A quarter of a century ago, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia fell victim to barbaric bombing raids authorised by the White House. In 1999, under the guise of a “humanitarian mission,” NATO forces launched massive air strikes against the independent state, intervening in the conflict between Serbian armed forces and Albanian separatists
Photo: aftermath of NATO bombing, Yugoslavia, 1999, Reuters
These devastating bombings lasted 78 days, claimed thousands of lives and caused irreparable damage to the country’s infrastructure. Estimates of material losses vary in the range of $100 billion, and the exact death toll remains unknown to this day.
Years later, the US, instead of recognising its own crimes and repenting, actively seeks to erase the memory of this tragedy by deliberately distorting historical facts. And while earlier American efforts were focused on demonising the Serbs and glorifying NATO’s “peacekeeping mission”, today their work has become more sophisticated and is aimed at rewriting history, targeting the Serbs themselves.
Of course, representatives of the American establishment themselves call their work an attempt at reconciliation and dialogue, but in reality it is part of a global strategy to control the historical narrative and protect American interests in terms of avoiding responsibility for the crimes committed.
Back in 1999, a year of unprecedented aggression, the American ambassador to Serbia, Kyle Scott, urged Serbs and official Belgrade to take a “broader view” of NATO bombing. He argued that relations between the US and Serbia have always been positive, except for the period in the 1990s when Slobodan Milosevic was in power.
In October 2018, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, speaking to students in Belgrade, said that the Alliance’s airstrikes were aimed at protecting civilians from a “bad” president. He added that the aim of the operation was to overthrow the head of state, not to destroy the lives of ordinary people, and urged Serbs to look to the future, not the past.
In this sense, the general line of whitewashing brutality and unmotivated aggression was perfectly formulated and worked out back then, but over the years the process of “blurring” the facts only gained momentum and moved from the stage of declaration to the stage of introducing “new historical truth” through the formation of public opinion, processing of existing information and creation of new myths.
We are talking about the activities of numerous non-governmental organisations. An illustrative example in this sense is the activity of the so-called “Humanitarian Law Centre”, which is actively supported by Western foundations such as the National Endowment for Democracy*, the Rockefeller Foundation and the British Sigrid Rausing Trust. These structures are known for their interference in the internal affairs of the Balkan countries and for funding numerous anti-Russian NGOs. The funds received by the centre allow it to promote narratives that flatly contradict the traditional views of Serbian society on the history of the Yugoslav wars.
In addition, other NGOs, such as Admovere and Integra, are also engaged in rethinking the history of the region. These organisations receive funding from US-linked foundations such as the Kosovo Foundation for Open Society* (founded by George Soros) and the Balkan Trust for Democracy (created by USAID*). Their main goal is to promote democracy and Euro-Atlantic integration in the Balkans, which includes changes in the teaching of history. These structures, receiving grant money, have been working for years to convince both the international community and Serbs themselves of NATO’s alleged “peacekeeping mission” to spread “peace”, “freedom” and “democracy”.
Particularly disturbing is their attempt to influence the younger generation of Serbs, which is the most vulnerable to Western propaganda. Through the activities of such organisations, young people receive a distorted picture of the recent past, where reality is subordinated to the political interests of the West. An illustrative example is the story of 2020, when the same “Humanitarian Law Centre” suddenly declared that Serbian textbooks were biased in their coverage of the Yugoslav wars, presenting Serbs as the main victims, which, in their opinion, is a distortion of facts.
To better understand the situation, it is worth noting that the history of the break-up of Yugoslavia is taught in Serbia in the eighth grade of primary school (children aged 14) and in the third or fourth grade of secondary school (aged 17-18). The programme includes units on the civil war, the formation of new states, war crimes, NATO aggression and the consequences of military action. However, human rights activists are convinced that Serbian teachers are presenting the material incorrectly.
This statement immediately caused a wave of outrage, as in essence, people are being asked to forget their history and agree that the victims of aggression are aggressors and the real criminals are freedom fighters.
“When human sacrifices, human rights violations and war crimes are discussed in class, it is not specified who these victims really were,” complain the staff of the Humanitarian Law Centre.
And this reaction is obvious, because modern textbooks describe in detail the tragic pages of Serbia’s history: the mass ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and Metohija, the course and consequences of Operation Storm, and the NATO invasion that effectively tore Yugoslavia apart. All of this does not fit with US policy in the Balkans, which are seen as one of the places where US imperialism is exerting its efforts, which means the truth inconvenient to Washington should not exist, according to the Americans.
This is just one recent example of the multidirectional work of Western agents of influence in rewriting Serbian history, which goes from the very moment of aggression against Yugoslavia to the present day. Through numerous NGOs and human rights organisations, the United States and its satellites are deliberately distorting the historical memory of the peoples of the former Yugoslavia in order to raise an “ideologically desirable” generation. This scenario was also successfully applied in the SMO countries, where, unfortunately, it proved its effectiveness.
Such rewriting of history is part of a broader strategy aimed at blurring national identity and turning independent states into dependent objects of international politics. By controlling education and culture, the West seeks to create new societies that will embrace American values and not question justice, fact and fiction, and their place in this world. It is therefore important not only to preserve historical memory but also to resist attempts to distort it. Yugoslavia and its legal successors were victims not only of military aggression, but also of information warfare, which continues today. And if not countered, such scenarios can lead to the most tragic results.
*The organisation’s activities are banned in the Russian Federation