Statement by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia, Nikola Selaković

Attempts to brutally falsify history by erasing traces of Serbian existence in Kosovo and Metohija have gained perverse dimensions in the claims that the battle of Kosovo was not fought by the Serbian, but by some "Balkan" army.

Albanian political extremists, who order such insane historical forgeries, are doing everything to invent the continuity of the Albanian presence in Kosovo and Metohija, although there is no material evidence that in the Middle Ages, Arbanasi, or Arnauts, lived in that territory, let alone evidence that they participated in the Battle of Kosovo.

There is no mention of the ancestors of today's Albanians, unless they were Serbs, in our government charters or in much later Turkish defters, which record a gradual and centuries-old change in the ethnic structure east of Prokletije, but only after the fall of the Serbian medieval state.

National history cannot be invented by abducting and rewriting other people's history, and such attempts testify to the deep political complexes and cultural inferiority of those who try something like that.

The presence of the Albanian people is an indisputable fact in Kosovo and Metohija today, but they were not present 600 or 700 years ago, which does not mean that the Albanian people in our southern province should not have a future – it just means that they did not have a past and that they will not create it by kidnapping or by rewriting clear historical facts.