Debray's "Letter of a Voyager to the President of the Republic" was published on the front page and other pages of the Paris daily Le Mond in its today's issue. According to the author's explanation, the letter is based on the facts he has established on the occasion of his one-week visit to Serbia - from May 2 to May 9 - in which period he spent four days in Kosovo and Metohija, including a visit to Macedonia.

Debray visited Belgrade, Nis, Novi Sad, Vranje, while his visit to Kosovo and Metohija involved travelling from Pristina to Preja and from Prizren to Podujevo, on which occasion he could establish that "what he could see on the spot... did not correspond to the words" President Chirac uses to explain the situation in Kosovo and Metohija and to justify the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia.

Already in the first lines of his letter, the author notes that he was able to go on the trip he had planned, with the approval of the Serbian authorities, and that he travelled by his own car to the places where he wanted to go and that he could talk to whoever he wanted with the assistance of "his interpreter".

The note is not insignificant, because Debray explains that in Macedonia and Albania one frequently finds local interpreters who are "mainly KLA sympathizers or activists" and who distort the picture of the events they talk about.

Debray has devoted the essence of this letter to the analysis of a characteristic and frequently repeated and variable statement by President Chirac concerning Kosovo and Metohija and the war against Yugoslavia, refuting the views expressed in that statement, one after the other.

In reference to one of the elements of that statement that the head of the French state expresses repeatedly i.e. that France and NATO, respectively, are not waging a war against the Serbian people but against the authorities in Belgrade, Debray tells his president that he is wrong.

He explains in detail that 300 schools have been hit during the bombing of our country, that children do not go to school, that the destruction of the factories has left half a million people jobless. He also reminds of the fatal "mistakes" made by NATO, when many innocent civilians were killed in the bombings of the buses, of an international train, a hospital in Nis, and of the lines of refugees.

Debray does not deny the fact that masses of Kosovo Albanians have left the province, but he does not accept the interpretation of this as "ethnical cleansing" because they had received "orders" to do so at the beginning of the bombing. He also warns of the destiny of the "four hundred thousand Serbs who were displaced from Krajina by the Croats, without the presence of microphones or cameras".

As for the accusations on account of the Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, Debray warns that he has been legally elected three times and that he respects the Yugoslav constitution.

In his letter to Jacques Chirac, the renowned French philosopher and writer also warns that there is a one-party system in Yugoslavia, and that there are no political prisoners.

Explaining that the citizens of Yugoslavia may freely criticize their head of state and that they do not consider him as a "totalitarian ruler", Debray says that "the West is, apparently, obsessed by Milosevic one hundred times more than his own citizens".

In addition to other things, Debray also denies Chirac's claims about NATO's success in the "destruction of the Serbian forces". He also lists that as far as Kosovo is concerned, the aggressor "has caused insignificant damage to one airport, that it has destroyed empty barracks, set fire to military trucks which were out of use, dummy helicopters and wooden artillery weapons..."

Finally, the author of the letter to the president of France reminds of De Gaul's definition of NATO as "an organization imposed on the Atlantic Alliance meaning nothing but military and economic submission of Europe in relation to the United States of America", and calls on Chirac to "explain, one day, the reasons that have led him to change the judgement" regarding the relations within NATO, that also one of the people from the ranks of the Serbian opposition that the author has talked to, has described as a relationship between "the master and the servants".