Serb Pupils Get Lecture About NATO’s Sins

The school year began Wednesday in Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, Serbia, with a lecture on NATO’s “aggression” delivered in those schools not closed by a teachers strike, damaged by bombs or occupied by refugees from Kosovo.

Teachers read out letters from Serbian Education Minister Jovo Todorovic reminding pupils of varying age groups of the evils of the Western defense alliance.

Teenage students learned that NATO’s airstrikes between March and June had pitted “the law of force against the force of law, hypocrisy against truth . . . coldblooded mass killing against worthy defense of the fatherland.”

Younger pupils were told that bombs had killed an unspecified number of their fellow pupils, all of them top students. The letters did not mention Kosovo, the mainly ethnic Albanian province of Serbia on whose behalf NATO launched its bombing campaign.

The reading of the letter came a day after Todorovic warned teachers threatening to strike that “we do not want politics in school.”

The government closed schools at the start of the bombing, saying it was too dangerous for children to attend. Many of the buildings were occupied by troops and police who moved from their barracks to avoid being targeted.

Officials say 384 schools were hit by NATO missiles, some aimed at the security forces based there, others gone astray.

Some schools remained closed Wednesday in Belgrade and several other cities because of the strike. A trade union leader said that at least 60 of Serbia’s 2,360 schools had joined in.

A teacher at one of the elite Belgrade secondary schools that has joined the strike said educators want three months’ overdue wages and a pay increase to bring their wages level with those of doctors. Teachers now are paid about $70 a month.