Tadic: Serbia will carefully follow work of EULEX
Serbian President Boris Tadic has said that Serbia will carefully follow how the European Union mission in Kosovo EULEX is doing its job, and that it will intervene with the United Nations if that mission fails to remain within the domain of the rule of law
(KosovoCompromise Staff) Friday, December 26, 2008
"Serbia will cooperate with the EULEX, and, under UN Security Council decision, EULEX is obliged to coordinate with the state organs of Serbia", Tadic said.
He said Serbian institutions will be at the disposal of EULEX in the coming period, which he said can be extremely important for the efficacy of the EU mission in Kosovo.
"EULEX is a technical mission, he said, and in that sense it has status neutrality. All those who are mistakenly defining the EU mission in Kosovo in their public appearances are inflicting damage to the successful work of that mission", he said.
"The status of Kosovo can be defined only at the UN Security Council and no mission engaged in Kosovo can determine the status of that province", Tadic said.
The state of Serbia does not have a strategic goal to partition Kosovo, he emphasized, primarily because of the majority of Serbs who live in central and southern municipalities of that province. Furthermore, such a policy would not be in keeping with the Serbian Constitution, Tadic said.
Should anyone consider setting before Serbia "the absurd condition" that Belgrade should recognize the independence of Kosovo for the sake of its integrations with Europe, President Tadic said, the answer would be a negative one.
Tadic also spoke about the fact that a number of EU member-states will never recognize the independence of Kosovo precisely because they are defending their own national interests in that way, as they would jeopardize their own integrity with such an act of recognition.
"For these countries, the independence of Kosovo represents a dramatic foreign-policy and a real precedent, that makes any country that is complex and pregnant with separatist tendencies deeply unsafe and politically unstable. That is why Serbia has an ally in the fact that the independence of Kosovo jeopardizes the integrity of certain European countries as well, but also of numerous countries outside the continent of Europe," Tadic concluded.
