Sinn Fein president Mr Gerry Adams has called for an end to NATO's bombing of Serbia. He told a conference on Irish neutrality and European security on Saturday that "determined efforts for a peaceful negotiated settlement, under the auspices of the United Nations should be redoubled".
Labour Party president Mr Proinsias De Rossa called the bombing of the Serbian broadcasting service's headquarters in Belgrade a "war crime". He told the conference in Dublin, which was organised by the Peace and Neutrality Alliance, that if Serb troops had occupied and killed civilians in a Kosovo TV station, it would rightly be regarded as a war crime.
Mr Adams said President Milosevic was "a gross violator of hu man rights". The TV pictures of tens of thousands of Kosovan refugees gave an insight "into the havoc he has presided over". How ever, NATO had supported and armed violators such as Indonesia, "still committing genocide in East Timor", and Turkey, which "ruthlessly suppresses the Kurds".
He added: "NATO has broken a whole range of international laws in waging war against Yugoslavia. Moreover, NATO is in breach of the Geneva Convention, which makes it illegal to go to war without making an official declaration to that effect. NATO is in breach of its own charter, which requires it to act in accordance with the UN, and it has violated the UN charter by assaulting a sovereign state without a UN mandate.
"Instead of passive support for NATO's stand," Mr Adams said, "Ireland should be leading the efforts outside NATO, in the EU and in the UN, to secure a diplomatic solution." If the Government "proceeds towards Partner ship for Peace, they will be clearly in breach of their promise to the electorate and of the mandate by which Fianna Fail gained power."
Northern nationalists were "living in a state dominated by a foreign power, Britain, occupied by British troops, who are also NATO troops. We therefore have had many years of first-hand experience of how NATO troops behave, of how NATO turns a blind eye to the military excesses of one of its member-states, but also how NATO seeks to use our situation as a testing ground of new weapons and surveillance technology, counter-insurgency techniques and crowd-control methods."
Mr De Rossa said as well as accepting the largesse of the EU, Ireland had to accept responsibility for participating in its common foreign, security and defence policies. It was important that any common European security and defence policy should be "founded on democratic decision-making". If Ireland joined the Partner ship for Peace, there would be no "democratic control", since it would be linked to NATO, of which Ireland was unlikely to become a member.
Asked about differences between himself and Labour Party leader Mr Ruairi Quinn on the bombing of Yugoslavia, Mr De Rossa said they both wanted the bombing to stop; the differences were over when that should happen and whether it should have started in the first place.
He later pointed to an agreed plan the two leaders announced 10 days ago which included a call for a 72-hour pause in the bombing to allow the UN and Russia to persuade Mr Milosevic to come to the negotiating table.
Mr Alan Dukes TD said Ireland joining the Partnership for Peace would not mean abandoning neutrality. It would mean joining an organisation where the best practices in peacekeeping were being effectively developed.