Vučić advocates for peace and supports war

What Aleksandar Vučić said on Saturday at Gazivode in Kosovo about the idea of preserving peace and stability, and the need to build better relations between Serbs and Albanians, does not give me the slightest confidence.

Vučić, the clean-shaven radical as Zagreb university professor Anđelko Milardović once called him – well, he used a much harsher term, but in such situations, one should allow for the possibility of adapting the text – has elaborated the hot-and-cold policy in detail. He backs down in Kosovo, tightens the screws on Bosnia and Herzegovina. Then he backs down on Bosnia, tightens the screws on Kosovo. And so on. What do I want to say? For the policy pursued by the Serbian president, peace can by no means be taken as a metaphor. On the contrary, it can be said that Vučić and his "Serbian Progressive Party" are indeed backward, and one of the main disruptive factors of stability in the region, and especially in neighboring countries. Vučić, in fact, wreaks havoc in both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, creating a very bad political environment in these countries. Sometimes he creates incidents, like the attack on him in Srebrenica, or the colorful train he sent to Kosovo, all to appear as the victim, not the other way around.

If Vučić genuinely wanted peace in both Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina, he would sit down at the negotiating table with the governments of those countries and discuss open issues. Instead, Vučić repeatedly gives wind to the separatists. It looks extremely disgusting, completely idiotic, when Milorad Dodik speaks from the same podium saying that Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a state, and that the entity he rules oligarchically will one day secede and join Serbia, and then, now completely predictably, Vučić starts talking about how Serbia will do everything to preserve peace in the Western Balkans, without denying a single one of Dodik's warmongering sentences.

Minister in the Kosovo Government Rasim Demiri recently said that even Kosovo Serbs do not agree with Belgrade leading the policy on their behalf, but few dare to speak about it publicly. Those who dared to speak differently from Vučić, like Oliver Ivanović, were brutally murdered, and the perpetrators were never found.

Dimitar Bechev, a fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of the book "Rival Power: Russia in Southeast Europe," has repeatedly warned about the dual policy pursued by the authorities in Serbia between the West and Russia. In this way, it can be said, Belgrade is trying to lobby and build a better position with the great powers, such as, for example, having Serbia's responsibility for war crimes during the 1990s in BiH and Croatia, and a few years later in Kosovo, forgotten.