Serbia

Serbian president

15 Oct 2020 3 2

Miroslav Lajčák

Inserted 3 years ago

“We cannot want normalization more than Serbia and Kosovo. It is crucial that in the end there should not be any open unresolved issues. What was agreed on the formation of the ASM [Association of Serb Municipalities] should be realized. During my stay in Pristina, none of the interlocutors said that the obligations would not be fulfilled. No one in Pristina said that was not possible. I am against setting artificial deadlines for ending the dialogue. It makes no sense to artificially speed up the process, it all depends on the two sides in the dialogue. I am convinced that the success of the dialogue will mean a lot for Serbia’s European path.”

European Union's special envoy to Serbia-Kosovo talks

15 Oct 2020 3 4

Petar Petković

Inserted 3 years ago

“The only way for the process of normalization of relations to continue, not only formally but also essentially, is for Pristina to fulfill its obligations undertaken seven and a half years ago and finally stop obstructing the formation of the CMS [Community of Serb Municipalities].”

Director of the Office for Kosovo and Metohija of the Government of the Republic of Serbia

14 Oct 2020 2 1

Gordan Grlić-Radman

Inserted 3 years ago

“I hope that Serbia and Kosovo will reach a comprehensive agreement, because the status quo is not an option.”

Croatian Foreign Minister

12 Oct 2020 2 2

Josep Borrell

Inserted 3 years ago

“We support all initiatives and the United States is our important partner, but the European Union is a mediator in the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue. Countries that want EU membership must fulfill the obligations related to good neighborly relations and mutual cooperation, and politicians should promote the policy of mutual trust.”

EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy

12 Oct 2020 4 6

Aleksandar Vucic

Inserted 3 years ago

“What we are doing with CRBC [China Road and Bridge Corporation] ... and what makes this day important is -- that we can today discuss an overall accelerated development and modernization of Serbia.”

Globaltimes

Serbian president

06 Oct 2020 4 3

Aleksandar Vulin

Inserted 3 years ago

“Shiptars are allowed to unite and seize other people's territories, but Serbs are not allowed to unite even in their own country. You cannot forbid Serbs to do the things that you allow Shiptars [to do].”

Serbian Defense Minister

02 Oct 2020 5 4

Aleksandar Vucic

Inserted 3 years ago

“We are confident that the two countries will continue to help each other. No matter what pressure Serbia is under, we will not question our friendship with China. The past was not easy, and the future may be more difficult, but we must show and prove our friendship with China. Even when I was in the most difficult place in the world to say good things about China, namely in Washington, I still told the other side that our relationship with China is very good”

Globaltimes

Serbian president

30 Sep 2020 1 1

Florian Bieber

Inserted 3 years ago

“The movement of embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would be going against the EU policy on this matter. This is particularly a problem for Serbia, which is already far from aligned with the EU foreign policy. There has been an EU-led dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo for ten years now, so it [the Agreement] really has no novelty value. The deal for the sake of a deal ends up being very slim. If Kosovo and Serbia cannot find a way to normalize their relations, Kosovo has to develop its own foreign policy not relying on the US as its only pillar, and visa liberalization would be really important for Kosovo.”

Professor at the University of Graz and member of the Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group (BiEPAG)

24 Sep 2020 6 7

Aleksandar Vucic

Inserted 3 years ago

“Where Americans come, where Americans want to invest, where the American Development Agency is, there is a future and those are good signals and symbols for such a country, for such a region.”

Serbian president

22 Sep 2020 3 2

Marko Djuric

Inserted 3 years ago

“We did not have a rational discussion but an emotional and heated discussion during which the Kosovar side tried to take us back 13 centuries and present Serbia as a colonizer, who occupied not only Kosovo, but also Toplica [in southern Serbia], trying to divert us from the topic with irrational and historically incorrect information.”

Head of the Serbian government office for Kosovo

18 Sep 2020 2 1

Suzana Vasiljevic

Inserted 3 years ago

“That was discussed [moving the Serbian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem]… The next steps will, of course, be discussed and it all depends … on Israel’s actions after that. We have not accepted anything so far, nothing has been signed. We will see how the situation develops and how Israel will behave in the future when it comes to their relationship with Kosovo.”

Serbian President Vucic’s media adviser

09 Sep 2020 3 5

Ana Brnabic

Inserted 3 years ago

“We achieved great things in Washington. I am proud of our country and the delegation led by President Aleksandar Vučić, how they represented Serbia in Washington and Brussels, how they negotiated the agreement and what Serbia got out of it. It’s a message to investors regarding how safe we are, how much investment there will be, what it means for the people and the economy.”

