Bulgaria is staying sleepless - watching television. Anxiety has gripped the minds and hearts of the Bulgarian people.

Bulgaria borders on Yugoslavia. Bulgarians and Serbs are both Slav peoples. We, Bulgarians and Serbs, are next of kin.

Today Serbia is in a severe plight. We cannot but feel for its people's sufferings. We do understand the difficult Albanian issue the Serbs are faced with.

Serbia is indignant at NATO's double standard - the one applied in the case of the Kosovars and  the other in relation to the Kurds. And not only the Kurds. This is immoral, Serbia says.

What is immoral?

Only a few years ago Yugoslavia was engaged in contriving a "Shopp language" and a "Shopp nation". By virtue of the "double-standard morality" of the Great Powers Yugoslavia now dominates Bulgarian lands. And the Shopps are a Bulgarian ethnographic group inhabiting an area where the capital city of Sofia is situated. The citizens of Sofia are Shopps.

Earlier, as a result of the Great Powers'  "double morality", which had produced Yugoslavia itself, the Serbs took over Macedonia and pronounced it Southern Serbia. The Macedonian Bulgarians were forbidden to speak Bulgarian. They were being murdered, because they called themselves Bulgarians.

After World War II it was the "double morality" of the Comintern and Stalin that let Serbia engage itself in creating the Macedonian nation and the Macedonian language using the "Southern Serbs", that is the Bulgarians in Macedonia. The persecutions and killings of Bulgarians were resumed.

So much for "double-standard morality".

Today, however, when bombs are falling over Yugoslavia, we have to forget that.  There should be no Bulgarian involvement whatsoever in this war!
The only thing we can say to Serbia is that even if she is right, she is nevertheless weak. To confront NATO in this moment is pure brinkmanship. It isn't patriotism. No "European Vietnam" will be the result. Serbia now lacks the back of the powerful alliance that stood behind Vietnam: China, the Soviet Union, the world anti-war movement.
Serbia must realize that Milosevic is not the leader she deserves to have at the present moment. Right now he is a threat to Yugoslavia's integrity, but in a couple of days his stubbornness might imperil the whole Balkan region and the world at large.