Nikolić: Instead of congratulations from Belgrade, they are once again promoting revisionist historical constructions

Instead of congratulating the citizens of Montenegro on Independence Day, Belgrade is once again promoting revisionist historical constructions, said Andrija Nikolić, president of the DPS parliamentary group in the Parliament of Montenegro.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić said yesterday that he had received an invitation to participate in the "glamorous celebration" of the 20th anniversary of Montenegro's independence.

"But I will not go to a glamorous celebration of secession from my Serbia. I would be ashamed, and I would spit in my own and my people's faces, and let them celebrate whatever they want," Vučić said at the time.

According to Nikolić, twenty years after the restoration of independence, Montenegro is an internationally recognized, civil and European state — precisely because its future was decided by its citizens, not by political centers of power outside it.

Nikolić said that it is therefore sad to see Vučić who "cannot accept the historical and democratic fact that Montenegro is not anyone's 'seceded part', but a state with a thousand-year-old identity and the right to independently decide on its own destiny."

"Instead of congratulating the citizens of Montenegro on Independence Day, Belgrade is once again promoting revisionist historical constructions and regretting that, as the current government in Serbia likes to say, Boris Tadić allowed Montenegro to leave. It is particularly worrying that the highest state officials of Montenegro respond to such messages with silence: President Jakov Milatović, Prime Minister Milojko Spajić and Parliament Speaker Andrija Mandić, whose ideological closeness to Aleksandar Vučić has long been known," Nikolić pointed out.

He added that, while the Serbian President disputes the meaning and significance of May 21st, and is assisted in this by the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the citizens of Montenegro rightly expect that those who hold the highest state positions will clearly and unequivocally defend the dignity of their own country and its greatest modern holiday.

"Instead - silence. Montenegro has restored its international legal subjectivity democratically, peacefully and Europeanly. And Montenegro will survive the current government, most of which fought against its independence, as well as the nostalgia of officials from the neighboring country who have never come to terms with that fact," Nikolić concluded.