Metohija

Similarities between South Africa and Serbia today are rather very unsettling.

for South Africa, because if we're going to follow up what has been happening in Yugoslavia since 1990, when NATO or America, for that matter, dismantled Yugoslavia on the false pretext of the genocide in the southern part province of Serbia, Kosovo and Metohija, we can see that this type of the pretext started appearing in South Africa as well.

And this is very, very unsettling.

If I can just again remind you that back in the 1990 and 1995 and consequently resulted in bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999 by the NATO.

[clears throat] Now, I want to read to you a report prepared by Juan Pablo Cordoba Elias.

It's called "The Reform: US Political Games on Kosovo and Metohija." And here's what he says.

This was prepared March fourth, ladies and gentlemen.

March fourth, nineteen ninety-nine.

Just like I told you last night.

Since the beginning of nineties, the rebels have considered that zone the Republic of Kosovo, where they represent the majority of two million one hundred thousand citizens, and their goal is creation of an independent state.

As a difference to that, Serbs are calling the same territory the autonomous province of Kosovo and Metohija, and are against the independence of that region.

In order to comprehend the political essence of the conflict, one should keep in mind the fact that neither good nor evil is always complete.

But at the same time, there have been ongoing negotiations with a variety of EU chief negotiators, Miroslav Lajček for a long time, now it's Peter Sorensen, a Danish, very able Danish diplomat who knows the region very well, who was ambassador of the EU to Bosnia and to North Macedonia.

And Ohrid and Brussels' agreement were accepted by both sides to the full unhappiness of Serbian nationalists and right-wingers who say and call Vucic a traitor, who actually abandoned all Serbian aspirations to keep Kosovo and Metohija, as the Serbian parlance goes, within the bounds of Serbia.

So what has happened is what we have seen, And I repeat, there's been basic stability, apart from the very regretful events in Banska, when this Serbian right-wing leader and quote-unquote businessman with very shady businesses, Zadojčić, acknowledged because he could not not acknowledge because it's seen by the whole world.

He has been condemned, but he is basically free to live in Serbia, despite calls from the European Union, from the United States, that he be tried.

In addition, for four and a half years now, I have been listening to lectures on how many in the West remain the last beacon of democracy in the world, the protectors not of Ukraine, but of the rules and principles of international law.

And when they raise their voices, thinking that they are being highly moral and that their positions are the only right ones, we simply smile and ask ourselves, and how did you treat Kosovo and Metohija and the territorial integrity of Serbia, which is guaranteed by the UN Charter and the resolution of the UNSC 1244? To that, either there is no answer or they supposedly give us some well-intentioned advice and tell us not to look to the past, but to the future.

When we ask them, do we also say to Ukraine that the territories they are fighting for are not important, we end the pointless conversation and move on to another subject.

And I want to warn all of you, all of you here who belong to the Global South, pay the utmost attention while signing all the agreements with great powers.

That is how we signed the famous Brussels Agreement in 2013, wishing to resolve problems between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo and Metohija by compromise.

All the obligations that were to be met by Serbia have been met, and the only one that was to be met met by Albanians, the one about the establishment of the community of Serb municipalities, has not been met to this day.

It is interesting that the agreement was accepted not only in the presence of the EU, but it was also confirmed with a signature of the EU, but it meant actually nothing.

In 1963, Kosovo got the status of kind of sovereign, uh, region in Yugoslavia, and there have been a constitutional change in 1974 when, uh, Kosovo got much higher position, so it remains autonom- autonomous region, but approximately with the same rights as autonomous states inside the Yugoslavian state itself.

Yeah, it was very interesting because within the Serbian, uh, Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, you had an autonomous region of Vojvodina, then, uh, Kosovo and, uh, Metohija, and these autonomous regions had the same right within the whole Yugoslavia as Croatia, for example.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it caused some stir and some complications, but it was also largely because of Tito.

I think he rolled back many of the-

Yeah

... autonomous powers, uh, of, uh, Kosovo and Metohija, and even went so far to rename it just to, I think, Kosovo.

Yeah.

I first asked him to describe the circumstances which led to war in Kosovo.

Kosovo war came about because this Albanian majority province of Serbia, known as Kosovo and Metohija, wanted to break away as part of the breakup of Yugoslavia that followed the collapse, I guess, of the Iron Curtain, the ending of the Cold War in Europe.

There was a resurgence of nationalism in the Balkans.

And although it wasn't part of the Soviet bloc, it wasn't really part of the Western bloc either.