Djuric: Dialogue has suffered major setback due to Pristina's non-constructiveness

BELGRADE - Serbian FM Marko Djuric said on Tuesday the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue had suffered a major setback due to a non-constructive and uncooperative approach by the Pristina authorities.

Djuric was speaking at a panel at GLOBSEC's BELTALKS: Belgrade Economic Talks forum.

"The Belgrade-Pristina dialogue was mentioned here - we have seen a major setback when it comes to the level of collective political, economic, cultural and other rights of non-majority communities in Kosovo. That, too, is a major elephant in the room, and there is no way around that, but the authorities there (in Pristina) have simply not been as constructive and as cooperative as we would like them to," Djuric said, citing university diplomas as an example.

"Paradoxically, with Serbian university diplomas, with diplomas from the Kosovska Mitrovica university, you can work in Berlin, you can work in London, but you cannot work in Pristina without additional, extensive procedures. More than a decade ago, we reached an agreement to accept each other's diplomas, but what really must happen is to stop the use of the status issue as some kind of an advantage when it comes to rights that are so basic and so fundamental as the right to recognition of university diplomas," Djuric noted.

Djuric: Additional push for EU enlargement in 2026 must be geopolitical decision

BELGRADE - Serbian FM Marko Djuric said on Tuesday an additional push for EU enlargement for Serbia and the entire region should be made in 2026 and noted that this was a matter of a geopolitical decision.

"And I believe it must be a geopolitical decision, similarly to the way it was for some other countries that joined the EU a little more than a decade ago," Djuric told a discussion panel on the Berlin Process, held as part of GLOBSEC's BELTALKS: Belgrade Economic Talks forum.

He added that he did not believe that, with all their advantages and weaknesses, Serbia's economy or institutions were worse than the economies or the institutions of some EU member states that had joined the bloc about a decade ago.

"In fact, I believe Serbia can make a strong contribution to a stronger Europe. We are a country whose economy has more than doubled in size in less than a decade," Djuric said.

He said moving away from the usual topics that had dominated Serbian politics for more than a century to issues such as GDP growth, infrastructure construction and focus on the future was, in fact, a part of President Aleksandar Vucic's vision.

"That, too, is a change of paradigm in Serbian politics. Regardless of whether you like our government or not, I can tell you that it is a fact that no one here was talking about GDP growth and the economy as the key political issue 15 or 20 years ago. We were always dealing with other topics, but that has changed now," Djuric said.