Pro-government daily publishes Vucic’s Vojvodina declaration

Vucic announced the mass gathering on Serbian Statehood Day in Sremska Mitrovica. The date of that national holiday, on the day the Serbian Orthodox Church celebrates Candlemas (Sretenje in Serbian), was chosen as the date that the first constitution of the Principality of Serbia (and in any of the countries of the former Yugoslavia) was adopted in Kragujevac in 1835. The central ceremony was customarily held in that central Serbian city with the president and senior state officials present. Serbia’s protesting students are planning a mass gathering in Kragujevac on Saturday.

According to Politika, the document warns that “the latest events in the northern Serbian province, revival of separatist ideas and movements and public advocating of a Vojvodina nation, language and Orthodox Church and the announcement of a Vojvodina Platform oblige us to act in the social and political sphere to protect the territorial integrity of the Serbian state,” the declaration says.

It added that the declaration is being proposed in line with the constitution which says that Serbia is the state of the Serbian people and all the citizens living in it and that its territory is indivisible. “Just as there is no Serbia without Vojvodina, Vojvodina cannot exist outside Serbia,” the document says.

The five point document recalls the historic development of what it calls Serb Vojvodina and attempts at statehood and nationhood, separatist tendencies and Vojvodina as a multi-cultural, multi-national and multi-confessional community based on equality.

“Vojvodina is an expression of European values, a community of everyone who lives on the territory of the autonomous province and an inseparable part of the national, political, consitutional and cultural identity of modern Serbia,” it says warning of the promotion of autonomist, separatist and anti-Serb content.