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BONN - NATO bombs that destroyed last spring the economy and infrastructure in Serbia were of course directed against the Serbian people, former leader of the German Social Democratic party (SPD) Oskar Lafontaine said in his book The Heart Beats on the Left Side, stressing that by its aggression on Serbia NATO had trampled the U.N. Charter and drastically violated international law.
Lafontaine for the first makes public in his book, whose excerpts continued to be published Thursday by the Bonn daily Die Welt that the NATO aggression on FR Yugoslavia was also one of the reasons he decided on March 11 to tender his resignation on all political functions.
Lafontaine was at the time also finance minister in the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
Condemning cynical, pretentiously moral lamenting of German Foreign Minister Jozef Fischer and Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping during NATO's aggression. Lafontaine called it the typical zeal of turncoats - of people who once were fervent pacifists, and now are even more fervent advocates of war.
The former SPD head, an authentic leftist, criticized more specifically Fischer because he, as foreign minister, had ample possibility to make the case for preserving U.N. monopoly on the use of force, instead of blindly following the plan drawn up by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
A true fighter for peace must at the same time fight for enhancing international law, and not for weakening that law. And that is precisely what happened in The Kosovo war, Oskar Lafontaine said.