One Million Signatures Collected Against Yugoslav War
by Dan Dragomir
Special to Antiwar.com
6/2/99

About one million signatures have been collected in Russia under the appeal against the war in Yugoslavia, on the initiative of the "Right Cause" coalition. They will be forwarded from Moscow to the NATO headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday, the leaders of the coalition said at a press conference at the Novosti news agency.

A truck loaded with the appeals will go by the Moscow-Brest-Poland- Frankfurt an der Oder route. It is expected to reach the NATO headquarters on June 8. The signatures were collected in 68 regions of Russia.

Boris Nemtsov said that they could collect dozens of times more signatures, because the overwhelming majority of Russian citizens oppose the NATO armed action in Yugoslavia. The problem is that they did not have enough time for that.

In the opinion of Nemtsov, people's diplomacy should by an indispensable complement to official diplomacy, because public opinion plays a very important role in the West. The Right Cause coalition is going to urge parties, public movements and religious organisations of the West to support their action, Nemtsov said.

"We believe Western public opinion is being misinformed on this problem, and our action is one more attempt to bring home to the West that the picture of what is going on is not just black and white, that there are many other colours," Boris Fyodorov said. "No one has the right to take upon himself the role of a world gendarme and to kill people."