SERBS HAVE THE RIGHT TO A UNIFIED STATE

BELGRADE, SEPTEMBER 14 /SRNA/ – Historian Aleksandar Raković told SRNA that the breakthrough of the Salonika Front on September 15, 1918, marked the resurrection of the Serbian people, and assessed that it is time, 107 years later, for the Serbian people to clearly state that they have the right to create a unified state in the Balkans.

Raković said that on the upcoming Day of Serbian Unity, Freedom and the National Flag, Serbia and Republika Srpska should demonstrate solidarity. “The Serbian people must show unity, and the leaderships must also demonstrate unity,” he emphasized. According to him, even when it comes to the intellectual elite, who can speak more freely than statesmen in power, it is necessary to express the intention for the Serbian people to be united in a single state. “Serbia, Republika Srpska and Montenegro should create a unified state. There is nothing controversial about that, because if Germany was able to create a unified state again, then one standard cannot apply to them and another to us. So, if we are talking about just solutions, then those just solutions must also apply to the Serbian people, just as much as they applied to the German and other nations,” said Raković. He stressed that the entire breakthrough of the Salonika Front in the First World War and the liberation of Serbia, Montenegro, and other Serbian and Yugoslav territories was a magnificent and historic event. Raković noted that it was one of the greatest achievements of the Serbian people, occurring only three years after Serbia and Montenegro had been occupied and practically erased from the map. “That showed the resurrection of the Serbian people and the strength of diplomacy and the army, which in 1918 managed to move the border from Šabac to the Alps. That was a great and magnificent shift of the state border, which led to the complete collapse of both the Bulgarian and Austro-Hungarian enemies in our region,” Raković said. He pointed out that it is true that this was a prelude to the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes /SHS/, later the Kingdom of SHS/Yugoslavia, and that Serbian unification was declared on December 1, 1918, but within the Yugoslav framework. He emphasized that the Serbian people should draw lessons after the breakup of three Yugoslavias, namely the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Socialist Yugoslavia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This, he said, is a lesson that the Serbian people should focus on their own integration in the future, that is, on creating a unified Serbian state, exclusively in a Serbian framework, without any other regional integrations, because it has been shown that this was not a good solution. “As a people, we have drawn lessons from our experience in Yugoslavia, which was a large state with virtues and flaws, but those flaws decisively led to the disappearance of Yugoslavia. And the Serbian people ended up as the greatest victim of the breakup of Yugoslavia,” Raković underlined. The Day of Serbian Unity, Freedom and the National Flag has been celebrated since 2020 in the Republic of Serbia and Republika Srpska, each year on September 15, because on that day in 1918 the Serbian army, together with its allies, broke through the Salonika Front, which led to a turnaround on the fronts of the First World War and the defeat of the Central Powers. The breakthrough of the Salonika Front, with the rapid liberation of Serbia and then other regions inhabited by Serbs and other South Slavic peoples, resulted in the creation of the joint state of the Kingdom of SHS/Yugoslavia.