Posted on 03/24/2013 4:03:35 PM PDT by Ravnagora
BELGRADE -- Today marks the 14th anniversary since the start of the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia, i.e. the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SRJ.
A heating plant in New Belgrade is seen after being hit by NATO missiles (Tanjug, file)
The bombing lasted 79 days and resulted in at least 2,500 deaths and more than 12,500 injuries.
The attacks on Serbia started on March 24, 1999, and the last one took place near Kosovska Kamenica on June 10 at 13:15 CET.
The death toll among the military and police forces reached 1,008, including 659 soldiers and 349 policemen. Around 6,000 civilians were injured, including 2,700 children.
The total damage was estimated at dozens of billions of dollars. NATO has never disclosed its losses.
The Pančevo Oil Refinery is seen after the attack (Tanjug, file)
“The NATO forces killed 631 members of the Serbian Armed Forces, while 28 went missing, which means that the total number is 659, including 72 officers, 41 noncommissioned officers, 18 contract soldiers, 191 conscripts, 245 reservists, 60 military volunteers and three civilians in the army,” Serbian Defense Minister Aleksandar Vučić stated in the Serbian parliament on February 11, 2013.
According to earlier data, 5,173 soldiers and policemen were injured.
The decision to attack Yugoslavia was the first in history to be made without the approval of the UN Security Council, and the order was given to U.S. General Wesley Clark, the allied commander at the time, by NATO Secretary General Javier Solana.
Later on, in his book “Waging Modern War”, Clark revealed that the plans for the air strikes against Yugoslavia were well under way in mid-June 1998 and completed in late August that year.
Yugoslavia was attacked under the pretext of failure of the talks on the future status of the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, held in Rambouillet and Paris.
A destroyed bridge in Novi Sad (Tanjug, file)
After the decision on non-acceptance of foreign troops was ratified by the Serbian parliament, which proposed the UN forces to monitor a peaceful resolution of conflicts in Kosovo, NATO launched air raids on March 24, 1999 at 19:45 CET.
The 19-member Alliance launched projectiles from ships in the Adriatic Sea and four military bases in Italy, all with the support of strategic operators who took off from the basis in Western Europe and latter in the U.S. The first targets were barracks and air defense forces in Batajnica, Mladenovac, Priština and other locations.
There is practically no city in Yugoslavia which was not targeted on a number of occasions during the 11-week campaign.
The bombing caused damage to 25,000 houses and apartment buildings and destroyed 470 kilometers of roads and 595 kilometers of railway tracks. A total of 14 airports were damaged, as well as 19 hospitals, 20 healthcare centers, 18 kindergartens, 69 schools, 176 cultural monuments and 44 bridges, while 38 more were completely destroyed.
The Interior Ministry (MUP) headquarters in downtown Belgrade are seen in flames (Tanjug, file)
During the campaign, 2,300 air attacks were carried out on 995 facilities around Serbia and 1,150 fighter jets fired nearly 420,000 missiles to the total weight of 22,000 tons.
NATO fired 1,300 cruise missiles, dropped 37,000 cluster bombs which killed around 200 individuals and caused injuries to several hundred more people. The forces also used banned depleted uranium ammunition.
A third of the electric energy capacity of the country was destroyed, two oil refineries, in Pančevo and Novi Sad, were bombed, and NATO forces used for the first time the so-called graphite bombs to disable electrical power systems.
Facing mounting diplomatic pressure, NATO ended the bombing with the signing of the Military Technical Agreement in Kumanovo on June 9, 1999, and the latest missiles fell near Kosovska Kamenica on June 10 at 13:30 CET.
The NATO secretary general issued an order to stop the bombing on June 10, after which the Yugoslav forces began to withdraw from Kosovo.
On that day, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1244, and a total of 37,200 KFOR soldiers from 36 countries were sent to the province, with a mission to preserve peace and security.
Serbian PM Ivica Dačić will Sunday laid a wreath at the monument to the killed members of the Serbian Army in Belgrade’s neighborhood of Rakovica.
Dačić said that March 24 was the day when everybody, regardless of their political affiliation, should remember the ones who had given lives to defend their homeland hoping that in future no one will have to die for Serbia.
“I hope that we will not have to die for Serbia any more, but rather that we will be able to live and work in it and give it the best we can,” he said.
Aside the prime minister, the wreaths were also laid by Belgrade City Assembly Speaker Aleksandar Antić, family members of fallen soldiers, a delegation of the Association of fighters 1991-1999, the Association for Cherishing the Tradition of the Serbian Liberation Wars 1912-1918, principles of primary and secondary schools.
Vučić laid a wreath at the monument to members of Air Force and Air Defense in the neighborhood of Zemun.
Belgrade Mayor Dragan Đilas paid respect and laid a wreath to the killed workers of the Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) in Tašmajdan Park. Novi Sad Mayor Miloš Vučević attended a commemoration in Novi Sad’s Jugovićevo army barracks.
Labor, Employment and Social Policy Ministry’s State Secretary Negovan Stanković laid a wreath to the monument to children killed in the NATO bombing in Tašmajdan Park.
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The real story is painfully simple.
A long time ago, the Balkans were invaded by violent Jihadists who stole children from across the region and turned them into the Caliphate’s slave army. During the occupation, Albania betrayed every other nation, and most of its population converted to Islam. Kosovo was always a part of Serbia, and had in fact, been central to the Serbian Empire, but the occupying Ottomans imposed a harsh Jizya tax on the Serbs there, driving a lot of them out, and paving the way for a mass immigration into the area by Albanian Muslims.
Time went on. The Turks lost WWI. Yugoslavia went communist, but routinely broke from Moscow on policy matters, notably refusing to join the Warsaw Pact. Communism in Yugoslavia wasn’t implemented very rigorously, which saved the country from most of the horrors experienced in Ukraine and Romania.
