Conflicting Memories: NATO Bombing of Serbia, 23 years later.
BELGRADE, March 18, 2018 — The alcove next to the Children’s Cultural Center in Belgrade is usually an oasis from city noise. Next to it sits a stone monument. Across from it a building, reduced to rubble. At 1 p.m. when an art class lets out at the Center, the silence is pierced by playful shrieks.
A boy in a puffy blue coat waddles up to the stone. He points at the engraved list of names, and his mother tells him who they are. Together, they count to 16. The boy raises his eyebrows and opens his mouth wide: “Sixteen?” he questions, his voice going up an octave. His mother nods as he runs away, chasing a pigeon.
She lingers, switching her gaze between the 16 names on the memorial, and the building across the street that claimed their lives.
The building is Radio-Television of Serbia, a public media outlet in Belgrade. NATO, led by the U.S. and then-President Bill Clinton, bombed the building in 1999, in an attempt to stop a violent conflict between Serb forces and pro-independence ethnic Albanians over the statehood of Kosovo, a region south of Serbia that has long been the center of territorial disputes.
The war claimed more than 13,000 lives of mostly ethnic Albanians before Serbia pulled its forces out of Kosovo, which gained independence in 2008 after almost another decade in limbo. This declaration remains unrecognized by Serbia and a handful of other states today.
Now, the RTS building stands as a testament to the political conflicts seared into Serbia’s history, including the lives lost when the bomb struck at 2:06 a.m. on April 23, 1999.
“We thought that we were secure here, more than at home,” Ana Jankovic, an editor at RTS says.
She was in the building just hours before the bombing.
“A lot of people were not found,” she added, gazing at the place her office once sat, now a pile of debris visible to anyone who walks by. “There is a feeling that they are still here. It is like working in a graveyard.”
“A lot of people were not found,” Ana Jankovic, an editor at RTS says. “There is a feeling that they are still here. It is like working in a graveyard.”
Amid human rights violations of the ethnic Albanian majority at the hands of Serb forces, NATO justified the bombing in a United Nations war crime court report as “necessary to disrupt the communications network” of the Serb army. But civil society members in Serbia still question if the civilian-inhabited building was a viable target, despite its ties to government propaganda.
A report by Human Rights Watch deemed it “illegitimate,” arguing that NATO did not give adequate warning, and that it violated a legal requirement regarding civilian population density of the area.
Those that lived are quick to agree.
Branislav Kovacevic woke up early that morning in 1999. By 5 a.m. he was waiting at the apartment of his friend, a video-mixer at RTS. For two hours he paced back and forth outside the building, not able to bring himself to knock and found out if his friend had been killed.
“That would have been the first time I was in a position to feel something very sad,” Kovacevic said. “When I heard he was okay, that stone fell from my heart.”
Now, weeds grow up the building, reclaiming the structure. Light casts shadows across a sink still installed in a tile wall. Wires and discarded office furniture are warped and exposed. Two black cats hiss at each other, battling for territory over a hole in the concrete.
The elements may be moving in on the building, but memories stay clear. However, much like the sight of the ruined office in a busy metropolis, they present a contrast.
The Humanitarian Law Center — responsible for the only conclusive death counts from the bombing — are worried that memories are being used for political manipulation, obscuring the taboo topic of human rights violations committed by Serbs against Albanians during the war.
“People here are very poorly informed about what was going on in Kosovo during the NATO bombing,” Jelena Jovanovic, a researcher with the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade said.
“The whole conflict there was not simply a bombing like it was here,” she added. “It was a huge conflict between the Serbian army and police with Albanians. People here know very little about [Serb] crimes committed there, and people here do not want to listen to that.”
“People here are very poorly informed about what was going on in Kosovo during the NATO bombing,” Jelena Jovanovic, a researcher with the Humanitarian Law Center said. ”People here know very little about [Serb] crimes committed there, and people here do not want to listen to that.”
But informing the public is a challenging task when confronted with conflicting memories of the event. This dynamic makes it hard for competing narratives to become mainstream. The RTS building itself encompasses this idea, a passive-aggressive lesson on collective memory and victimhood in the 21st century.
Jovanovic and the Humanitarian Law Center are aiming to change this. The Center hosts classes that teach both sides of the conflict to local students, who do not receive this history in the state-sanctioned education.
Even with this step forward, the task of re-education looms large. Government officials continue to wield statistics like political weapons. Jovanovic says the Serbian government often references Serb victim counts into the multiple thousands, a widely disputed claim.
But the Serbian government has never released an official count of victims, and the Humanitarian Law Center remains the only organization that has documented the human losses from the bombing campaign. Their estimates show about 754 Serbs killed, including 454 civilian deaths and 300 military personnel.
On the other side, the Humanitarian Law Center estimates that over 10,000 ethnic Albanians in Kosovo were killed or disappeared between January 1998 and December 31, 2000. This figure includes civilians and armed forces.
Still, Jovanovic says the reckoning process of the NATO bombings goes much deeper than agreeing upon the numbers.
“Without empathy it is hard to talk about reconciliation or opening dialogue,” Jovanovic said. “Here when we talk about NATO bombing we don’t talk about the beginning or why it happened to us, we just talk about what happened during these 72 days. The consequence is a lack of will to hear what the other side have to say or what the other side survived.”
