Twenty-five years since NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia: a wound still open

2024-03-24 07:17:52

In Belgrade, Serbia, there is the monument The eternal flamewhich is attended to commemorate the victims of the Atlantic Alliance bombings (NATO) over Yugoslavia in 1999. The monument, about thirty meters high, is basically an obelisk that in the years has caused great controversy. The reasons are many, but one stands out: the monolith, which is the greatest architectural tribute to those dead, was erected by the will of Mirjana Marković, wife of Slobodan Milosevic, who ruled the Serbs with an iron fist and was president during that attack. So much so that some time ago someone even proposed renaming it in memory of the victims of the late dictator.

Twenty five years later of the start of the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslaviawhich are fulfilled this Sunday, Serbiathen the country that fought against the disintegration of that socialist entity, has changed, but still he does not forget nor has he healed completely that painful wound like the terrible crimes committed by Milosević in those years. Those urban memories of the bombs dropped by NATO do not allow amnesia either.

The operation, started by order of the Spanish Javier Solana (NATO general secretary at that time) and without the authorization of the UN Security Council (whose reputation was damaged), lasted 11 weeks, in which thousands of bombs were dropped and a still unknown number of civilians died. The figures still oscillate today between 500 deaths, according to Human Right Watch, and 2,500, according to Serbian authorities. For its part, NATO itself did not respond to a recent BIRN request for this informationas confirmed by this medium specialized in journalistic investigations in the region.

The then Secretary General of NATO, Javier Solana, during a press conference in June 1999. / ROBERT VANDEN BRUGGE / EPA

War (also) for the story

The discrepancy in these data continues to be, two and a half decades later, one of the great legacies of the controversy. The stated justification for the operation was to avoid a ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians in the then Serbian province of Kosovoafter the failure of the Rambouillet conference (Paris).

But this version, defended by the Atlantic Alliance and a part of Western politics, has been repeatedly questionedalso by virtue of well-remembered testimonies in Serbia, such as that of the former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. “The Rambouillet text, which asked Serbia to admit NATO troops in Yugoslavia, was a provocation, an excuse to start the bombing“said Kissinger in an interview given in June 1999 to the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph.

Outside of the debate on the origin, analysts such as Miguel Roán have described, with the calm that allows the passing of the years, what the military operation meant for the civil population. In Belgrade, “bombed with graphite pumps“, the city was left “without electricity for days” and scenes of “pain” and “stupor” were experienced. Among these episodes, Roán quotes, were the bombings “of a maternity hospital“and the American shells that fell on”the Chinese Embassysupposedly due to a miscalculation by the Atlantic forces”.

In total, according to journalistic calculations, there were 11 massive attacks with civilian victims throughout the territory that was then still Yugoslavia; even two very serious ones against columns of Albanian refugees. That is also why, according to researchers such as Francisco Veiga, the NATO campaign never garnered “the sympathies [en la opinión pública europea] that had started the Bosnian war.” “There was everything: bus bombings line, civilian residential centers, a convoy of Doctors of the Worldand even a prison in which numerous Albanian nationalists were detained,” Veiga wrote in The border factoryone of the most complete works on those events.

On December 3, 2000, Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan visits the ruins of the embassy in Belgrade, affected by a NATO bombing. / MIKICA PETROVIC / AP

Gasoline for nationalism

Bombings resulting from errorsor qualified as such by the Atlantic Alliance, which became to feed propaganda and the nationalist discourse Serbian in a country where Milosević already repressed any opposition. Collateral damage of this: murders like that of the journalist Slavko Ćuruvija in April 1999, after being accused by a pro-government media of supporting the Atlanticist campaign. “The dehumanization of journalists uncomfortable, accused of treason, continues today to be a tool used [por la política en Serbia]”, Ivana Stevanović, from the Ćuruvija Foundation, responded to EL PERIÓDICO this week.

Of course, one result of the operation was Serbia’s departure from Kosovo and Milosević’s subsequent fall from grace, but that did not prevent the diplomatic conflict between Belgrade and Pristina from prolonging, never ending, with its consequences for the region. The British historian Mark Mazower summed it up this way in his The Balkans: “A problem was solvedSerbian persecution of Albanians, creating others [como] the persecution of the Albanians from the Serbs [en Kosovo]”, which has to add to the perpetuation of “a strong ethnic nationalism while civic traditions have remained fragile.

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