YOUR editorial (LET, April 1) stated that Serbian people were not told the whole truth about what is happening in Kosovo. That may or may not be true, but one thing is for sure, people in this country are certainly being deceived.

The Kosovo Liberation Army is being held up as defenders of human rights against the alleged barbarity of the Serbs. The New York Times on March 28 reported that many of the leaders of the KLA traced their roots to a fascist unit set up during the Second World War by the Italian occupiers.

It is constantly stated that the Serbs are trying to ethnically cleanse their territory of Kosovars, rather than what is actually happening. The state of Yugoslavia, even taking into account the mistakes it has made regarding Kosovo autonomy, is in reality attempting to defend its inalienable sovereignty, something that is established in international law, yet rejected by NATO, which purports to speak for the so-called international community.

We are never told that Serbs, hundreds of thousands of them, were ethnically cleansed from their homes in Croatia and Slovenia in 1995. We are not told that the composition of the Yugoslavian delegation at the Rambouillet talks in France consisted of 10 people, including two Albanians, a Slavic Muslim, a Turk, a Goran, a Romany and an Egyptian. Not much ethnic cleansing there. We are not told that the stories of the execution of 20 teachers were in fact re-creations of events carried out under Nazi occupation during the Second World War and, in fact, the teachers are alive and well.

We are not told any of these things because it suits NATO's purpose to continue to demonise the Serbs, Milosevic and Yugoslavia, in order to justify the illegal and barbaric daily bombing of a sovereign state.

Nor are we told that Kosovo is the source of the richest mineral deposits in the whole of the Balkans. As always, the reader has to make up his or her own mind. But one thing is certain -neither NATO, nor the Lancashire Evening Telegraph, has a monopoly of the truth.

GEORGE DAVIES, Redearth Road, Darwen.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.