Eurasia Press & News
“The Day of Mourning in Serbia is a bad signal, it is distasteful to declare a Day of Mourning for a terrorist act, and a terrorist act became when a police officer was killed. So the whole story is distasteful in that context,” said the head of the Committee for the Western Balkans of the German Bundestag, Josip Juratović in the show “Iza vesti”
On the occasion of the incident in the village of Banjska in the north of Kosovo, in which one policeman of the Kosovo Police and three attackers were killed, the Government of Serbia declared Wednesday, September 27, a Day of Mourning.
And the killed Serbs, says Juratović, are victims. “They are victims because they are people, younger people, who are victims of a wrong policy, first of all the policy of Aleksandar Vučić,” he says.
Speaking about how Serbia is seen from Germany’s point of view, Juratović said:
“I would say that 90 percent of my colleagues have been of the opinion for a long time that VUčić has lost control in Serbia, not only because of this in Kosovo, but also when you see the demonstrations, it shows that the society in Serbia can no longer cope with this politics”, assesses Juratović.
The government’s behavior, he says, is expected.
“These are classic moves – in order to mask the internal situation, then it moves with international problems, first of all with the theory ‘everyone is against us’, ‘we must now be in solidarity’, more or less protecting one political group from its fall . And it’s inevitable, the government has lost control over society, and their policy no longer makes sense, it’s an agonizing struggle to stay in power, just as Milosevic once led politics,” emphasized Juratović.
Regarding the scale of this crisis, the German MP says that “institutions must be stabilized”.
“We are aware that the Serbs as a nation are the most numerous nation in the Western Balkans and that must not be ignored. The experience from German history has shown us that one must be careful when working with peoples who are manipulated and who are told that they are victims and that everyone is against them, Serbia’s policies played on that political note, above all the current policy of Vučić”, opinions is Juratović.
They are aware, he says, that Serbs are a very important factor for stability in the region.
“We tried to turn Serbia into a functional state, obviously we didn’t succeed, and now we have to look at how we will stabilize Serbia in another way, it must not happen to us that Serbia goes into anarchy. But we are aware that the political structure no longer has control over things,” he said.
“No blank checks without conditions”
And what is the other way?
According to Juratović, now “we have to talk with the institutions in Serbia that still exist, that have power and that will be able to hold the society, to stabilize Serbia from the inside”.
“Institutions need to be stabilized, they need to function, I say that all the time, aid to Serbia in the form of blank checks, money, without conditions, will lead to autocracy. Vučić has made himself an emperor, the structure around him has become independent and nothing is under control anymore. It’s just that emotion that is spreading, that victim theory has to stop, the people are being manipulated, and that has to stop,” emphasized Juratović.
Juratović believes that the situation in Kosovo should now be resolved only in cooperation with Quinta.
“It has to go through structures from Serbia that will cooperate with Quinta. I don’t think the EU has any more space there either,” believes Juratović.
Serbs, he says, must be included in the institutions in the north of Kosovo.
“A new policy with the Serbs must also be started in Kosovo, the construction of a society in which the Serbs will be included. In Croatia you have SNV, for example, everything is open if the right people will be involved. If the wrong compromises are not to be made… And it has to be only with Kvinta, there should be a stop to some ‘Kurta and Murta’ suggesting what should be done and how to do it,” said Juratović.
Both Kosovo and Serbia and other countries in the region, he says, should establish societies that will function “through institutions, not through self-appointed emperors.”
“And they are not, because the only control is the cliques around them. The judiciary, the media, the parliament do not work, nothing works, one man who has lost control wonders there, not today, not now, but all the time. The finances we give to Serbia should be conditional on the functioning of the institutions, and not give blank checks,” Juratović repeats.
When asked if the international community is responsible for the situation in Kosovo, Juratović says that it is.
