Ex-President invites Vucic for a TV debate on Kosovo issue

Tadic said he was inviting Vucic as the former President and not as the opposition representative, adding that his opponent should show a “minimum of courage” and face the answers to the accusations “he has been presenting cowardly for almost a decade.”

“In desperate attempts to maintain the position of the 'grand patriot' in his electorate, while meeting the servility promised to the West in solving the Kosovo issue – which brought the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) into power in 2012, Vucic has been presenting to citizens only lies about the responsibility of former government as well as a primitive combination of whining and self-promotion of himself fighting like a lion,” Tadic said in a written statement.

According to him, Vucic's SNS is the only political party that has never presented a single plan for Kosovo. He assessed as a lie the allegation about the International Court of Justice (ICJ) making official the recognition of Kosovo's independence.

“First of all, that court has never given an opinion but avoided providing one. If we had asked that court a wrong question, as Vucic claims, they would not have certainly avoided giving an answer. The fact that the Albanians interpret the court's answer as the legalisation of Kosovo's independence is propaganda that they use to fight for their interests. But it is not only illegitimate but also illegal for the President of Serbia to use the same propaganda and directly deteriorate the interests of our state by doing so,” underlined Tadic.

He also dismissed the allegations about the status talks on Kosovo being transferred from the UN to the European Union level during his rule and that the talks as of 2012 were only technical.

“It was exactly this government which transferred the talks from the UN to the EU, and placed it on the heads of state level. Now, it seems we will see the status talks even in Washington,” said Tadic.

He denied that the former authorities of Serbia set up the border between Serbia and Serbs in central Serbia and Kosovo, stressing that “Vucic's regime signed an agreement immediately after coming into power in 2012 on establishing the administrative crossings which this government calls borders.”

“Nobody ever set a border and Vucic is violating the Constitution and committing the criminal act of jeopardising the territorial integrity of Serbia by calling an administrative crossing a border,” stressed Tadic.

He also recalled that the SNS took over the power by promising its voters it would annul everything that was previously agreed with Pristina and promising the western countries it would sign an agreement that would make Serbia lose in peace everything it kept in the war.

The promise that the SNS gave to its voters was never fulfilled because nothing from the previously passed decisions has been annulled, said Tadic.

“But they did meet the promise to those who were sending them early congratulatory notes in 2012 on the election day and, in accordance with that promise, they annulled all remaining institutions of Serbia in the north of Kosovo,” he added.