A Forgotten Crime

NATO, the "humanitarian war" and the unjust bombing of Serbia

“We’ll never forget, but we have to work together with the West.” This sums up the attitudes of most Serbs on the tenth anniversary of the NATO bombing of Serbia. At noon on March 25th of this year, Serbia came to a standstill as sirens sounded throughout the country. “We were just children,” were the words inscribed on a memorial in Belgrade to the 89 children killed, young innocent victims of a hideous crime – a crime against humanity.

At the end of March 1999, NATO countries led by the US launched air strikes against the former Yugoslavian republic in what was then deemed a “humanitarian war”. This war was supposedly in support of Kosovo, then a renegade province of Serbia. Ironically, much of the damage suffered during the campaign was borne by Kosovo itself, the very province that western powers sought to protect. In the end, some three thousand people were killed, two thousand of them innocent civilians. The damage caused was extensive and has been estimated at about 29 billion dollars.

The importance of this event is that not only did it have a profound effect on the region, but it also marked a turning point in international affairs. The bombing of Serbia was the first time that NATO was engaged in an actual combat mission, and marked a precedent whereby the US would use the military alliance for its own narrow purposes. It also marked a time from when the Western world began to accept the use of force and military might as opposed to dialogue and diplomacy as a means to an end. The notion of “humanitarian warfare” therefore was introduced so as to justify the unjustifiable. Indubitably, the children and other innocent civilians killed were regarded as nothing more than “collateral damage”.

To this day most Serbs regard the bombing of their country ten years ago as unjust. For this reason, the forced independence of Kosovo is likewise regarded by many as unfair and even illegal. On the one hand there are those who still feel that Kosovo is a part of Serbia and that it’s actually an occupied territory; others, meanwhile, can accept that Kosovo is independent yet still feel that the way in which the province was torn away from Serbia was wrong and that there could have been a better and more peaceful way of doing it.

While Kosovo was seen as the primary reason for the NATO war against the then rump Yugoslavia, it’s quite obvious that there was another motive for the attack. In a similar scene that would be played out later in other parts of the world, most notably in the Middle East, the bombing campaign was seen as a legitimate tool for bringing about a regime change within the country. However, as with the faulty reasoning of the Allies toward the end of the Second World War, bombing a country into submission invariably has the opposite effect. Thus, if NATO countries had hoped that the bombing campaign would quicken the fall of the Milosevic regime then they were sadly mistaken. If anything, it perhaps helped to prolong the dictatorship for a little while longer.

While there is much resentment in Serbia toward to the west for the death and destruction that was caused ten years ago, in Kosovo the anniversary of the NATO attacks is seen in a different light. Most within Kosovo see the bombing of the former Yugoslavia as one of the highlights in the history of democracy. To this extent, the people of Kosovo are eternally grateful to the US and its allies for what they regard as their liberation from Serb rule. What many in Kosovo fail to realize, however, is that democracy can never be the result of outside intervention. This can be seen not only in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, but within Kosovo itself.

Vojvodina ended up paying a heavy price for Kosovo independence

Sadly, what is often overlooked in the recent history of the Balkans is the fate of Vojvodina. This region, like Kosovo, was an autonomous entity under Tito’s communist Yugoslavia and was the breadbasket of the former federal state. Unlike Kosovo, however, it had a more ethnically diverse character and could be said to represent a truly multi-cultural entity in where different groups were able to peacefully coexist with one another.

When Yugoslavia began to fall apart at the end of the 1980s both Kosovo and Vojvodina lost their autonomous status. Whereas the former went down the road of violent confrontation, the latter tried to maintain its status through peaceful and democratic means.

In the end, Vojvodina ended up paying a heavy price for Kosovo independence. Many Serb refugees not only from Kosovo but elsewhere from within Serbia and the former Yugoslavia ended up being resettled in the area. This, in turn, upset the ethnic balance within the region as more radicalized and nationalistic-minded groups became dominant. Fuelled by a fear that ultimately Vojvodina might also try and break away, ethnic tensions and violence within region has since been on the increase.

Not only this, but during the NATO bombing campaign in 1999 the region was unjustly targeted. Although hundreds of kilometers from Kosovo and in diametrically the opposite direction, NATO bombers nevertheless destroyed three bridges across the river Danube, an oil refinery, and the region’s television tower. Residents of the area are still suffering from the wanton destruction wrought on land routes and other infrastructure.

To this day the rationale for blowing up the bridges across the Danube during the campaign is inexplicable and controversial. These targets, as most others within Vojvodina, were of limited military value and ended up causing widespread environmental damage. Not only this, it caused much economic hardship outside of Serbia as well on those countries dependent on the river. Furthermore, the destruction of the Danube bridges was a clear breach of international law, enshrined in the Danube River Commission of 1876, in where the Danube was recognized as a vital resource over which no-one has neither power nor the authority to obstruct. Obviously, the US failed to take this into account when it bombed the bridges at Novi Sad and elsewhere.

Aside from all this, what raises the NATO campaign of ten years ago to that of a crime is the way in which it was conducted. Not only were cluster bombs used, but NATO also employed the use of depleted uranium shells. As a result, contaminated shrapnel and dust was left behind which peacekeepers and civilians later came into contact with. Soon after, it was revealed that an unusually high number of war veterans and peacekeepers from different European countries who had served in the Balkans developed leukemia and other cancers. Known as the Balkan Syndrome, the use of depleted uranium shells are suspected of being responsible for the ill-health of these veterans and former peacekeepers. Similar increases in the number of cancers among civilians have been noted in Serbia in Kosovo as well, yet the issue has since faded into obscurity.

Unfortunately, such crimes get buried as times goes on. Already, many western countries have either already forgotten about what happened ten years ago or it has become little more than a minor footnote. The problem with this is that by simply letting past injustices be forgotten they end up being repeated in the future. In many ways this future is now, only it is happening this time much further from Europe which, in turn, makes it even easier to forget.