Belgrade, April 6th (Tanjug) - On the occasion of the criminal arrest of Momcilo Krajisnik by the SFOR members, Yugoslav Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic, on behalf of the Federal government, sent a letter to the UN Security Council, addressed to current Council President, Canadian Ambassador Robert Fowler. The letter reads as follows:

"Esteemed Mr. President,

The Yugoslav Government and public have most strongly condemned the perfidious and disgraceful arrest of Momcilo Krajisnik, one of the most prominent leaders of Serbian people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, carried out in a most brutal way in the night of April 3rd 2000 by SFOR, at the orders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

This arrest, carried out in a terrorist manner and in Gestapo-style by using explosives to break into the house, and by intimidating and tying up the children, is just the most recent and drastic instance in the series of the criminal, immoral and politically motivated NATO acts under the guise of the Hague Tribunal, aimed at frightening and enslaving Serbian people.

Momcilo Krajisnik was not only Speaker of the Parliament of Republika Srpska elected at a democratic election by the will of the people, the outcome of which was confirmed also by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), but was also a member of the collective Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the highest representative of Republika Srpska at the negotiations in Dayton. This brazen criminal act is all the more absurd, as Momcilo Krajisnik never held an executive office except that, after the Dayton-Paris Agreement, he was elected a member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This insolent act has confirmed what the Government of the FR of Yugoslavia has been pointing out ever since the establishment of the Tribunal - that this "ad hoc" body, in outright contravention of the principle of International Criminal and Humanitarian law, is not an institution of law and justice, but a political creation functioning as the commission of genocide against Serbian people. It does not act according to the international law, but according to the dictate of the US Administration, the aim of which is to impose hegemony and thought monopoly.

If indeed the Tribunal acted on the basis of justice and law, it would have to, first and foremost, call to account the leaders of NATO and those who are responsible for genocidal aggression against the FR Yugoslavia, carried out with the most flagrant violation of the Charter of the UN, international law, national laws of the States members of the UN, as well as the NATO founding act.

If it was a forum of justice, it would have long ago indicted those leaders who ordered and managed the aggression against the FR Yugoslavia, who ordered a ruthless bombardment of a sovereign country and an entire nation without a precedent in the history of civilization, who ordered the killing of thousands of innocent people, one third of whom were children, and over four fifths of civilians, the killing of patients in hospitals, destruction of hundreds of schools, a huge number of hospitals, maternity wards, refugee camps, systems of heating and transmission of electric power, TV and radio stations, refineries, roads, bridges etc.

In the situation when genocide against Serbian people and other non-Albanian population in the Serbian province of Kosovo-Metohija takes place before the eyes of the international public, the Tribunal has not taken a single step in order to try and put an end to that protracted crime.

The absence of persecution and arrest of persons responsible for the genocide against Serbs in Croatia during operations "Flash" and "Storm", as well as in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the time of the civil war, is deliberate encouragement to new crimes against Serbs since it demonstrates that they can be carried out with impunity. This is the case even by the same criminals that acquired their criminal experience in Krajina and other parts of the former Yugoslavia.

World-renowned legal experts have passed their assessment that the Tribunal is not based on the Charter of the UN, since there is no legal basis for establishing a judicial organ as an auxiliary body of the Security Council. All international courts are set up exclusively by agreement. That the Tribunal was set up for political goals, for manipulating the international public, is most clearly evident if the rules of procedure of the Tribunal and the Permanent International Criminal Court are compared, particularly with respect to the position of the Prosecutor.

The rules applied by the Tribunal in its procedure do not exist in any modern legal system. No legal system recognizes the so-called "secret indictments". The prosecution policy pursued by the Prosecutor of the Tribunal shows that the Tribunal has been politically instrumentalized by the Administration of the United States and NATO countries. More than two thirds of the arrestees and indictees are Serbs, including the highest-ranking political and military officials of Republika Srpska, who have been charged even with the most serious crimes and who are alone being arrested in a brutal way.

Thus, the work of the Prosecutor and the Tribunal has so far demonstrated in a clear way that the US creators of the Tribunal have sought to impose the impression of the responsibility of the Serbs for the civil war in the former Yugoslavia at all costs, and thus to conceal their own responsibility for atrocities. The Tribunal is a mechanism for fabricating a justification for the aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the genocide against the Serbian people.

The Tribunal shows no legal, political or moral responsibility for its work. This is reflected, inter alia, in the killing of Serbs during arrests (Simo Drljaca, Dragan Gakovic) and an inhumane treatment of the arrestees (the tragic loss of life of Slavko Dokmanovic and Milan Kovacevic in the prison at The Hague).

The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, as a party signatory and a guarantor of the Dayton-Paris Agreement, stresses that these activities of the Tribunal represent a drastic violation of the letter and substance of the Agreement, the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and International law in general, whereby peace and security not only in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also in the entire region, is brought into question.

Proceeding from the afore-mentioned, the FR of Yugoslavia calls on the Security council to abolish the Hague Tribunal, as a creation without legal grounding, without delay. The records kept by that quasi-judicial institution should be forwarded to regular courts of the member-States of the UN, for the purpose of being acted upon in accordance with their internal laws, since each and every member-State without exception provides severe punishment of war crimes.

Specifically, the FR Yugoslavia requests that Momcilo Krajisnik and all other persons indicted and arrested without a legal grounding be released immediately, says the letter of Zivadin Jovanovic to the Security Council of the UN.