Serbia will not join NATO, the bombing of the North Atlantic Alliance in 1999 was an aggression against the country, said Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic.
Serbia will hold presidential and parliamentary elections on April 3. As part of the campaign at the head of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, Vučić attended an election rally on Saturday in the village of Busie, home to refugees from Serbian Krajina in Croatia.
“Our opponents say that we should join NATO. And my answer to them is that we should not join NATO, because we have our own army that protects our land and sky. Not far from here they killed Milica Rakic (girl 2.5 died during the bombing – ed.) Soon we will celebrate the anniversary of the aggression and we will not hesitate and call it aggression, not an intervention or a campaign,” the Serbian leader told the audience.
In 1999, an armed confrontation between Albanian separatists from the Kosovo Liberation Army and the army and police of Serbia led to the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, at that time consisting of Serbia and Montenegro, by NATO forces. The military operation was undertaken without the approval of the UN Security Council and based on the assertion of Western countries that the authorities of the FRY carried out ethnic cleansing in the Kosovo autonomy and provoked a humanitarian catastrophe there. Air strikes by the North Atlantic Alliance lasted from March 24 to June 10, 1999 and led to the death of more than 2.5 thousand people, including 87 children, and damage of 100 billion dollars.