Former Serbian President Boris Tadic, who was the guest in this Sunday's edition of the Croatian Television's talk show "Nedjeljom u 2", stopped short of specifying whether he thinks that genocide was committed in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995 when the Bosnian Serb forces overran the then UN safe haven.
Commenting on the topic of the Srebrenica genocide, Tadic said that he would express his opinion after the completion of the ongoing legal proceedings and that in the meantime it was historians and legal experts who should talk about it.
He also insisted that being a politician and an official, he had "a restricted space" for free expression and that he would give his opinion after the courts ruled on the matter.
Tadic recalled that while he had been the head of state, he had made sure that the Declaration on Srebrenica, adopted by the parliament in Belgrade in 2010, included both opinions of the International Court of Justice which in 2007 found that genocide and large-scale atrocities had been committed in Srebrenica.
"The Srebrenica Declaration was tailored in the form in which it could be passed by the parliament," Tadic said.
He said that he was in favour of conducting investigations into camps for prisoners of war such as Stajicevo on the Serbian territory as well as into other camps for POWs.
As for the future of the Croatia-Serbia relations and how he looked at them in the next five or 10 years, the former Serbian president said that the bilateral relations must not be held hostage to the events from the war times in the 1940s or in the 1990s.
"If we got stuck in the 1990s or in the 1940s, we would experience a Chauvinistic farce," Tadic said adding that the two countries must be aware that they were "small markets that need to be merged".
"Otherwise, we will not be competitive, and will vegetate," he said describing "the common language and the resources of culture" as an example of "a great economic potential".
Asked by the show host about his opinion on the attempts to rehabilitate Draza Mihailovic, the leader of the 1941-1945 Serbian Chetnik Movement, who was sentenced to death by the Yugoslav authorities for collaboration with Nazi Germany, treason and war crimes and who was executed in Belgrade in mid-1946, Tadic said that he could see no purpose in those initiatives.
"I personally have a negative attitude to the Chetnik movement," Tadic said describing Mihailovic as "a man who was a monarchist and who was not a Fascist,"
"However, he was a quisling as he calculated and did not oppose the (German) occupying forces," Tadic said.
As for the topic of Kosovo, Tadic said that he had "designed a policy that sought solutions".
I launched an initiative starting from the tenets of the international policy that there was no division of Kosovo and of the domestic (Serbian) policy that there would be no recognition (of Kosovo's independence)," Tadic said recalling the four points of his plan: to protect the Serbs in Serb-populated enclaves in Kosovo; provide Serb Orthodox monasteries with a special status; protect the property rights of local Serbs; and, reach a separate solution for the north of Kosovo.
Tadic, who is the Democratic Party (DS) president, said that he would decide on 4 November whether he would stand for the party president at the DS election convention, likely to be held on 10 November.
As for claims that he had helped Tomislav Nikolic to establish the Serbian Progressive Part after Nikolic fell out with the Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj, only to be later defeated by Nikolic at the last elections, Tadic said that his job was to ensure "reconciliation in Serbia" and that the strongest opposition party at the time had changed its policy, shifting from the talk about changing the borderlines and expanding Serbia to the talk about integration into Europe.
"Yes, I paid the price of reconciliation with the Serbian Progressive Party," the DS leader admitted.
