October 03, 2000

Belgrade, October 2 - Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic addressed Monday the nation over the Serbian radio and television.

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Honored citizens,

In the expectation of the second round of election, I take the opportunity to explain to you my views on the electoral and political situation in our country, especially in Serbia. As you know, efforts have been underway for a whole decade to place the entire Balkan Peninsula under the control of some Western powers. A big part of that job was done by establishing puppet governments in some countries, by transforming them into countries with limited sovereignty or even deprived of any sovereignty at all.

Due to our resistance to such a fate for our country, we were subjected to all forms of pressure to which people in the contemporary world can be subjected. The number and intensity of the pressures multiplied as time went by.

All experience the big powers gained in the second half of the 20th century in overthrowing governments, causing unrest, instigating civil wars, disparaging or liquidating national freedom fighters, bringing states and nations to the brink of poverty - all this was applied to our country and our people.

The developments organized for our elections are also part of the organized persecution on our country and our people, because our country and our people constitute a barrier to the establishment of full domination in the Balkan Peninsula.

A grouping has for a long time now been present in our midst which, under the guise of opposition political parties of democratic orientation, represents the interests of governments which are the protagonists of pressures against Yugoslavia, and especially against Serbia.

That grouping appeared in these elections under the name of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia.

Its real head is not its candidate for president.

Its head for many years has been the president of the Democratic Party and collaborator of the military alliance which waged war against our country. He could not even conceal his collaboration with that alliance. In fact, our entire public knows of his appeal to NATO to bomb Serbia for as many weeks as necessary to break its resistance.

The grouping organized in this manner for these elections therefore represents the armies and governments which recently waged war against Yugoslavia.

In representing their interests, the grouping launched messages to our public that under its leadership, Yugoslavia would be out of any danger of war or violence, that economic prosperity would come, the standard of living would improve visibly and rapidly, that Yugoslavia would allegedly reintegrate international institutions, and so forth.

Honored citizens,

It is my duty to warn you publicly and in time that such promises are false and that the situation is quite different.

It is precisely our policy which guarantees peace and theirs only lasting conflicts and violence, and I shall tell you why.

With the establishment of an administration supported or installed by a community of countries gathered within NATO, Yugoslavia would inevitably become a country the territory of which would quickly be dismembered.

These are not only NATO´s intentions. These are the pre-election promises of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia. We have heard from its representatives that Sandzak would get the autonomy that the member of its coalition and leader of a separatist Muslim organization Sulejman Ugljanin has been advocating for ten years, and which would in fact mean a definite separation of Sandzak from Serbia.

Their promises also include giving to Vojvodina an autonomy that would not only separate it from Serbia and Yugoslavia but would in fact make it an integral part of neighboring Hungary.

In a similar manner other areas would be separated from Serbia, especially its border areas.

Their annexation by neighboring states has for a long time been a hot issue in those states, which keep inciting their minorities in Yugoslavia to make a contribution to an integration of parts of our country with neighboring states.

Within this policy of dismembering Yugoslavia, Kosovo would be the first victim. Its present status would be proclaimed as legal and final. It is the first part of its territory to which Serbia would have to bid farewell, without even voicing hope that that part of its land could once be returned to it.

The territory that would remain bearing the name Serbia would be occupied by international, US or some third military forces, which would treat this territory as their military training ground and as their property to be controlled in line with the interests of the power whose army is present there.

We have been looking at cases of such control and its consequences for decades, and especially in this decade in many countries around the world, unfortunately lately even in Europe, for instance in Kosovo, Republic of Srpska and Macedonia, in our immediate neighborhood.

The people of Serbia would know the fate of the Kurds, with a prospect of being exterminated more speedily that the Kurds since they are less numerous, and since their movements would be limited to a much smaller area than the one in which Kurds have been present for decades.

As for Montenegro, its fate would be left in the hands of the mafia, whose rules of the game should be made well known to the citizens: any breach of discipline and especially any opposition to mafia interests is punishable by death without any right to appeal.

I have presented to you the fate of Yugoslavia in case of acceptance of the NATO option for our country, in order to warn you that, in addition to loss of land and humiliation of the people, all would live under ceaseless violence.

The new owners of former Yugoslavia´s state territory and occupiers of the remaining Serbian territory would, as is the nature of things, terrorize the population whose territory they will have occupied.

The Serb people itself would at the same time fight continuously for the re-establishment of a Serb state in which it could reassemble.

They do not want peace or prosperity in the Balkans. They want this to be a zone of permanent conflicts and wars which would provide them with an alibi for lasting presence.

A puppet administration therefore guarantees violence, possibly many years of war, anything but peace. Only our own administration guarantees peace.

Moreover, all countries finding themselves with a status of limited sovereignty and with governments under the influence of foreign powers, have speedily become impoverished in a manner destroying all hope for more just and humane social relations.

A great division into a poor majority and a rich minority, this has been the picture of Eastern Europe for some years now that we can all see.

