Vucic: Principles apply to all, their violation is root of most problems

NEW YORK - Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said in the UN General Assembly on Thursday that principles should not be changed from one occasion to another and that they did not apply only to the strong but to all because, if that was not the case, they were no longer principles.

"We have pledged from this place to respect the principles and the rules of the UN Charter - precisely violation of the principles is the root of most of the problems in international relations, and implementation of double standards is an open invitation to all those who try to achieve their interests through war and violence by violating the norms of international law, but also basic human morality," Vucic said.

"That is why I believe that, in the modern world, there will either be principles and the same rules will apply to all or, as a world, we will end up in the deepest divisions in our history and in the most difficult conflicts and in problems we will not manage to cope with," he noted.

"Here in this hall, only two days ago, we could hear from the president of the US the most important principle in relations between countries – respect of their territorial integrity and sovereignty, and only as the third most important factor, he mentioned human rights, and it seemed to me that everyone in this hall could support that. I, as the president of Serbia, supported that with unhidden jubilance. The only problem in all that is the fact that, a few hours after his speech, I had to see in these premises the president of the so-called Kosovo, who is considered by the most powerful part of the West as the president of an independent country," Vucic said, noting that the so-called Kosovo had seceded from the Republic of Serbia.

"The German minister said that Germany firmly observed the UN Charter and UN decisions and documents and that it would never give up on them. All that would be nice if it were true," he said.

"Namely, almost all Western powers brutally violated both the UN Charter and UN Resolution 1244," Vucic said, noting that they had "denied and violated precisely those principles they are defending today" 24 years and 15 years ago, respectively.

He added that, in 1999, for the first time, without precedent in world history, the 19 most powerful countries had "made a decision without involvement of the UNSC, I repeat, without any decision by the UNSC, to brutally attack and punish a sovereign country on European soil as they had said, to prevent a humanitarian disaster."

"They did not laugh out loud when the Russian president used the very same words justifying his attack on Ukraine. They forgot that they themselves had used the same narrative, the same words and the same explanation," Vucic said.

"I would like to inform you that Serbia had not set its foot on the territory of some other country nor jeopardized its existence, but 24 years ago, the 19 most powerful and the strongest (countries) had no mercy on small Serbia. Even when they finished this job, they said that the issue of Kosovo is a democratic issue and that it would be resolved in accordance with the UN Charter and other international law documents. And then, contrarily to all, absolutely all documents of international public law, it occurred to them in 2008 to support the independence of the so-called Kosovo," he said.

"The illegal decision on a secession of the Autonomous Province of Kosovo-Metohija from Serbia was made a decade after the war conflict in our country had ended," Vucic said, noting that the secession had taken place without a referendum or any other democratic form of declaration by the citizens of Serbia "or at least in Kosovo itself."

"This decision was made at a moment when Serbia had a government committed to European and Euro-Atlantic integration…." and when it was "a full-fledged member of the UN but also the Council of Europe, OSCE and many other international organisations," he said.

"Nevertheless, that did not prevent legal and political violence coming from those who are today at the forefront, lecturing from this place. Pointless and meaningless explanations like 'police terror' that Serbian authorities had carried out in the southern province a decade earlier, a humanitarian crisis and expulsion of the local Albanian population were only a drop that overflowed the glass of lies and nonsense in order to justify the violence against a sovereign country and in order to undermine its integrity," Vucic said.

He noted that, since the victory of "those 19 against small Serbia", 70 percent of Kosovo-Metohija Serbs had left their ancestral homes while the ethnic Albanian population in the province had grown by 300,000.

So much for law and so much for justice, he said.

"Worse of all, all those who have committed an aggression against the Republic of Serbia lecture today about the territorial integrity of Ukraine, as if we did not support the integrity of Ukraine. And we do support it, and we will keep supporting it because we do not change our policies and our principles regardless of the centuries-long friendship with the Russian Federation," he said.

Vucic noted that Kosovo-Metohija Serbs were subjected to violence at the hands of the separatist authorities in Pristina.

"Only last week, after who knows which failed round of the dialogue in Brussels, Pristina PM Albin Kurti, after rejecting the European proposal for de-escalation, addressed the public in front of one of the main buildings of the EU, in front of millions of viewers of the media that were present, and conveyed to the not so many remaining Serbs in Kosovo that Serbs will, I quote, 'suffer and pay for the mistakes they made,'" Vucic said.

Is a worse mockery of humanity, international order based on rules and international community possible, Vucic asked.

"Unfortunately, it is possible," he said.

He noted that Kosovo-Metohija Serbs were being arrested on fabricated accusations as a part of Kurti's terror campaign.

Vucic said that, for 20 months now, Kurti's extremist regime had been taking actions that, together with "repeated accelerated displacement of the remaining Serbs," were turning into a creeping ethnic cleansing at the heart of Europe.