German Greens, Executive Committee Statement of March 29, 1999.

• Position: On NATO intervention in Yugoslavia - Brief Article

In Kosovo, an enormous humanitarian disaster is developing.

We have supported the intervention of NATO air forces in Yugoslavia since its beginning on March 24, 1999. Despite our great concerns, especially in the area of international law, because we hoped in this way to find a possibility to force an end to the criminal policies of the Serb leadership against the Albanian majority in Kosovo and to secure the enforcement of the peace treaty of Rambouillet. We are and have been conscious of the dilemma involved in defending human rights through a procedure which undoubtedly itself involves a violation of existing international law.

The international political system must and will in the future move the obligation of sovereign states to observe human rights more toward center stage...The sooner, and the more it becomes possible; to establish this as part of a multilateral order; that is to say as part of the UN and the OSCE, and primarily in the form of crisis-prevention policy, the sooner and the more it will be possible to counteract tendencies toward self-mandating by individual powers or alliances, which we reject.

Since the beginning of the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia, the situation has not, in our judgment, changed for the better, but rather for the worse. The chance of acceptance in the future of the Rambouillet treaty by Serbia appears illusory, and for that reason, this goal can no longer be given as a reason for decision-making regarding further procedure. The murders and expulsions committed by Serbian gangs or by...