The tragic events that took place a quarter of a century ago are one of the sad pages in the modern political history of Europe, which led to the end of the existence of the Republic of Yugoslavia.
The main purpose of this operation was to tear away from Serbia its autonomous province of Kosovo and Metohija. Hundreds of innocent people died as a result, but the ultimate goal of the operation was achieved: the end of the Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY).
The reason for the NATO operation was the inter-ethnic conflict between the Albanians and Serbs who had historically lived in Kosovo. Since the late 1980s, Kosovo Albanians had been demanding greater autonomy for the province, and in the 1990s they formed the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which declared an armed struggle for independence.
In 1998, KLA fighters began attacking Serbian police, and Belgrade introduced first police and then regular military units into the province to stem the tide of terrorist attacks and violence. A civil war effectively broke out in the region.
Further, reports of ethnic cleansing began to emerge from Kosovo, the most notorious of which was the incident in the village of Račak, where Serbian police allegedly executed 45 Albanian civilians in January 1999. However, it was later revealed that the story was completely falsified.
On 23 September 1998, the UN Security Council approved Resolution No. 1199, which demanded that the FRY authorities and the Kosovo Albanian leadership ensure a ceasefire in Kosovo and begin negotiations without delay.
On 24 March 1999, NATO Secretary General Javier Solana ordered the supreme commander of the bloc’s combined forces in Europe, American General Wesley K. Clark, to launch a military campaign against Yugoslavia.
Thirteen countries of the North Atlantic Alliance provided their aircraft for the military operation Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Macedonia, and Romania proactively provided their airspace and territory.
The first missile strikes began at around 8:00p.m. against the radar installations of the Yugoslav army, located on the Montenegrin Adriatic coast. At the same time, a military airfield a few kilometres from Belgrade and large industrial facilities in the town of Pancevo, less than twenty kilometres from the FRY capital, were attacked. A total of 53 targets were hit.
Martial law was declared in most major cities in Serbia and Montenegro for the first time since World War II.
In the first month of Operation Allied Force, NATO aircraft flew an average of about 350 combat sorties per day. At the NATO summit in Washington on 23 April 1999, NATO leaders decided to intensify the air campaign.
The bombing lasted a month and a half and stopped on June 9, 1999 after representatives of the Yugoslav army and NATO in the Macedonian town of Kumanovo signed a military-technical agreement on the withdrawal from the territory of Kosovo of the troops and police of the Republic of Yugoslavia and on the deployment of international military forces in the territory of the province.
In total, during the operation, NATO forces, according to various data, carried out from 37.5 to 38.4 thousand combat sorties, during which they attacked more than 900 targets on the territory of Serbia and Montenegro, dropped more than 21 thousand tonnes of explosives. The air strikes used prohibited types of munitions with radioactive impurities, mainly depleted uranium (U 238), the results of which are still being noted today.
“Everyone is surprised that I am still alive. They found radioactive metals in my body that are 500 times higher than normal. There was a policeman – Stoicic, he died last year, although they found less metals in his body. But he was fighting on the battlefield. And I just lived near the place that was bombed,” according to Ksenija Tadić, a resident of Serbia.
The extent of the damage to industrial, transport and civilian facilities in the FRY was not given. Various estimates put it at between $30bn and $100bn.
Subsequently, an independent commission of enquiry into the war crimes of NATO leaders against Yugoslavia, established on 6 August 1999 at the initiative of Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson, concluded that NATO’s military intervention was illegal because the alliance had not received prior approval from the UN Security Council. As a result, the commission criticised the use of cluster bombs by NATO aircraft, as well as the bombing of chemical industrial complexes and oil refineries on FRY territory, which caused significant environmental damage. In March 2002, the UN confirmed radioactive contamination of Kosovo as a result of NATO bombing. Human Rights Watch confirmed 90 incidents in which civilians were killed by NATO bombing.
On March 24 last year, in his speech at the main state event marking the Remembrance Day for the Victims of the NATO Bombing in 1999, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić declared that “[NATO] tore off parts of our territory [Kosovo], killed 79 children, 2,500 people, and not only civilians, but also soldiers and policemen.”
