Former Yugoslav foreign minister: Serbia should demand reparations from NATO
Zivadin Jovanovic, the foreign minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1998-2000, told journalists that the time is coming when Serbia will demand reparations for damage from the 1999 NATO bombing.
“One hundred billion dollars is the direct damage, which was calculated by the government I was a member of. The cabinets they installed in Belgrade after October 2000 (the overthrow of former president Slobodan Milosevic – ed.) were their governments that underestimated this figure, but the people know this… NATO also knows about the responsibility, not only for material damage, but also for poisoning nature, getting depleted uranium into the food chain. I am sure that the time will come when we will raise the issue of reparations,” Jovanovic said and noted that the alliance started the aggression with a wrong calculation.
He observed that NATO promised the American and Western public that Yugoslavia would be “finished in a few days and Milosevic would be brought to his knees.”
“That didn’t work out and they began very extensive destructive bombing raids all over the FRY from the North Macedonian border to Hungary. They thought that if they bombed factories, bridges, hospitals, power grids and energy, the people would direct their discontent against Milosevic and overthrow him. All civilian infrastructure, industry, in all spheres of the economy were destroyed en masse. First of all, they bombed bridges, the system of production and transmission of electricity, which is vital for the preservation of state food reserves, hospitals, the entire economy, which must work in wartime,” said the former Yugoslav Foreign Minister.
According to him, the Serbian people were so patriotic that the power grids destroyed by graphite bombs during the day were rebuilt overnight. “They bombed our oil refineries to destroy fuel supplies for our army, while releasing poisonous substances that poisoned the neighbourhood, forcing people to leave their homes. They bombed hospitals, kindergartens, the children’s hospital “Dragiša Mišović” in the centre of Belgrade, schools were bombed almost systematically, for example, the school “Djura Jakšić” in the town of Čuprija, gyms, water supply, there was nothing that in their estimation had vital importance, and they would have missed it – they destroyed everything,” said the interlocutor of the Agency.
According to his data, the industrial centre of the country – the city of Kragujevac, where the automotive and defence industry was concentrated, which employed over 100 thousand people, NATO bombed for weeks, “expecting that if the workers were left without earnings, their families would have nothing to live on and this would cause protests and they would overthrow Milosevic”, which did not happen then.
“They bombed our markets, for example in the city of Niš, all important facilities, including 30 TV and radio stations and repeaters from Radio and Television Serbia in Belgrade, where they killed 16 employees, to the repeaters in Subotica on the border with Hungary. These are their two objectives – to cause damage and to stir up the people against the president and to mask their cowardly behaviour, which is why they have wreaked so much havoc,” Jovanovic concluded.
In 1999, an armed confrontation between Albanian separatists from the Kosovo Liberation Army and Serbian security forces led to the bombing of the FRY (then consisting of Serbia and Montenegro) by NATO forces. The military operation was undertaken without the approval of the UN Security Council on the basis of the Western countries’ claim that the FRY authorities allegedly carried out ethnic cleansing in the Kosovo autonomy and provoked a humanitarian catastrophe there. North Atlantic Alliance air strikes continued from 24 March to 10 June 1999.
The NATO bombings resulted in over 2,500 deaths, including 87 children, and $100 billion in damage, while medical experts record the effects of depleted uranium leading to an increase in cancer.
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