Balkaneu

Prime Minister of Serbia

08 Sep 2020 3 4

Peter Stano

Inserted 3 years ago

“There is no EU member state with an embassy in Jerusalem. Since Kosovo and Serbia identified EU accession or EU integration as their strategic priority, the EU expects both to act in line with this commitment, so the European perspective is not undermined.”

Lead spokesperson for the external affairs of the EU

07 Sep 2020 6 5

Aleksandar Vucic

Inserted 3 years ago

“We have agreed on a mechanism for determining the registers of displaced and missing persons and access to all archives. Prishtina will adopt a law on the return of displaced persons, which is an important step, although we remain reserved about the results in practice.”

Prishtinainsight

Serbian president

07 Sep 2020 4 2

Miroslav Lajčák

Inserted 3 years ago

“This was our first exchange that allowed us to define the next steps in our discussions. Our next meeting will be dedicated to these two topics. Our negotiations today have been intense and not easy, but what precedes them is the will of both parties to continue the talks, despite the painful and complex issues at hand.”

Prishtinainsight

European Union's special envoy to Serbia-Kosovo talks

07 Sep 2020 2 2

Humanitarian Law Center

Inserted 3 years ago

“The textbooks present war crimes committed during the 1990s in a superficial and biased manner, with a selective choice of information used to portray the Serbian nation as the main victim of the armed conflicts. At the same time, the textbooks usually ignore the suffering of other ethnic groups or the responsibility of members of the Serbian forces for it.”

Policy paper published by Humanitarian Law Centre NGO

07 Sep 2020 3 2

Aleksandar Vucic

Inserted 3 years ago

“They thought we should call on Israel to recognize Kosovo, and we said we couldn’t because it undermines our policy. We said that if Israel and Pristina agree on that – fine. We also told Israel that if they respect Serbia, then our country will move the embassy to Jerusalem.”

Jpost

Serbian president

04 Sep 2020 4 4

Sinisa Mali

Inserted 3 years ago

“Economic topics are obviously not a priority as we expected. This is the worst proposal we have seen so far in the history of our talks with the Albanians. But we will not give up and we will fight, fight for every sentence and every word.”

Serbia’s Finance Minister

03 Sep 2020 2 3

Vedran Džihić

Inserted 3 years ago

“The essence is that in the heart of the regime of Aleksandar Vučić, not only is there no political will, but there is not a shred of enthusiasm for anything that the Treaty on the European Union defines in Article Two as basic democratic and liberal values of the EU. What motivates the regime to maintain the facade of Europeanization is nothing but the mere fact that the EU members and the Union itself, and not Russia and China, are the largest trading partners, largest investors and largest donors of aid to Serbia. This has been shown during the COVID-19 pandemic. And the regime knows that without all these means, many of which are disappearing, similar to, say, in Hungary, in the pockets of structures and people close to the regime, it cannot be sustained.”

Senior Researcher with the Austrian Institute for International Affairs and a lecturer at the University of Vienna

28 Aug 2020 4 4

Marko Duric

Inserted 3 years ago

“These were difficult talks, in many ways unpleasant, because we had to face the claims of the other side, that there are allegedly no problems of the missing persons, that there are no problems of internally displaced persons and refugees, with the denial of claims that there are 18,000 usurped houses and apartments in Kosovo and Metohija.”

Serbian politician, Serbian Progressive Party's vice president and member of party's Council for Foreign Policy and European Integration

27 Aug 2020 1 1

Nemanja Todorović Štiplija

Inserted 3 years ago

“Fajon is being attacked according to a practice that is well known in Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia… which means that a critic of the regime is attacked in the media in a certain country, and this is then reported by the pro-regime media in other countries. It is no coincidence that she was the target of criticism, because since she took the helm of the Social Democrats, she has become the biggest opposition to the current Prime Minister, right-wing Janez Janša. Although the Social Democrats are not the leading opposition party, Tanja Fajon, due to her influence both in her home country and in the EU, is the main opposition to Janša.”

Editor-in-chief of the European Western Balkans portal

31 Jul 2020 6 2

Nemanja Rujevic

Inserted 3 years ago

“Previous protests in Serbia have shown that the government can tolerate several months of peaceful demonstrations by several thousand people - as long as it controls the media narrative”

Aljazeera

Serbian journalist based in Bonn (Germany)

11 Jul 2020 0 4

Aleksandar Vucic

Inserted 3 years ago

“We will not have an easy time in the future. I think we will be exposed to great, great, let me not say pressure, but expectations from our European partners. At the same time we are faced with a completely unrealistic approach from Kosovo Albanians who want it all, leaving Serbia without anything. No one is going to cuddle us or give us a present. On the contrary, we will be pressured to give in.”

