Head of DS foreign policy board steps down over PACE vote

Head of DS foreign policy board steps down over PACE vote

BELGRADE -- Dušan Spasojević, chairman of the DS Foreign Policy Committee and the party's international secretary, has confirmed that he resigned from all functions.

Spasojević, Serbia's former ambassador to Turkey and former foreign policy adviser to President Boris Tadić, said the reason for his decision was the vote taken at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) last week.

Democratic Party (DS) officials and Serbian MPs Vesna Marjanović and Nataša Vučković voted in favor of suspending Russia's voting rights in this organization.

Vučković, one of the vice-presidents of the opposition party, told a news conference on Monday that the DS MPs believed their vote was "in Serbia's interest."

In a statement for the Beta news agency, Spasojević said that he "deeply disagreed with this position of the deputies," and added he believed it ran contrary to the country's foreign policy interests and represented "a drastic deviation from the state-making and nationally responsible policies that all DS leaders conducted in the past and are conducting, on behalf of the party and the thousands of its members."

He described as devastating the fact that relevant party organs were circumvented on the occasion, and the practice of harmonization of positions on key issues violated, while the conclusions on the Ukrainian crisis, adopted by the DS Foreign Policy Committee, were ignored.

"I resigned in order to defend the integrity of the Foreign Policy Committee, the dignity of all its members, and my own reputation," said Spasojević.

The PACE vote on Thursday saw a member of the URS party join the two DS MPs...