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- MOSCOW (CP) -- Former Soviet president
Mikhail Gorbachev says NATO's war against Yugoslavia is a sign of collapsing
global order, and it never would have been allowed to happen if the Soviet
Union still existed.
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- "Russia has lost its former position
and ability to influence events, and therefore was unable to prevent this
war from occurring in the first place," Gorbachev said Tuesday in
an interview while attending a signing ceremony for a joint Russian-Canadian
research project in Moscow.
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- "This war is a disgrace to all of
us who tried to build a new world order based on political methods and
a strong role for the United Nations Security Council," he said.
"Instead we see NATO imposing itself as supreme arbiter, using military
power alone".
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- He said that Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic is to blame for taking away the autonomy of the troubled region
of Kosovo and persecuting its ethnic Albanian majority. "But the
situation only became dramatic when NATO set aside the political process
and turned to bombing," he said. "This in turn gave the Yugoslav
forces the green light to strike hard against the Albanians, and turned
Kosovo into a ruin. "Nothing good has been accomplished, only destruction
and chaos".
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- Gorbachev, who led the Soviet Union from
1985 to 1991, is credited with ending his country's participation in the
Cold War and moving to integrate it into the world community.
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- He says that as the Cold War was winding
down 10 years ago he and western leaders discussed a new global security
order that would be founded on law and supervised by the UN Security Council.
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- But the Soviet Union fell apart and the
West tried to unilaterally impose its own writ upon the world, he said.
"At the root of this is the United States' ambitions to dominate the
world," he said. "Two-thirds of the world's raw power, concentrated
in NATO, is attacking one tiny country."
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- Last weekend's accidental bombing of
the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade shows the situation is spinning out of
control, he said. "NATO is hitting everywhere, not only the Chinese
Embassy. Their missiles are even falling on neighbouring countries like
Bulgaria," he said.
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- "It is pure lawlessness and I strongly
condemn it."
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