BELGRADE, April 8 (Hina) - The new head of the Yugoslav (Serbian/Montenegrin) negotiating team at the talks on the succession to the former SFRY, Dobroslav Mitrovic, has announced that the Yugoslav side will show more cooperativeness
at the coming round of negotiations, set up for 9-11 April in Brussels. In an interview issued by the Belgrade newspaper "Politika", Mitrovic said his country was now prepared to swallow "a hot potato" inherited from the regime of Slobodan Milosevic who totally obstructed the succession negotiations. Mitrovic envisaged that the coming meeting would administer "the merciless justice" under which each country-successor would get what it used to be on their territories at the moment of the collapse of the SFRY (Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). According to him, international mediators in the negotiations, Sir Arthur Watts and Carlos Westendorp agree with s
BELGRADE, April 8 (Hina) - The new head of the Yugoslav
(Serbian/Montenegrin) negotiating team at the talks on the
succession to the former SFRY, Dobroslav Mitrovic, has announced
that the Yugoslav side will show more cooperativeness at the coming
round of negotiations, set up for 9-11 April in Brussels.
In an interview issued by the Belgrade newspaper "Politika",
Mitrovic said his country was now prepared to swallow "a hot potato"
inherited from the regime of Slobodan Milosevic who totally
obstructed the succession negotiations.
Mitrovic envisaged that the coming meeting would administer "the
merciless justice" under which each country-successor would get
what it used to be on their territories at the moment of the collapse
of the SFRY (Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia).
According to him, international mediators in the negotiations, Sir
Arthur Watts and Carlos Westendorp agree with such a proposal.
Mitrovic said that in contrast with the former regime of Slobodan
Milosevic, the new Yugoslav authorities, and thus their current
negotiators, would not insist that the FRY - the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia which consists of Serbia and Montenegro - was the only
successor to the SFRY. Belgrade now recognise all the five
countries-successors, he explained.
Mitrovic believes that the easiest part of the job at the coming
meeting in Brussels will be the division of the gold deposited in
the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements (BIS). He could
not answer whether the Basel bank also had the gold deposited by the
Kingdom of Serbia, given that the BIS was established in 1930 much
later after the said kingdom. He maintained that it might be also
possible that the gold of the Kingdom of Serbia was deposited by the
Karadjordjevics (Serbian dynasty) somewhere else or that Germans
and Italians took it during the Second World War.
As regards the Archives, Mitrovic said his country abode by the
demand, with which other countries-successors do not agree, that
the entire archive material should be retained in Blegrade as "the
unique heritage of the history and culture" of the Kingdom of
Serbia, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians ("Kraljevina
SHS"), the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and the subsequent Federal
People's Republic of Yugoslavia (FNRJ) and SFRY, and each country-
successor (to the SFRY) "could copy everything it needs." In this
context, he reiterated that Croatia and Slovenia insisted that they
would take original documents from the archives which refer to
their territories.
(hina) ms