goals in the field of sustainable development, and finally, at the end of that road, our common interest – EU membership.

/The Geopost