http://www.slobodanjovanovic.org/2010/01/12/200-serb-intellectuels-say-serbia-cannot-join-nato-without-referendum/?lang=lat
200 Serb intellectuels say Serbia cannot join NATO without referendum
Over 200 leading Serb intellectuals, including film director Emir
Kusturica, the acting head of the Serb Orthodox Church Amfilohije,
former Yugoslav presidents Vojislav Kostunica and Dobrica Cosic, as well
as the president of the Slobodan Jovanovic Fund Matija Beckovic, pleaded
on Monday for a referendum on NATO membership, arguing that Serbia must
hold a popular consultation on the issue due to the Alliance’s 1999
bombing and its role in organizing the Kosovo Albanian unilateral
secession in 2008.
“Serbia has many times, from the world’s most important podiums, said it
will ‘never recognize an independent state of Kosovo’, and that means
that Serbia will never join NATO,” says the text of the petition.
“The ‘independent Kosovo’ is NATO’s doing, it created this phony state
and gave itself supreme and unchallenged powers [there],” the group said
in its request, read during a news conference in Belgrade this Monday by
author and member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU)
Matija Beckovic.
The letter adds that a “militarily neutral Serbia, true to herself and
her own traditions, is no exception”.
“Serbia also has another reason [not to join], that no other country
has, and that is the criminal NATO bombing and destruction of Serbia and
her people, while trampling on sacrosanct norms of international law.
That reason has not been produced from times immemorial, nor is some
other NATO, rather than this one, responsible for that crime,” the
intellectuals wrote, in reference to the 1999 bombings over Kosovo.
“This is a reason that the Serb people cannot ignore, without ignoring
their own memory and their own dignity”, the intellectuals underlined.
The Serbian parliament adopted a resolution on the country’s military
neutrality in December 2007, but it is under pressure by Washington and
a few other Western countries to drop the resolution and join NATO.
Serbian News Network - SNN
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