Anyway, a time came when Yugoslavia was weakened and began to break apart along ethnic lines (Croatia, Slovenia). The Albanians in Kosovo saw an opportunity to break out of Serbia’s control and become an Albanian puppet state, so they began to riot and burn Christian churches and ancient texts. Milosevic responded with force, in the same way we would respond if the Muslims of New York began trying to tear down the Statue of Liberty.
Clinton wanted a legacy of global change, and Middle East peace was obviously not on the cards, so he went into Serbia backed up by anti-Serb propaganda that exaggerated the actions of the Serb military and hid the grim reality of Serb Christians massacred in Kosovo. It was never a justified engagement. They had done nothing to us, but we destroyed people’s lives, and killed children, and robbed a country of its sovereign territory. Serbs are still persecuted in Kosovo today, and in greater Europe, where the same propaganda was used, shown recently by the pardoning of several Croatian military officers who had committed war crimes in Serbia.
As someone mentioned before, it was one of the worst things our country ever did. Serbs are people we could have a lot in common with, but Bill Clinton cut a wound so deep, dislike for the US in Serbia is only outdone by stronger feelings in Arab countries.
Bottom line_ Kosovo is not a real country. It’s a fake country, and if Europe destabilizes, Serbia will get their payback on the Albanian Muslims for all they have done.
I would definitely recommend:
Yugoslavia, The Avoidable War(2002)
http://vimeo.com/24454469
I saw this movie when the actual producers showed up in New York City for a selected showing. The link above has subtitles but I still have the VCR tape that I bought that night that does not. Maybe I should digitize it.
I was one of those people that used to participate pretty regularly in those threads back in the day. We used to call ourselves “The Balkans Front”! We had lots of defenders of the US war action on FR that used to make the threads somewhat combative as well.
But of course, Fusion stands out above them all. An international man of mystery, Fusion frustrated everyone on those threads!
A Super Entarde bump for all my Balkans Friends!
Dry is good. Wind is better.
It may very well be the worst.
The reason we bombed the Serbs is because they were White Christians and NATO wanted to enforce multiculturalism on the former Yugoslavia. If it was the other way around and the muslims (who are also white) were winning battles against the Christians, NATO would not have done squat. This is the only military action the U.S. engaged in where race and religion were the ultimate deciding factors, and the white Christian Serbs were the wrong color and religion for modern NATO.
It may very well be the worst.
A few links...
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/ddj/Kosovo/articles/Binder87NYT.htm
http://members.tripod.com/~sarant_2/ksm.html
http://www.labournet.net/balkans/0007/sanja.html
http://members.tripod.com/sarant_2/ks12milica.html
At three years of age when she was killed by a KKKlintonista/NATO bomb hundreds of kilometers from anything even remotely resembling a legitimate military target, that is, if you even assume there was such a thing as a legitimate military target for NATO at the time, Milica Rakic probably has the dubius distinction of being SlicKKK KKKlintler's youngest female victim.
The other picture of Milica which you see is this
That means that Milica has been declared a martyr of the Orthodox church. It means that Slick Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Albright, Wesley Clark and that whole crowd are going into the history books on the same page as the ****heads who burned Joan of Ark.
There is of course anyone number of internet search engines you could use, just type in ‘’History of the Balkans/conflicts’’ for instance. That would be a very good place to start. I’m sorry I can’t offer anything right off the top of my head. The history of the Balkans is very complex.So many different ethnic groups all clamoring for land and power. Serbs, Croats, Bosnians , Montenegrins and primarily two religions Orthodox Christians(the Serbs) and Roman Catholics(the Croats) and Muslims( Bosnians/Kosovars.) What you’ll soon come to see however is that there nothing is clear cut about any of the politics of the whole situation and there are no real winners or losers per se, although historically the Serbs have always caught the worst of it. It isn’t for nothing the Balkans have always been called ‘’Anus Mundi’’(’’a-hole of the world’’.
Not really, there was a thorough discussion here about the war. Mostly against. I lurked here then joined later.
—
Huh? The Internet hardly existed then and mostly consisted of Prodigy and CompuServe (among others) and expensive dialup modems. You must be thinking of something else or someplace else, not Washington State in the 70s and 80s.
From our perspective there was little outside support, mostly against us - pro government and pro Treaty Indian. The MSN - then ABCCBSNBC made a big deal about getting both sides, but only broadcast the Indian side, while vilifying us.
You must understand that the vilest part took place in the years 1975-1983 and petered out in the following years when the protests became a Federal felony.
And yes you got the ‘war’ part right, as it did involve deliberate Federal violence, death, Federal imprisonment for the crime of fishing, and as far as it went a violent Constitutional Rights battle, thus qualifying in some minds as the second Civil War, or as close as one can get.
Had we had significant outside help then (even FR’s - had it existed then), the guys that died or were maimed might still be alive and hale today.
But thanks for your support. But you really haven't lived until you've been stared down by a nervous 18 year old on a lurching 80' Coast Guard Cutter manning a locked and loaded .50 cal Ma Duce pointed at you. Quite a thrill, I tell you true ...
We must be talking about different conflicts. Clinton’s attack on Serbia was during 1999 when the internet was well-established along with Free Republic. Previous portions of breakup of Yugoslavia took place in the 80’s.
Yes you are correct. I was writing extensively yesterday on the war on natural resource harvesters on another thread, and managed to confuse it with the Kosovo war in my replies. Sorry to confuse you also.
I feel the same way. I could never figure out what we were trying to do.
A quick vid to let you know who the clinton’s work for:
http://www.juliagorin.com/wordpress/?p=2937
The filthy koranimals from the house of fraud aka “Our friends”.
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