That picture would also include us. We, too, would under the command and control by the owners of our country quickly have a tremendous majority of the very poor, whose prospects of coming out of their poverty would be very, very uncertain and far away.

The rich minority would be constituted by the black marketeering elite, which would be allowed to be rich only on condition that it be fully loyal to the command which decides the fate of their country.

Public and social property would quickly be transformed into private property, but its owners, as demonstrated by the experience of our neighbors, would as a rule be foreigners. Among few exceptions would be only those who would purchase their right to ownership by their loyalty and submission, which would lead to the elimination of elementary national and human dignity.

The greatest national assets in such circumstances become the property of foreigners, and the people who used to manage them would continue to do so, but as employees of foreign companies in their own country.

National humiliation, state fragmentation and social misery would necessarily lead to many forms of social pathology, of which crime would be the first. This is not just a supposition, this is the experience of all countries which have taken the path that we are trying to avoid at any cost.

The capitals of European crime are no longer in the west, they were moved to Eastern Europe a decade ago.

Our people find it hard to bear already the present crime incidence, as we lived for a long time - from World War II to the nineties - in a society which hardly knew any crime at all. Wider crime, such as cannot be avoided in a society that we would become with the loss of sovereignty and a large part of territory, such wider crime would be as dangerous for our small and unused to crime people as war is dangerous for the society and its citizens.

One of the essential tasks of a puppet government in any country, including ours were we to have such a government, is loss of identity.

Countries under foreign command relatively quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

Invisible at first, but very efficient and merciless selection of national identity would reduce it to a few local dishes, a few songs and folk dances, the names of national heroes used as brand names for food products or cosmetics.

One of the really obvious consequences of the takeover of territories of countries by the big powers in the 20th century is the annihilation of the identity of the people of those countries.

Experience of other countries shows that people can hardly come to terms with the speed with which they are starting to use a foreign language as their own, to identify with foreign historic figures forgetting their own, to be better acquainted with the literature of their occupiers than their own, to glorify the history of others while mocking their own, to resemble others instead of themselves.

The loss of national identity is the greatest defeat a nation can know, which is inevitable in the contemporary form of colonization.

Besides, that new form of colonization by its very nature rules out any possibility of free speech or free will, and especially rules out any creativity of any kind.

Countries that are not free deny to the people who live in them the right to free speech, as it would necessarily be contrary to the absence of freedom.

This is why torture over thought is the most consistent and essential form of torture in a country that has lost its freedom. As for exercising free will, it is, naturally, out of the question. Free will is allowed only as a farce. It is allowed only to the lackeys of foreign masters, whose simulated free will is used by the occupiers as a justification for establishing democracy in whose name they have taken possession of another people´s country.

I would like to stress particularly because of young people, intellectuals, scientists, that countries deprived of sovereignty are as a rule deprived of the right to creative work, and especially creative work in the field of science.

Large centers and large powers finance scientific work, control its attainments and decide about the application of its results. Dependent states, if they have scientific laboratories and scientific institutes, are not independent ones but operate as branches controlled by one center. Their attainments must remain within bounds that will not introduce in occupied countries and occupied peoples the seed of rebellion and emancipation.

In this moment ahead of the run-off elections, because the Democratic Opposition of Serbia doubts it can achieve the result it needs, leaders of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia with money introduced into the country are bribing, blackmailing and harassing citizens and organizing strikes, unrest and violence in order to stop production, all work and every activity.

All that, of course, with the aim of stopping life in Serbia and with the explanation that life can start again and go on successfully and well, when it is organized by those who represent here the intentions, plans and interests of occupiers.

Our country is a sovereign state. It has its laws, its Constitution, its institutions. Serbia is duty bound, and it deserves, to defend itself from invasion which has been prepared against it by false forms of subversion.

And the citizens should know, that by participating in subversion whose objective is foreign domination over their country or the occupation of their country, they shoulder the historical responsibility of denying to their country the right to exist but also the responsibility of losing control over their own lives.

By giving up their country to others, to foreign will they also surrender to foreign will their own life and the life of their children and of many other people.

I considered it my duty, to warn the citizens of our country about the consequences of the activities financed and supported by the governments of NATO countries.

Citizens do not have to believe me.

My wish is only that they do not realize this when it is too late, that they do not realize this when it will be difficult to redress mistakes that citizens naively, superficially or erroneously made, as those mistakes will be difficult to rectify and some will never be rectified.

My motive to express my opinion in this way is not, at all, of personal nature. I was elected twice president of Serbia and once president of Yugoslavia. It should be clear to all, after these ten years, that they are not attacking Serbia because of Milosevic, but Milosevic because of Serbia.

By conscience in that respect is totally clear.

My conscience, however, would not at all be clear if I would not tell my people, after all these years at their head, what I think about their fate if that fate is imposed by someone else, even if it means to explain to the people that they have chosen that fate themselves.

The misjudgment that they are choosing what has been chosen by someone else, is the most dangerous misjudgment and the main reason of my decision to address publicly the citizens of Yugoslavia.

Thank you.