200 leading 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, as well as former Yugoslav presidents Vojislav Kostunica and Dobrica Cosic, 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.
(KosovoCompromise Staff) Tuesday, January 12, 2010
"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.
