NATO Justifies Bombing Serbia

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Photo: AP

"I want to emphasize that we did this to protect our people and to stop the regime of President Slobodan Milosevic," Mr. Stoltenberg said. Mr. Stoltenberg wanted the alliance and Belgrade to "look to the future together."

Mr. Stoltenberg also boasted of the "excellent relationship" between the military alliance and Serbia, affirming that NATO "respects" Belgrade's decision not to join the bloc.

However, he stressed that NATO still wants to be a "partner" of Serbia. The NATO Secretary General added that the military bloc supports "dialogue" between Serbia and Kosovo not only diplomatically but also "in the form of KFOR" - the NATO-led international peacekeeping force deployed in Kosovo.

In March 1999, NATO launched air strikes on Yugoslavia without the support of the UN Security Council. The attack came after NATO accused Belgrade of "excessive use of force" in its conflict with ethnic Albanian Muslim rebels in Kosovo, which unilaterally declared independence in 2008.

During the bombing, NATO dropped "between 10 and 15 tons of depleted uranium, causing a catastrophic environmental disaster" and forcing the Serbian people to file a lawsuit against NATO for causing a series of cancer-related illnesses among residents in the surrounding area.

“In Serbia, 33,000 people fall ill every year due to problems related to the disaster. That is one more child every day,” a member of the international investigation team told RT in 2017.

In 2015, Mr Stoltenberg himself expressed "regret" for Serbian citizens killed in NATO bombing in 1999.