Tadic: Brnabic and Petkovic are lying, Resolution 1244 does not foresee the return of the Serbian army to Kosovo

Boris Tadic, President of the Social Democratic Party and former President of Serbia, told Vreme that Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic and the Director of the Kosovo Office Petar Petkovic are “misleading the public” when they talk about the possibility of Serbia returning a certain number of Serb forces to the north of Kosovo, as Brnabić said, i.e. “up to a thousand members of the army and the police”, as announced by Petkovic.

Tadic recalls that UN Resolution 1244, annex 2, point 6, “does not mention any Serbian army, but Yugoslav and Serbian personnel. So there are no military and police troops, as Brnabic and Petkovic say”.

The text of paragraph 6 of Resolution 1244 is as follows: ‘An agreed number of Yugoslav and Serbian personnel will be allowed to return after the withdrawal to perform the following functions: liaison with the international civilian mission and international security presence; minefield marking/clearing; maintaining a presence in Serbian cultural heritage sites; maintaining a presence at the main border crossing points.

Boris Tadić was the Minister of Defense at the time Resolution 1244 was adopted. He says that at the time he did say that Serbs in Kosovo would be “clay pigeons” and explains why he thought they had no place there.

“In a verbal conversation with the KFOR commander, I said that it would be appalling for me to agree to our people clearing minefields, or to be in parts of Kosovo where there is a predominantly Albanian population, such as on the border with Albania and Macedonia, and around the monastery. With the exception of Gračanica, there is hardly any Serbian population around our other monasteries”, explains Boris Tadić, noting that “there is one Serbian family living in Dečani”.

“I was not in favour of sending anyone to an area with a population hostile to Serbia.”

“On the first point, sending liaison personnel with the international civilian mission and the international security presence, they would be liaison officers. And these are not the units or military forces that Brnabic and Petkovic are telling people about,” Tadic assesses.

“In short, Resolution 1244 does not foresee the presence of the Serbian army or police in the north or anywhere else in Kosovo”, concludes Boris Tadic.