By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Mar 26 1999 (IPS)

NATO’s air strikes against Yugoslavia reverberated across China, causing the government to issue its strongest denunciation of the joint military action taken by the Western alliance.

China gave full support to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s defiance, putting out its usual rhetoric about the respect for “the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of the country.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Sun Yuxi, said Beijing believed the issue was “an internal matter of the Yugoslav government and must be resolved through political negotiations”.

Calling for an immediate halt of the military actions against Yugoslavia, the spokesman said China, having tried to help resolve the dispute, will continue to work for a peaceful solution.

For the first time in its 50-year history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization launched an attack against a sovereign country, a move that earned both condemnation and support.

Traditional U.S. allies gave support to the air strikes aimed at destroying Serbian military targets, but Russia and China blasted the military offensive.

The two members of the UN Security Council, each with a veto power, condemned the NATO attack as a violation of the United Nations charter.

The bombardment, threatened for months, came after lengthened diplomatic negotiations failed to yield a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Kosovo.

While Beijing was careful to stick to a formal denunciation of the attack without putting forward any additional diplomatic initiatives, at home it launched an intense propaganda campaign to show domestic audiences its anger and utter disapproval.

The major evening TV newscast on Thursday was dominated by the NATO attack on Yugoslavia. It featured President Jiang Zemin and Defense Minister Chi Haotian criticizing the air-strikes and calling for peace.

Jiang Zemin, on the second leg of his three-country European tour, was shown discussing the issue in the Italian business capital of Milan at a banquet given by Lombardy Prefect Roberto Formigoni.

He said he was “deeply worried” about the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia and that “external military intervention cannot solve a country’s internal issues”.

His statement was followed by one delivered by Chinese Defense Minister Chi Haotian. He told visiting Surinam delegation he was also worried about the situation in the Balkans and warned air raids could escalate into something worse.

Yugoslavia has lost four of its pre-1990 republics to ethnic frictions and now consists only of Serbia and smaller Montenegro. Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians outnumber Serbs by nine to one, is located in the southern part of Serbia and is regarded as the birth place of Serbian nationhood.

Combining live reports from Belgrade and Washington, China Central Television presented a grim picture of the NATO actions, describing the Western alliance as one which aspires to be the “international policeman of the 21st century”.

The official English language newspaper, China Daily, devoted the whole front page on Friday to the conflict. It featured prominently an interview with the Yugoslav ambassador to China who called the NATO air raids “the most shameless crime of the century”.

State-run media’s reaction to the NATO offensive was unusually strong, giving away Beijing’s anxiety that a similar scenario could be re-played on China’s own territory.

China, itself with many restive provinces, cannot ignore easily the similarities between the demands for self-rule of ethnic Albanians in Yugoslavia’s Kosovo and its own disgruntled minorities.

With 56 minority groups, China shares federational Yugoslavia’s worries about ethnic breakaways.

Tensions between ethnic minorities and Chinese Han majority in the far-flung province of Tibet and the Muslim province of Xinjiang have occasionally erupted into violent clashes.

This year Beijing is even more sensitive to ethnic conflicts — it marks the 40th anniversary of the quelled Tibetan uprising against the Communist Chinese rule, which forced thousands of Tibetans in exile, including their spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

The US-led attack on Yugoslavia is one other contentious issue to further complicate the upcoming first visit to the United States of Chinese premier Zhu Rongji.

Zhu, who is scheduled to visit Washington in the second week of April, has already the uneasy task of getting the strained US- China relations back on track.

In recent months, dialogue between Washington and Beijing has been on a downhill, caused by US allegations that China stole its nuclear technology and Beijing’s continuous crackdown on dissent. (IPS-END-ap-ip-ab-ral-99-

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