At great pleasure of both organizers and participants of the ISSS 2014, former MEP, German politician and a teacher Doris Pack, held a lecture about her experience during a long-year work related with the SEE region. As someone who is introduced with problems of the region regarding EU accession process more than other EU parliamentarians and politicians, Pack started with the dissolution of former Yugoslavia. She stressed that nobody wanted the Yugoslavia to split and that EU parliamentarians were not aware what is about to happen. “Nobody paid attention. We wanted the entire Yugoslavia to join the EU and not six or more states each and separate”, said Pack.
As for BiH the way it is now, Doris Pack said that BiH needs a system and politicians who want welfare for the citizens to overcome the current problems. However, politicians in BiH are using ethnic rhetoric just the way former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic did in the ‘90s. The Dayton Peace Accords (DPA) which stopped the war made the country that cannot function and it needs to be changed, said Pack. She added that general elections are close but “for whom to vote, when we see same names, all corrupted?”
Students were very active and asked questions about the situation in Kosovo and relations with Serbia in terms of the EU accession, Macedonia and the issue of minorities, minorities in Greece and even whether Switzerland will ever become the EU member state.
As for the possibility of the EU to be more active in the Balkans, particularly in BiH, she said that the EU cannot intervene in BiH to change the situation and that it should be done by politicians who were elected by the citizens. At the end, Doris Pack concluded that parliamentarians who will speak on behalf of BiH need to have more personality and power to make European Governments, and not the European Commission (EC) which mostly deals with administrative work, to react in the region.