March 24 marks another anniversary of NATO’s Operation Allied Force (1999). This topic is still on the Balkan agenda, especially in Serbia and Montenegro, then part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It is on Russia’s agenda, to a lesser degree, and to an even lesser degree in the ex-Soviet republics, including Ukraine. As years passed, however, this topic has become the cornerstone of the Kremlin’s anti-West propaganda broadcast by Ukraine’s pro-Russia channels.
“Eighteen years ago, peaceful Belgrade became a raging inferno… NATO violated international law by air-raiding Yugoslavia… More than 2,000 peaceful civilian victims… Thousands of casualties later referred to as side effects of an undeclared war…” These are the narrator’s lines from a trailer of the documentary “Bombs that Blew up the World,” carried by Channel Inter in Ukraine, also a case study in classic propaganda and undisguised manipulation.
It all began in 1996-97, when, after Operation Storm, followed by the Erdut and Dayton peace accords, the Yugoslavian government proceeded to resettle Serbian refugees from Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina in Kosovo (or in Kosovo and Metohija, as the Serbians referred to it). This caused armed conflicts between the Kosovo Liberation Army and federal troops, turning into combat operations in 1998. Followed repressions against the populace, each with every hallmark of an ethnic clean-up operation. There was a sharp increase in the exodus of Albanian refugees, and there were thousands of civilian casualties. The UN Security Council could do practically nothing about the situation because Russia would veto any resolution it didn’t like. In the end, Belgrade ordered its troops to leave Kosovo.
In October 1998, a NATO delegation, led by Secretary General Xavier Solana, warned Yugoslavia’s leader Slobodan Milosevic that the Alliance would air raid his country unless he stops repressions against the civilian population.
There were also diplomatic talks underway, aimed, among other things, at agreeing on the terms and conditions of the withdrawal of Yugoslavian troops from Kosovo and replacing them with an international peacekeeping contingent, and securing NATO monitoring. In February 1999, Slobodan Milosevic declared he would not permit any foreign troops, peacekeeping or monitoring, to be deployed anywhere in Yugoslavia. The political settlement talks also failed. Belgrade refused to have any self administration bodies in Kosovo, fearing this would result in its independence.
The conflict was gaining momentum. Each day the situation could repeat the Bosnian scenario, with hundreds of thousands of casualties. Under the circumstances, NATO started Operation Allied Force on March 24, 1999. The air raids stopped after the signing of the Military Technical Agreement between the International Security Force (KFOR) and the Governments of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Republic of Serbia in Kumanovo, Macedonia, on June 9, 1999. It provided for the withdrawal of the Yugoslavian military and police units from Kosovo, and for the deployment of a peacekeeping force. On June 10, the UN Security Council passed Resolution No. 1244, authorizing an “international civil and military presence in Kosovo.”
Offering bare facts of NATO air raids and the resulting death toll in former Yugoslavia, out of context, without explaining the situation, is nothing other than juggling such facts around the way that would please someone else. Regrettably, this is what some of our media are doing. Another tactic is distorting the NATO air raids’ death toll. Of late, such tactics have been on a disgustingly upward curve. Suffice it to say that past fall the Center for Euro-Atlantic Studies declared in Belgrade that they could no longer stand all this falsehood (following Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s allegation that “thousands of people” had died as a result of NATO air raids).
According to the Humanitarian Law Center [a non-governmental organization with offices in Belgrade, Serbia, Pristina, and Kosovo], a total of 758 people died as a result of NATO air strikes, starting on March 24 and until June 9, 1999, including 267 in Central Serbia, 10 in Montenegro, and the rest in Kosovo and Metohija, among them 450 civilians, 300 Yugoslavian army and police officers and men, also members of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Many casualties, indeed, but not “thousands” as alleged by Russian propaganda.
NATO’s Operation Allied Force is still subject to international debate, but the Kremlin propaganda version broadcast by Channel Inter is doubtlessly unacceptable in Ukraine. Until the spring of 2014, Ukraine’s vague stand in the matter of what had happened in Yugoslavia, in the 1990s, was the wrong but de facto explicable choice. Today, no Ukrainian media, experts or politicians should be allowed to echo the Kremlin’s view on what happened in the Balkans, not after the annexation of Crimea, not while being at war with Russia in the east of Ukraine.
