By Beti Bilandizic

By Staff
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Google Oneindia News

BELGRADE, Nov 29 (Reuters) The former Yugoslav republics of Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia today welcomed a NATO invitation to join its Partnership for Peace programme, saying the membership would strengthen security and boost investment.

The symbolic message behind the invitation is that it ends the exclusion of the three Balkan countries not yet in the club.

The decision was made at a summit in Latvia despite earlier reservations about war crime suspects still at large.

Serbian President Boris Tadic called the step ''great news for the citizens, the army and the state''. Bosnia's Prime Minister Adnan Terzic said NATO sent ''a message to the region that our insistence on Euro-Atlantic integration will pay off''.

Montenegrin Premier Zeljko Sturanovic said membership would have positive effects and would ''enable foreign investors to increase their presence in Montenegro''.

Admission to the outer circle of the US-led alliance is seen in the Balkans as a step closer to a full place in the Western club of democracies and a clear break with the wars that followed the break-up of socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

The war heritage meant most of the successor states of Yugoslavia, a champion of the non-aligned movement during the Cold War, were kept waiting, while the Partnership embraced former Soviet satellites such as Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan more than a decade ago.

The invitation provoked an emotional response in Serbia, bombed by NATO in 1999 to halt the killing of ethnic Albanian civilians in Kosovo by troops of the late nationalist president Slobodan Milosevic.

Serbia has been re-integrated into several international organisations since reformists ousted Milosevic in 2000, and has been seeking admission into the PfP since 2003. However, hardliners still evoke the NATO bombing to stoke anti-Western feelings.

''Bearing in mind the scars we all carry from the armed conflicts and the NATO bombing, such a decision (to join the PfP) can be made only by the people at a referendum,'' said Ivica Dacic of Milosevic's Socialist Party.

Ordinary Serbs were not impressed, saying the PfP would do nothing for the people and could even cost them in blood.

''The Partnership for Peace is not good for Serbia. Why should our boys go and get killed in Afghanistan and Iraq for the sake of America's interests?'' said Boza Zukic, a World War Two veteran.

Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Draskovic called it ''a clear message to the retrograde political forces in Serbia that there will be no return to the past''.

Draskovic said he hoped the decision would open the door again to the country's main economic goal -- resuming talks with the European Union, blocked since May over Serbia's failure to deliver top war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic.

REUTERS PB HT2155

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