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BERLIN - President of the Yugoslav parliament Chamber of the Republics (upper house) and head of the Yugoslav delegation to the 102nd conference of the Interparliamentary Union Srdja Bozovic said during the general debate Thursday that last spring's aggression by the most powerful world military alliance against Yugoslavia, a small, sovereign and peace-loving UN member-state, without prior Security Council approval, had seriously undemined the very foundations of the world organization and international order.
Yugoslavia was a victim of a brutal experiment whose goal was to introduce and legalize a new doctrine of interventionism and to trample the principle of the sovereignty of states under the pretext of alleged protection of human rights, Bozovic said.
Describing to the participants the catastrophic effects of the NATO aggression, Bozovic said that overall damages had been assessed at over 100 billion dollars.
Yugoslavia is meanwhile still being subjected to untold pressures and economic and financial sanctions, preventing its reconstruction and recovery from the aggression, Bozovic said.
This can only be described as pursuing aggression by different means, he noted.
The aggressors must be held accountable for the unprecedented crimes against peace and humanity they have committed, and the people of Yugoslavia, the principal victims of the aggresson, must receive just compensation for their losses and suffering, Bozovic said.
First of all, Yugoslavia demands an immediate lifting of all sanctions and the halting of all political conditions and collective punishment of its entire population, Bozovic said.
The international community has the moral obligation to help Yugoslavia, which is hosting 250,000 new refugees from Serbia's Kosovo-Metohija province in addition to the 700,000 Serb refugees who had fled earlier from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which makes it a state with the highest number of refugees in the world. It must also enable Yugoslavia to join the European and world family of nations on the basis of equality and without pre-conditions, Bozovic said.
Bozovic pointed to the disastrous situation in Kosovo-Metohija, where international KFOR peacekeepers and UN civilian mission UNMIK have failed to honor their commitments and have even flagrantly violated the relevant documents.
KFOR and UNMIK have not secured a safe environment for all or law and order in the province, and have not ensured the conditions for the safe return of all displaced persons, nor have they demilitarized and disarmed the terrorist-separatist self-styled KLA and other armed ethnic Albanian groups, Bozovic said.
KFOR and UNMIK are consequently increasingly moving away from their basic goals of preserving the multi-ethnic, multi-confessional and multi-cultural character of the province, while at the same time encouraging ethnic Albanian separatists and terrorists to perservere in their dangerous plans for creating an independent Albanian state in a part of Yugoslavia's and Serbia's sovereign territory, as a first step towards creating a "greater Albania", Bozovic said.
Yugoslavia insists on preventing any attempts at violating its sovereignty and territorial integrity in Kosovo-Metohija and demands that the Security Council take the firmest measures to that end as it must guarantee the implementation of its own Resolution 1244, Bozovic said.