WE have sent the following petition to all five East Lancashire MPs with a request for their signature. After an open debate among staff and students at Blackburn College, some felt that voices should be heard as media coverage of opposition to NATO action has been extremely limited:

"The NATO war against Yugoslavia is reducing Kosovo and Serbia to a bomb site. It is also leaving a polluted and increasingly uninhabitable land for people to live in. As the recent 'mistakes' have demonstrated, the idea that this strategy can be contained and controlled is clearly untrue.

"The intensified bombing campaign can only worsen the Kosovars' suffering at the same time as it runs the Serbian civilian population increasingly into NATO targets. It has already severely undermined and damaged the democratic opposition in Serbia, which in 1991 and 1996-7 came close to toppling Milosevic.

"To stop this human tragedy, the first and most basic step is to stop the bombing now and give peace a chance."

HELEN Christie, Barrowford Road, Colne, Matt Davies, Peter Keogh, Margaret Walker, Helen Wilson, Vicky McAdam, Hannah Shipman, Alison Seed, Jenny Preston, J Clegg, S Kirk, A West, L Wareing, C A Grantham, Andrew Hudson, Sylvia Quinn, J Blakey, Caroline Pinder, Emma Clarke, Raymond Pickup, Matthew Grant, M Webster, P J Webster, Angela Fitzpatrick, Lisa Holt, Farag Adam, Leslie Scott, Doug Clink, Clare McNulty, G Fielding, D Griffiths, Bruce Ogelvie, P M Gleave and 30 others whose signatures are illegible (Staff and students at Blackburn College - in a personal capacity).

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