BELGRADE – Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic has written to European officials to warn that, by closing the border with Serbia to freight traffic, Croatia has violated the Stabilisation and Association Agreement, inflicting direct damage to Serbia’s economic cooperation with the European Union.
“At a time when the Serbian government is making efforts – both human and financial – to open reception centres, a European Union member state has unilaterally closed its border to us for all economic activities, including freight transport,” Vucic wrote in a letter.
With aggressive and unacceptable measures, Croatia has drastically impacted Serbia’s national and vital economic interests, also strongly undermining regional relations and stability within the overall context of the regional reconciliation process as well as open and unsolved issues, which still exist in our bilateral relations, the prime minister wrote.
Vucic noted that Croatia’s unilateral decision to ban freight traffic has absolutely nothing to do with solving the migrant crisis in Europe, but with a violation of the Stabilisation and Association Agreement that is directly damaging Serbia’s economic cooperation with the EU.
“Based on my recent conversation with the Prime Minister of the Republic of Croatia, Mr Zoran Milanovic, I would like to reaffirm the readiness of the Republic of Serbia to hold an open dialogue with all regional partners on potential solutions to the migrant crisis,” Vucic wrote in the letter to European officials, the Serbian government press office said in a statement.