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BELGRADE - Yugoslavia's foreign minister said on Thursday that the Istanbul summit of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) showed that this Organisation was serving the purpose of NATO and the western military industry.
Zivadin Jovanovic said that the conditions of, manner of preparation for and participants in the OSCE summit, which opened earlier on Thursday, showed that the OSCE had been turned into an instrument of NATO and the western military industry.
Jovanovic was speaking at the graduation of the first generation of students from the Diplomatic Academy in Belgrade.
He said that the OSCE's attitude to Yugoslavia as a founding member of the Organisation bore out Belgrade's thesis that the OSCE defeated its purpose and had allowed itself to be turned into NATO's instrument of pressure on a European state and nation.
Speaking about the tasks of Yugoslav diplomacy, he stressed that its first job was to defend the country's sovereignty and territrial integrity, which had for years now been grappling with an offensive of separatism and terrorism.
Another important job of the diplomatic service, he added, was to work to create conditions necessary for further development and for the reconstruction of the devastation caused by NATO's aggression on Yugoslavia from March 24 to June 10, 1999.
He went on to say that the Yugoslav diplomatic service was "the diplomatic service of an independent and sovereign state, and it serves the vital interests of the states and nation, while taking care not to harm another subject in international relations."
He further said that Yugoslavia was a victim of NATO, which had used the ethnic Albanian separatists and terrorists in the Yugoslav republic of Serbia's Kosovo-Metohija province as its scouts on land and, occasionally, as its land forces.
However, he stressed, the western military alliance had failed to achieve its object, "which was to occupy and subjugate our country and our people."
Jovanovic said it was hard to imagine that a nation and state that had successfully resisted the greatest military power should not show the same determination in the defence against new forms of aggression.
He explained that aggression on Yugoslavia took several forms, the first of which was political aggression, whereby efforts were being made to destabilise the country internally.
He went on to say that centres for destabilising Yugoslavia had been set up in some neighbouring countries and within various international centres.
"This is to the credit neither of the countries nor of the governments that have allowed it," nor is such practice conducive to closer ties between neighbours or to neighbourly relations, according to Jovanovic.
This was conducive, rather, to the imposition of the will of others on the whole region, he added, explaining that these efforts were upheld by corresponding financial measures.
Another form of aggression, according to Jovanovic, is economic aggression, taking the form of an outer wall of sanctions in the economy, science, technology and transport, and yet another is a media blockade.
He went on to say he was sure that Yugoslav diplomacy would help narrow the scope for political hegemony and the subjugation of other nations.
He hoped also that international law and international organisations would, in the foreseeable future, escape from the jaws of the military industry and the forces of hegemony and return to the road of right and the principle of equality.
Jovanovic further said that the doctrine of limited sovereignty, which was being propagated in the name of democracy and human rights, was a threat that the world was beginning to perceive and that the influential states fully understood.
They were, therefore, working for a multi-polar world, based on the equality of states and nations regardless of the power of their military, economy or population, he explained.
He stressed that the NATO aggressors and advocates of continuing the aggression would not understand that the independence, national entity, dignity and glorious defence of the national interests and independence displayed by the Yugoslav people had deep roots.
These powers are wasting their time, and the economic and media blockade of Yugoslavia has no future, according to Jovanovic.
He went on to say that the diplomatic service had the special and topical job of leading the country out of the isolation and breaking down the outer wall of sanctions.
Yugoslavia was achieving this, he added, through a policy of openness and a philosophy of freedom of movement of people and ideas, of economic, cultural, scientific and other goods.