As the efforts of the international community and the UN Secretary-General Special Envoy to resolve the future status of Kosovo are intensifying, we believe it is necessary to remind all involved parties of some very essential things;
1. The discriminatory policies of the Milosevic regime towards the majority Albanian population in Kosovo, who experienced massive crimes during the NATO intervention, has made it impossible for Kosovo to remain a part of Serbia.
2. The post-Milosevic authorities, especially the Democratic Party of Serbia, have a lack of will to break from the criminal past and carry out a lustration process in Serbia. In addition, the leaders’ actions have increased the desire of the majority of citizens in Kosovo that their region not be connected with Serbia in the future.
3. The citizens of Serbia want to live in peace, without fear of new wars, renewed international isolation, general poverty and insecurity - in short, without everything that we remember from the period of the criminal Milosevic regime.
4. People’s lives take precedence over territory and state-legal status. Those who would sacrifice people’s lives (especially the lives of someone else’s children) to gain territory without citizens do not want the best for all ethnicities, regardless of the patriotic phrases which they employ. (Experience teaches us that such slogans are a mask for the moneymaking that motivates war profiteers).
5. It is in the interest of citizens of Serbia and the Balkans, that all changes in the state-legal status of a country or part of country in our region are enacted without violence. There must be a firm guarantee of individual and collective human rights of all women and men in Serbia and neighboring countries.
We resolutely renounce the saber-rattling that the most extreme holdovers of the criminal regime (in complete agreement with the extremists from other ethnic communities) employ and the transparent manipulation of ‘holy Serbian earth’ which the prime minister and like-minded people employ.
Vojislav Koštunica did not condemn the war crimes committed in our name in 1999 or today. He imitates Milosevic’s refusal to meet with envoys from the international community. His irresponsibility is leading Serbia towards international isolation once again. We hope that democratic forces and the citizens of Serbia will prevent this and that international political decision makers will stop treating Kostunica as a democratic politician. They will choose if history will remember him as an unsuccessful politician or as a criminal whose irresponsibility led Serbia to international isolation again and forever estranged his country from normalcy.
Women in Black
Belgrade, February 2, 2007
