I have the great honour to address the General Assembly today on behalf of the citizens of the Republic of Serbia. I would like to thank their Excellencies Mr. Abdulla Shahid, Mr. Volkan Bozkir and Mr. Antonio Guterres for the active engagement, dedication and leadership they have shown for the United Nations and all of humankind during these difficult times. Serbia shares their conviction, and we remain fully committed to supporting their efforts.
This year, we come together at a decisive moment in our history. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has shaken our foundations to the core. At the same time, we are increasingly witnessing and experiencing the effects of climate change. And, finally, we are seeing significant shifts in global partnerships and alliances, trade wars between traditional partners and allies, protectionism instead of openness and free market policies, and overall uncertainty at an unprecedented scale. Some of the pressing and extremely emotional issues that we have locally in the Balkans remain unresolved. While we are trying — and Serbia is especially dedicated to this — to change the future by working together and creating alliances through such initiatives as the Berlin process or the Open Balkan initiative, others are trying to disrupt these processes. Instead of focusing on the future, they want to recreate the past, whatever the cost of that may be.
But let me start with COVID-19. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed critical weaknesses in the architecture of global governance. It has threatened to erase the progress many nations have made in recent years. It has placed nations at the juncture between isolation and collaboration, between panic and hope, between chaos and order. The pandemic has brought into question some of the basic tenets of the open and cooperative international order. Global exchanges, international communication and cross-border trade have all seen a vast decrease. Curfews, restrictions on freedom and lockdowns of entire societies have created uncertainty in many aspects of the individual lives of our citizens, and, for that matter, in our own individual perception of what freedom in today’s world even means.
For Serbia, the pandemic threatened to undermine everything we have been doing for the past seven years and crush all of the results and accomplishments stemming from the difficult reforms we initiated in 2014, propelling us back to times of high unemployment, rising public debt, an uncontrollable deficit and overall desperation. Much as it has done in any other country, COVID-19 has tested our nation’s resilience, and, this time, unlike during the global financial crisis — which was much more limited in scope and incomparable in terms of consequences than the COVID-19 pandemic — Serbia stood strong. The reforms we undertook in pre-COVID times made us more resilient than ever. Our fiscal consolidation, our budget surplus and the efficient and predictable investment environment we created became a lifeline that saved us from a recession during the pandemic and ensured that we could support our citizens and our economy during the most difficult of times.
Notwithstanding the effects of the crisis, Serbia has managed to preserve financial and economic stability. In 2020, we recorded a decline in gross domestic product of only 0.9 per cent — one of the best results in Europe. Our public debt remained below 60 per cent of our gross domestic product, the average salary continued to grow by almost 10 per cent, and, despite the pandemic, the number of people employed increased by over 3 per cent.
The recovery this year has been stronger than we expected. Our gross domestic product will grow approximately 7 per cent, and perhaps by even more. Prior to the pandemic, we opened our borders to investment, technology and ideas, and we managed to create a peaceful and stable environment that allowed us to pursue rapid domestic transformation, with innovation and knowledge-based economy as the foundation. The innovative advances we had made allowed us to diversify our capabilities when the virus hit — through e-government, online education, digital textbooks and a central software system that drove a successful vaccination rollout. We invested heavily in health infrastructure and strengthened the health system in order to respond to the current crisis, and we are eternally grateful to our health-care workers for their dedicated struggle.
Our decision to put geopolitics aside, and people at the centre of our policies, is the reason we were able to acquire vaccines more quickly than most other nations. We did not discriminate between manufacturers. We did not care whether vaccines were from the East or the West but chose to negotiate with all vaccine manufacturers deemed safe by regulators. This openness gave us the ability to purchase vaccines from around the world, giving our citizens the unique freedom to choose which vaccine they prefer. Serbia believes in solidarity among nations, multilateralism and helping others when in need.
Since the beginning of this year, we have made it our mission to support our neighbours and all those in need with COVID-19 vaccines. We have also allowed foreign nationals to come to Serbia to receive the vaccine that will protect their lives. In total, Serbia has donated or allocated over a million doses of vaccines — 230,000 doses for the region, 300,000 doses for foreign nationals who have come to Serbia to get vaccinated, and an additional 570,000 doses for countries in Africa and Asia. And we will keep doing so, to the greatest extent possible, until COVID-19 is behind all of us. This is why we have also taken steps to acquire the technology to produce at least two types of vaccines; by helping to improve global access, we can all be safe and triumph over this virus.
Nevertheless, as stated by dignitaries of some of the largest nations during this General Assembly, there are other pressing issues that all of us need to keep addressing without any delay and in a bold manner, the most urgent of which is climate change. Serbia has redoubled its efforts to make our country safer and cleaner for its citizens, and by doing so, it is contributing to the fight against climate change and for environmental protection.
We are strongly committed to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on climate change. We are committed to global efforts and will continue to work actively to meet our obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
We are about to submit our revised nationally determined contributions to contribute to this critical global effort. We have already announced our intention to reduce greenhouse gases by at least 33.3 per cent compared to 1990, and 13.2 per cent compared to 2010, which we are currently incorporating into our energy and climate strategic documents. We are working strategically on planning and investments in this sector. These investments are extremely expensive, requiring years and decades of commitment and a systemic approach, but we are firmly set on the path of this transformation.
