The International Relations Council of the Vojvodina Movement had a discussion on the subject "Stability pact for South-Eastern Europe and Vojvodina as an autono-mous province and a European region" on its session held on 21 August 1999. Apart from the members of this Council - representatives of the organisations forming Vojvodina movement as well as the leaders of the movement, a significant contribution to the discussion on the extended session of the Council was made by former foreign ministers of Yugoslavia, Mr Milos Minic and Mr Ilija Djukic, as well as other experts on international affairs, businessmen and others involved in this complicated matter, all of them friends of the Vojvodina movement.

The Council has evaluated the initiative for forming and accepting of this Pact as an act of long-lasting and strategic importance for the future development of South-East Europe and the European continent as a whole. By this pact - for the first time and eventually - Balkan is accepted and treated as an integral part of modern Europe.

The Council has concluded with great worry that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, i.e. Republic of Serbia, due to the catastrophic policy of Slobodan Milosevic's regime, remained out of this Pact, which will have far-reaching consequences on future development and position of all countries, peoples and regions and all citizens in the area of South-East Europe. If there were not other reasons, this only would be enough to urgently change the harmful and despotic regime, its conceited and wrong goals and its notorious protagonists and their unfortunate policy.

Regretfully, the Council has noticed that the creators of this Pact, at least until now, have totally ignored the specific importance and interests of Vojvodi-na as it is - in many geopolitical, historic, geo-economic, demographic, cultural, civil and other characteristics - an authentic European region.

The Council will not stand idly by, and the Vojvodina movement will not accept the views by which it is most natural the Vojvodina should be the only constitutional part of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia whose highly autonomous status was among first to be taken away by the centralised and unitarian regime of Milosevic, whose faith does not seem to be of any interest to modern Europe and the international community as a whole. Therefore, the Council calls on all the European countries and other international factors, and especially the most deserving for the creating of the Pact and the ones responsible for its implementing, to find specific ways to adjoin Vojvodina, as one of the most specific and richest in resources European Region in South Europe, to all the programmes and institutions of this Pact. That is of highest importance to be politically accepted and practically secured at this very beginning of its existence, as it was done in the cases of Montenegro and Kosovo.

Forcefully annulled autonomy and all the historic collective rights of Vojvodina and the nations and citizens living in it, as Council sees it, have to be given back to them. Democratic struggle for them in Vojvodina itself is every day growing into a wider movement for full and really constitutional autonomy of the Province. That is visible to Europe and the world, hopefully, or should be if it is not the case at the moment. Or maybe they think that in Vojvodina also the crisis should be brought to such an extent of the bloodshed which we witnessed already in Bosnia and most recently in Kosovo, before the international community will start taking notice and positions towards it.

The Council has agreed to until Vojvodina regains its constitutional autonomous status, objective and to the full extent acceptable to its unquestionable regional specificity, autonomist and other truly and original Vojvodina's political forces must do all that is in their power to strengthen its political subjectivity. Therefore, the Council recommends all parts of Vojvodina movement and its collective members and individuals in it to help to form a unified regional institution of Vojvodina for cooperation of Vojvodina with the makers and institutions of the Pact for stability of South-East Europe. That also means systematic and planned activities on forming branches of all European and other nongovernmental organisations in Vojvodina, intensive and much more systematic relations of the political organisations of Vojvodina with relevant European and international factors as well as a far more successful international promotion of the goals, intentions and interests of Vojvodina as a region.

The Council calls on the Coordination council of the political parties and other subscribers who signed the document "Proposal for the autonomy of Vojvodina", the newly formed National Council and all other government and nongovernmental organisations of the Hungarian and other minorities of Vojvodina and all the ethnic groups, all opposition members of parliaments and local councils who support the autonomy of Vojvodina to support and help this initiative and together identify all possible projects which could help to bring Vojvodina, with its complex long-term political, economic, development and other interests, to join in the work of the Regional Round Table and other parts of the Pact's mechanism. The Council highly respects the initial suggestions for different actions which were already presented at this session.

Legitimate joining in all the projects, mechanisms and policy of the Pact is of crucial interest of Vojvodina as well as of South-East Europe. And in this way, Vojvodina would give its own real help to the tendencies of including Yugoslavia into this Pact, as well as Serbia, as its largest region and federal part.

The council has agreed that only in Serbia fully and permanently integrated into Europe can Vojvodina again become and stay its highly autonomous integral part. That fact, that condition, should be much more respected by all European and other relevant factors in the international community, as well as all the political forces of Serbia and Yugoslavia, if they do not want to have, in a due course, Vojvodina as a new and dangerous critical point in these parts.

President of The International relations Council

of the Vojvodina Movement

Zivan Berisavljevic (s)