Yugoslavs in Serbia want national status

(Patria) - The Yugoslav People's Movement has submitted an initiative to the competent institutions in Serbia for Yugoslavs to be recognized as a nation.

"Yugoslavs are not asking for more or less than what everyone else has - to be Yugoslavs, with all their flaws and virtues.

For our country, the Republic of Serbia, to truly be a country that takes care of its heritage, we, Yugoslavs, must be recognized as a national minority," they stated in a press release.

They add that, although Yugoslavia no longer exists, members of the Yugoslav people are bearers of the memory of the existence of both the state that "proudly bore the name Yugoslavia, and the people who also proudly bore the name Yugoslavs".

They stated that they are not "mere nostalgics" for the former state, but a people who sublimate within themselves all ethnic and other phenotypic characteristics of all peoples and nationalities who lived in Yugoslavia and created its tradition, culture, and all specificities, "of which they are very proud".

"In every Yugoslav, the heart of a Serb, Croat, Montenegrin, Macedonian, Slovene, Bosniak beats, and we do not view anyone through nationalist, chauvinistic, or any prisms of social division, but as integral parts of one, Yugoslav, but also state entity," the press release reads.