Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic in 2007 signed a declaration that treats the Serbian people in Montenegro as a minority, Princip.me news portal reports.
During the recent visit of the Prime Minister Dusko Markovic to Belgrade, Vucic said that the Serbs in are a minority in Montenegro and that Serbia will work to improve their position. Only one day later, he corrected himself and said that he misspoke.
“Serbia will never treat the Serbs in Montenegro as a minority, because they are not. There is Serbian community and not minority in Montenegro. It is possible that I made a slip of the tongue at the press conference and it turned out that I said Serbs were a minority in Montenegro. This is simply not true,” Vucic said.
https://www.cdm.me/politika/vucic-srbi-nijesu-manjina-napravio-sam-lapsus/
According to the Princip.me portal, Vucic personally participated in the formation of the Serbian National Council in Montenegro in 2007, at a time when he was still in the Serbian Radical Party (SRS). The declaration adopted on that occasion says “the Serbian people are a minority in Montenegro”.
“As prominent SRS members Aleksandar Vucic, then the party secretary general, and Tomislav Nikolic, as SRS vice president, participated in establishing the Serbian National Council in Montenegro. Then they accepted the national minority status for Serbs after the adoption of the Constitution of Montenegro in 2007, Princip.me says.
According to the portal, Vucic thought that setting up the Serbian National Council was the best way to take a direct struggle for the rights of Serbs in Montenegro, who are disenfranchised and subjected to ethnic discrimination with elements of assimilation, still being treated as a “political Serbs” (like at the time when Montenegrin statehood and independence were an open question) and not as a minority different from the Montenegrins, in a country where no nation has clear majority.
It further states that in the preparations for establishing the Serbian National Council, SRS adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Serbs in Montenegro on 2 February 2007.
In the chapter Modern Age, the above-mentioned declaration says: “The Serbian people are a minority in Montenegro. It’s a fact arising from the results of the census held in 2003”.
Princip.me adds that Serbian minority in Montenegro must not be discriminated against and must have rights like all other minorities. It also says that the Croatian minority in Montenegro, which is about 29 times smaller than the Serbian minority, has the right to dual citizenship.
