[Column] Toward stronger and diverse ties

H.E. Nemanja Grbic
The author is the ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary of Serbia to Korea.

As the Embassy of Serbia in Seoul proudly celebrates the National Day together with the Serbian community here, as well as our Korean friends, it is an opportunity to once again recall the close and decades-long friendly relations that so happily exist between our two countries and two peoples.

The Statehood Day or National Day is a holiday celebrated every 15th of February in Serbia to commemorate the outbreak of the First Serbian Uprising in 1804, which evolved into the Serbian Revolution against the Ottoman rule. The revolution ultimately resulted in the recognition of Serbia’s autonomy (1817) and later independence (1878) from the Ottoman Empire. On the same day in 1835, the first modern Serbian constitution was adopted.

Since the establishment of the diplomatic relations in 1989, Serbia and Korea maintained close and mutually beneficial bilateral cooperation. This fact was recently further reconfirmed through bilateral exchanges at the highest level, namely meetings of President Aleksandar Vucic and President Yoon Suk Yeol on the sidelines of the WEF in Davos in January and that of Prime Minister Ana Brnabic and his counterpart Han Duck-soo in Paris on the sidelines of the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) last November.

Also worth mentioning is the meeting of the First Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Serbia Ivica Dacic with senior presidential secretary Yang last November in Tunisia. Along with the meetings at the highest level, two ministries of foreign affairs recently successful held the 8th Regular Bilateral Political Consultations in Seoul, on the deputy ministerial level, which served as a good opportunity to discuss paths of future cooperation across wide range of sectors.

On the economic front, I am happy to note that, despite the Covid-19 pandemic, cooperation between Serbia and Korea remained successful and robust. Trade exchange volume tripled over the past five years with overall Serbian export to Korea showing an impressive 13-fold increase compared to 2018. Total bilateral trade exceeded $530 million last year for the first time in history, but still there is vast room for further improvement of our economic ties. So far, Korean companies in Serbia created 10,000 jobs and invested around $100 million, but we certainly do hope for more Korean investments in the years to come.

Serbia has a lot to offer to potential Korean investors in the fields of ICT (which became largest Serbian export sector worth 2.6 billion euros in 2022), renewable energy, agriculture, automotive industry, etc. The country has numerous comparative advantages, such as great geo-strategic location, generous government incentives and tax policies, stable economy, which enabled the country to attract around 60 percent of all foreign direct investments in the Western Balkans in the past few years. It is my strong belief that initiating bilateral FTA talks scheduled for the second half of this year and finalizing bilateral investment agreement will further enhance our trade exchange and incentivize new Korean investments in Serbia.

In the field of development cooperation, I wish to underline how very grateful we are for the Korean support in developing our capacities in ICT, e-government, custom administration, smart cities and others. The successful Serbo-Korean Center for IT and E-government founded in 2020 and the Serbo-Korean Information Access Center (SKIP Center) established in 2017 are just two examples of a very fruitful cooperation in this sense. We are determined to continue with this trend in the future as well.

Being a small country that is very proud of its sports achievements and the home country of Novak Djokovic (the best tennis player in the world, winner of 22 grand slams), Nikola Jokic (the NBA MVP 2-time in a row) and Milica Mandic (the winner of two Olympic gold medals in taekwondo), Serbia is a country that can offer a lot to Korea in terms of exchange and cooperation in the field of sports.

To this end, I hope that an MOU on cooperation in this area will be signed in a very near future. In addition to sports, areas like culture and creative industries (film, gaming, audio-visual arts, etc.) but also scientific cooperation (AI, big data, IoT) are of particular interest to Serbia as it emerges as a technological hub in Southeast Europe.

In parallel to the growing interest for Korean pop-culture in Serbia (movies, K-pop music, and drama etc.) and rising interest in learning Korean language among young generations of Serbs, we are doing our best to promote Serbia and its rich history and culture to the young generations of Koreans. To this goal, the Embassy has carried out several public diplomacy activities last year with “Young ambassadors program” being the most successful one. We plan to keep up with this work.

As the tourism sector is steadily coming back on track after being heavily hit by the pandemic and more and more Koreans start to pick their new travel destinations, I am confident that there is a lot Serbia can offer. Despite being the country abundant of rich historical heritage, serene nature, delicious food and warmhearted people, Serbia still remains undiscovered for many Koreans. My goal and mission here is to change this and awaken the desire of Koreans to visit my beautiful country in bigger numbers.

At the very end, I would like to express my sincere and warmhearted wishes for health, prosperity and success of your readers in the Year of the Rabbit. Let us work together on forging yet stronger and diverse ties between our two friendly nations.