Letter: Kosovo's future

Sir: Repeatedly we are told that the Serbs were forced by months of bombing to accept terms available to them months before at Rambouillet. This is simply untrue, as is obvious to anyone who has read the text of the draft Rambouillet accord. Under the accord all of Yugoslavia would have been subject to Nato occupation and the Yugoslav government would have been relinquishing all claims to sovereignty over its own territory. As the Berliner Zeitung put it, "This passage sounds like a surrender treaty following a war that was lost. ... The fact that President Milosevic did not want to sign such a paper is understandable."

Plainly, the Rambouillet text was so framed as to ensure its rejection by the Serbs and thus to provide a pretext for the aerial bombardment of Serbia. This in turn, as Nato must have calculated, provoked the Serbian backlash that was a factor, but by no means the only one, in the mass exodus of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.

The pivotal importance of the Rambouillet accord is undeniable and yet, it seems, no British daily or TV channel gave it editorial prominence. Only through having friends linked to the Internet did I get to see this vital text. Others, the vast majority, were out of luck and effectively denied information of great value to the anti-war cause.

M F LYONS

Abingdon, Oxfordshire