Of all the challenges we face, the most worrisome for Serbia is the maintenance of peace and stability in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija. For more than two decades, we have been constantly drawing international attention to the problems that the non-Albanian population is facing in Kosovo and Metohija. Physical safety and respect for and protection of human rights, especially of minority communities, are far from satisfactory. We are now witnessing a constant increase in the number of attacks targeting Serbs, their property and religious heritage in Kosovo and Metohija. To illustrate, there were 55 such incidents in 2014, 62 in 2016, 71 in 2020 and 100 since the beginning of this year. The total number of attacks in 2020 was already surpassed by June of this year.
According to the United Nations, Kosovo and Metohija is still the territory with the least number of returnees — internally displaced Serbs — of all postconflict areas in the entire world. I will provide just a few examples to depict what the lives of Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija look like today. On 11 May, the house of Radoje Pumpalovic, an 81-year-old returnee to Kosovo, in the village of Dubrava, in the Istok municipality, was attacked. That was the fifth attack on him in the same year. I again emphasize that he is 81 years old.
Since June, multiple attacks have been carried out against Dragica Gasic, a 59-year-old woman, the first Serb returnee to Dakovica 22 years after the end of the conflict. Attacks include the stoning of her apartment, banning her from shopping for food at the local store and petitions by civil society organizations demanding her eviction from the city.
On 2 July, in the village of Gobulji, near Vucitrn, a group of Albanians attacked 13-year-old Nikola Peric. The attack occurred when he was returning home from the school playground with three friends.
Attacks on Serbian medieval churches, monasteries and monuments in Kosovo and Metohija make them some of the most endangered cultural heritage sites in Europe. The Visoki Decani Monastery was recently listed by Europa Nostra as one of the seven most endangered heritage sites in Europe in 2021. The
Advisory Panel of Europa Nostra noted that Decani was the only monument in Europe under robust military protection for a continuous period of 20 years, although it constitutes a monument of ultimate historical and cultural importance for Europe and the world.
That spiral of violence occurring in Kosovo and Metohija culminated at the beginning of this week. On the pretext of enforcing new licence-plate rules, Pristina dispatched heavily armed special units to the north of the province. That is yet another brutal violation of the First Agreement of Principles Governing the Normalization of Relations, and that irrational show of force ignited a major crisis. It has disrupted the supply of food and medication to Serb communities in the north of the province. Local Serbs who peacefully gathered to protest that measure were met with tear gas and police brutality, thereby seriously threatening local and regional stability.
Despite all the challenges and daily provocations, Serbia remains strongly committed to finding a compromise-based solution that will ensure lasting peace and stability. Dialogue and the implementation of the agreements reached are the only proper way to resolve all open issues.
However, almost nine years after reaching the Brussels Agreement, the first agreement on normalization between Belgrade and Pristina, the establishment of the Association of Serb Majority Municipalities — the very backbone of that agreement — has not yet even begun.
I would like to once again appeal to the international community, and especially the European Union (EU) as the guarantor of the Brussels Agreement, to firmly insist that the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government in Pristina start to implement all the agreements reached.
The Republic of Serbia, by defending its sovereignty and territorial integrity, at the same time defends international law, the Charter of the United Nations, the legally binding Security Council resolution 1244 (1999) and the supreme authority of the Security Council when it comes to the preservation of international peace and security. We attach special importance to the activity of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission and expect it to continue to implement its mandate in the province in accordance with that resolution.
Our generation shares the common destiny of the modern world, which is becoming increasingly complex in terms of geopolitics, technology, health and climate. In the face of those challenges, Serbia will continue to nurture international partnerships on a predictable and transparent basis. We will continue to pursue rule-of- law reforms on our EU path, which is our strategic foreign policy goal. We see that as inseparable from achieving sustainable peace, stability and prosperity.
We will host, together with the Republic of Azerbaijan as the current Chair of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries, a commemorative high-level event marking the sixtieth anniversary of the first Non-Aligned Movement conference, which was held in Belgrade in 1961. We very much look forward to hosting our friends from all parts of the world in Belgrade in October this year.
We will further enhance cooperation across the Balkans, through the Open Balkan initiative and the Berlin process, by opening borders, harmonizing differences and further integrating our region.
In conclusion, over the past seven years, Serbia has been transformed. We have sparked an economic revival, created opportunities for young people, cultivated a technology boom and improved Serbia’s position abroad. The progress that we have made has allowed Serbia to better face, and survive, the pandemic.
The world now faces a turning point. The recovery from COVID-19 and sustainable reconstruction will not proceed if issues, new and old, are not handled by joint forces and collaborative international actions. The pandemic taught us one important lesson: unless all of us are safe, no one is safe. We can either win together, all of us, regardless of how rich or poor, large or small, from Europe, Asia, Africa, America or Australia, or fail together. If anything, the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the issue of climate change, should have taught us to stand together.