Mr. Federico Mayor
Director General
U N E S C O
Paris

Belgrade, 3 April 1999

Mr. Director General,

With reference to your letter of 2 April 1999, I should like to inform you of further escalation in bombing the territory of the FR of Yugoslavia by NATO aggressors.

The aggressor air forces increasingly and more extensively bomb civilian targets - cities and villages, infrastructure. As I have already informed you, particularly endangered are cultural monuments across the Yugoslav territory.

The latest example of this barbaric act is the destruction of a bridge on the Danube, which connected Novi Sad with Petrovaradin. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that this bridge has a particular place in cultural-historical heritage of Yugoslavia and Europe and is under State protection. In April 1942, Nazis shot and threw in the river thousands of arrested civilians, primarily Jews and Serbs from that bridge.

In the immediate vicinity of the Bridge of Sorrow, there is a Square of the Victims of Fascism, with the monument containing the names of killed Serbs and Jews, symbolizing the unity of multi-ethnic Vojvodina in the fight against the Fascist occupier.

Unfortunately, today these sacrosanct symbols of history and culture not only of Yugoslavia but of entire Europe as well, have been lastingly scarred by the barbaric aggression of the bridge has left 600,000 residents without water, and the navigation along this international water way has been discontinued.

I again call upon you to raise your voice so that UNESCO may engage that his senseless aggression by NATO be immediately stopped, threatening with its barbaric nature the holiest values of European culture and historical heritage.

Please accept, Mr. General Director, the assurances of my high consideration.

Zivadin Jovanovic
(sgd)