Serbian president

10 Jul 2020 0 2

Tanja Fajon

Inserted 3 years ago

“The use of force is unacceptable. Angry people accuse President Vucic of deliberately concealing the real health picture [with COVID-19] until the recent elections. Safety and health of people are in the first place. But not with repression.”

President of the European Parliament’s Stabilization and Association Committee between Serbia and the EU

09 Jul 2020 6 4

Aleksandar Vucic

Inserted 3 years ago

“It happened that people of a right-wing orientation – and no doubt at the beginning there were those who thought that they were there because of the coronavirus, and because of their understandable dissatisfaction with the possibility of tightening measures – attacked the National Assembly. These people were not talking about coronavirus – they were talking about some kind of betrayal, about migrants, the 5G network and the earth as a flat plate, and these people were not there for the first time, only their degree of aggression was higher”

Serbian president

08 Jul 2020 3 3

Safeta Bisevac

Inserted 3 years ago

“Novi Pazarians protested and booed the premier because they were mad and furious with the government for many reasons. The health system did not react responsibly to the alarming increase in the number of patients, there were no tests, the patients were lying on the floor in hallways, the authorities were hiding the statistics of the number of infected and the death toll. Since [Novi Pazar] has a Bosniak [Muslim] majority, the president mentioned extremists. The coronavirus has nothing to do with ethnicity and religion. I believe the government is abusing the multi-ethnic and multiconfessional structure of Sandzak. There are politicians in Sandzak who sometimes give unacceptably sharp nationalistic statements, but there is no extremism or separatism in Sandzak. People just want better conditions for treatment.”

Aljazeera

Journalist of the Belgrade-based daily Danas

07 Jul 2020 (approx) 3 2

Aleksandar Vucic

Inserted 3 years ago

“I would like us to be smart enough and to know that it's not always the territorial issue that's the most important. It's important, no doubt. But it cannot be more important ... than the values, than the virtue, than the language and the culture.”

Politico

Serbian president

04 Jul 2020 (approx) 2 3

Viola von Cramon-Taubadel

Inserted 3 years ago

“Aleksandar Vučić has a promise to have a stable country in our neighbourhood. But stability is not enough: we want to see a democratic Serbia. Under these circumstances, when Serbian democracy is in its current shape, the country cannot join the EU. The European institutions have the opportunity and the obligation to demand Serbia to undergo meaningful reforms”

Member of European Parliament and shadow rapporteur for Serbia

22 Jun 2020 2 4

Eric Gordy

Inserted 3 years ago

“There's absolutely no uncertainty about what the result will be at all. It's another series of elections [Vucic's] government has called under conditions in which they know that they will win and so, they are seeking to expand their mandate to further weaken the opposition and they'll succeed in that. There's an absolute monopoly over control of information. The majority of all political news is about him [Vucic].”

Aljazeera

Professor at UCL's School of Slavonic and East European Studies

20 Jun 2020 1 3

Bosko Obradovic

Inserted 4 years ago

“For eight years, someone has been violating the constitution, destroying all state institutions and in every way manipulating, humiliating and insulting the people and the state. We are protesting because we will not tolerate it anymore.”

Dveri movement president

08 May 2020 2 4

Bojan Klacar

Inserted 4 years ago

“A faster election suits the ruling party more because they were the only ones visible during the state of emergency and can more easily organise election activities, while … the opposition is a little more comfortable with a later election, as they will get an opportunity to consolidate and get voters accustomed to circumstances other than COVID-19”

Political analyst from the Centre for Free Elections and Democracy

06 May 2020 (approx) 0 4

Anita Mitic

Inserted 4 years ago

“I considered this discrimination and that the slanderous calling of 'Siptars' was detrimental to the relations that we want to build in the future with Kosovo, with Albania, and with the Albanians who live here in Serbia. In this fragile relationship and the difficult political situation in which Serbia is today regarding Kosovo, every incident and every time Albanians are called Siptars is bad. But it’s even worse when high officials of Serbia, especially the minister of defense, contributes not only to the deterioration of relations with Kosovo, but also to the rise in hatred toward ethnic Albanians.”

Former activist of the Youth Initiative for Human Rights

03 May 2020 0 4

Aleksandar Vucic

Inserted 5 years ago

“The irresponsible behavior of Pristina could lead into a catastrophe because Serbia cannot peacefully watch the destruction of the Serbian people.”

Serbian president

05 Dec 2018 (approx) 2 1

Serbian People’s Party

Inserted 5 years ago

“We believe that Serbia must be determined and send a sharp demarche to the government of Montenegro, demanding that it stop this practice of forbidding Serbs from marking this great jubilee.”

Political Party

29 Oct 2018 (approx) 3 1

Marko Djuric

Inserted 5 years ago

“Europe must not remain blind and passive when facing the expansion of extremism and religious radicalism in Kosovo”