In years to come you will realise that it is not me being biased towards the Serbian people; it is you who refuse to treat Serbian people with respect or to see anything away from the poison spouted about Serbia by Nato. You judge everybody by the 'demons' painted by the media. Go there yourself and speak with people to understand how badly you have misjudged the country.
Statement by Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Igor Ivanov at Airport on Arrival in Washington, September 19, 2001
1654-19-09-2001
Beginning my short working visit to Washington at the invitation of the US Secretary of State, I would like above all to express the solidarity of the leadership and people of Russia with the people of the United States, which came recently under barbaric terrorist attack. Together with it we grieve for the victims of this monstrous crime. The grief and outrage of America have echoed in the hearts of the citizens of Russia, who had personal experience of the horror of terrorist attacks. I will repeat the words of the Russian President, addressed to the people of the United States, we are with you, we wholly and entirely share your pain, we support you. Once again the fact has been borne home to all of us that terrorism knows no frontiers. Thrown down to all of civilized mankind, the impudent challenge requires a resolute rebuff. Combining the efforts of the whole international community in the fight against the terrorist threat is becoming imperative. It is necessary to cooperate more specifically and effectively, to make maximum use of bilateral and multilateral channels and to create an international legal base. We have practical proposals on that score. We expect this theme to be examined in depth and comprehensively at the upcoming talks in Washington.
During the visit my meetings are scheduled with US President George Bush, his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and a number of influential US Congress members. Naturally, we will hold several rounds of consultations with Colin Powell.
The main aim of the talks is the preparation of a meeting between Presidents Vladimir Putin and George Bush in Shanghai in October 2001 as part of the APEC summit, and of the visit to be paid by the President of the Russian Federation to the US in mid-October, 2001. The intensity of the Russian-American contacts already held recently and those upcoming is a striking testimony to the fact that our dialogue is acquiring positive dynamics, and bilateral relations the necessary durability and predictability.
Much of the attention in the Washington meetings at various levels, undoubtedly, will be devoted to questions of strategic stability. In particular, we will analyze the outcomes of the consultations held between the foreign affairs and defense agencies of the two countries on the interrelated issues of strategic offensive and defensive arms, as had been arranged by our Presidents in Genoa. A timetable for their continuation in the future also will be considered.
I think that a discussion of the most acute regional problems will also take place. Above all, this concerns the situation in the Middle East, in the Balkans and around Iraq. I must say that our approaches to many of the crisis situations are identical or similar, and the differences mainly concern tactical ways to resolve them.
In addition, I'm planning to touch on certain questions of development of trade and economic ties between Russia and the US. In this area some positive shifts have become evident of late, and we need to help in every way the consolidation of this tendency. A number of other questions of bilateral relations between our countries also will be considered.
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Now's your chance to shine, Kate: Provide link for verification.
The one million refugees are from Bosnia and Croatia as well as Kosovo, and during the heydey of Serb Nationalism were sadly outnumbered by their Croat, Bosnian, and Kosovar Albanian counterparts. Hopefully they too will see their homes again.
What was achieved? 800,000 Kosovar Albanians returning home from refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania, along with more hundreds of thousands of internally displaced allowed to return home.
HRW based it's numbers on the White Book, so again, please provide your UN source, and try to figure out why Belgrade's public prosecutor used HRW's numbers in his indictment of NATO leaders.
Kate, I hold no personal animosity towards anybody in the region unless they've committed crimes personally - but if I have to see 1 man killed to stop another from killing hundreds, or watch as an airliner full of nuns and orphans is shot down to prevent it from being crashed into a skyscraper - so be it. Milosevic was warned that we would bomb him and his country if he didn't act like a decent human being for once, and he thought he could tough it out.
His mistake, Serbia's loss.