27.11.2017.
People are the best that Serbia has
During today's visit to the Republic of Cyprus, Defence Minister Aleksandar Vulin talked with Major General Mohammad Humayun Kabir, Force Commander, after which he visited members of the Ministry of Defence and the Serbian Armed Forces who are deployed to the multinational operation UNFICYP.
- It is most important for me that all of our boys and girls are well, healthy, disciplined, that they are taken care of and this is not only by our commanding officers, but by the heads of the entire peacekeeping mission and what I can say with special pleasure, they are talked about in superlatives. The Serbian soldier here, in Cyprus, represents the Serbian state, the Serbian Armed Forces with dignity and shows that the people are the best we have, Minister Vulin said.
He added that members of the Serbian Armed Forces also in Cyprus proved to be top professionals, as well as people "who can understand someone else's pain, someone else's troubles and who are able to deal with numerous challenges."
- At least we have experience how it looks like in interethnic conflicts, how it looks like when you have peoples who live very close to each other and are divided by politics, history, divided by everything which can make life very, very difficult. Our people are here to make their lives easier, to enable politicians to find a peace solution and they are pretty much successful in doing so.
Members of the Ministry of Defence and the Serbian Armed Forces participate in ten peacekeeping missions - six under the command of the United Nations and four under the command of the European Union.
- In every mission, we proved to be very good and in each of them our soldiers were talked about all the best. In each of them, we have Serbia decently represented, and it is not a small thing when your country is talked about well in so many different places and when the people are spoken of as the people whom everyone would like to see again. After each of our peace missions there are representatives of large, powerful countries who wish to have exactly our peacekeepers in some other peace missions with them. Of course, there is a clear political interest, which is the spread of the influence of our country as there is a clear economic interest. In all countries affected by difficult times, when it passes, there comes a period of reconstruction. And reconstruction is usually carried out by those who took part in the peace implementation. So we have the interest to show that we are a country that has a significant influence and a country that can help tomorrow also in the reconstruction of countries that were affected by the war, Minister Vulin said.
Master Sergeant of the Serbian Armed Forces, Goran Buzić, commander of the first detachment and commander of the Stefan Nemanja base, said that, unlike the job that he does in Serbia, the job in Cyprus differs in the fact that instead of arms and military equipment, they use cameras, conversation and smile in their work with the people whose land they are guarding making sure that interpersonal and interneighbourly relations are not broken.
- Here we get a great experience that we will be able to transfer to colleagues from the Serbian Armed Forces. We are now one big family. Together we celebrate our birthdays and family fiests, for many things it is enough to look at each other and solve everything, Master Sergeant Buzić says.
Lance Corporal Jasna Radulović has been employed since 2010 in the Serbian Armed Forces and came to Cyprus thanks to the encouragement of her husband - a colleague who was also on the mission. She says she is satisfied with the attitude that male colleagues have towards her and that women are equal with men at the Stefan Nemanja base.
Defence Minister Aleksandar Vulin, who is paying an official visit to the Republic of Cyprus at the invitation of its Minister of Defence Christoforos Fokaides, signed with Minister Fokaides an agreement on exchange and protection of classified information earlier during the day.
