UN General Assembly
1994

To all this, the world has sent us one message: negotiate. In the belief that the only right path was to continue to defend our land and that in this just struggle the peace-loving and freedom-loving peoples of the world would support us, we refused for a very long time to negotiate with war criminals. Finally, faced with the unbearable plight of our people and the world’s indifference, without any choice we accepted negotiations. It turned out that the aggressor had only been using negotiations as a way to bargain for time and to cover up its continuation of the aggression. 6 In March 1993, after long and painful negotiations and with many concessions from our side, we signed the so-called Vance-Owen plan. The aggressor rejected it. The next bloody round in the war ensued, to be followed by another round of negotiations that resulted, on 5 July 1994, in a peace plan drawn up by the Contact Group consisting of five great Powers: the United States of America, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the