NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia

[SasaYU]

Relics from NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999.

[Richie B]

Interesting photos

The F16 in flight

Richie

[Ulsterman]

Huh-

Interesting. You don't often see US stuff as 'war trphies'.

[Gordon Craig]

SasaYU,

Looks like a new display at the aircraft musuem at the airport in Belgrade. Very interesting.

Regards.

Gordon

[SasaYU]

Hi Gordon.

Display is not so new. It is there for a few years.

But it is interesting, as you said.

Edited June 13, 2009 by SasaYU

[Gordon Craig]

SasaYu,

I left Belgrade the day before the bombing started. We had evacuated the staff and the families of the Canadian Embassy a few days earlier. I lead the team that retruned to re-open the Embassy in July of the same year. I have some excellent pictures of what Belgrade loked like when we arrived back in the country. If I can find them I will post some of them. Those of us (Canadians) who lived and worked in Belgarde at the time didn't think bombing was the solution to the problem. I still don't.

Regards,

Gordon

[SasaYU]

@ Gordon

Thank you for your words Gordon. I have read your post about life in the embassy in those days. I know that you understand what happened here.

Hope that kind of thing won't happen again.

@ eitze

Thank you.

[leigh kitchen]

About the time I arrived in RS for duties with the IPTF, initially delayed because of the conflict in Kosovo.

It was an interesting experience to enter a meeting full of Serb police chiefs & introduce yourself as their new (English) crime investigation advisor at a time when the RAF were operating against their friends & relatives.

Back at my accomodation, living in the community, my old landlady used to phone her sister in Belgrade & end up in tears because relatves were being injured & their houses damaged.

I covered up my Union Flag patch with a neutral "IPTF" patch to be on the safe side.

We're straying into "poltical" here, should keep off poltics.

Christan Zulu posted a thread a while back, photos of a US Stealth that was shot down - same museum?

[SasaYU]

Should be no politics. As a thread says : Modern Campaigns and Conflicts.

Yes, it is a same museum.

Edited June 13, 2009 by SasaYU

[PKeating]

Those of us (Canadians) who lived and worked in Belgarde at the time didn't think bombing was the solution to the problem. I still don't.

Aerial bombardment is rarely a solution to any military problem. It is often said that the Anglo-American bombing campaign against Germany may have prolonged the war by up to a year and a half through polarising German civilians who were not normally disposed to supporting Nazism in any active way and creating a diversion from Hitler's woeful performance as the supreme military commander once things began going wrong. As Leigh says, we should avoid politics but it is an inevitable consequence of showing images of "war trophies" with revisionist captions referring to Western aggression against Yugoslavia so perhaps you will all indulge someone else who was there in 1999, although somewhat removed from the sun-dappled boulevards, caf?s and stunning women of Belgrade in the springtime.

The bombardment of Belgrade was a major factor in persuading the Serbian dictator Milosovich and his henchmen to withdraw not just their armed forces but the irregulars commanded by Arkan and his ilk from Kosova. However, it was only when the Serbian militiamen and irregulars got a dose of their own medicine from 3 Para and certain members of the Bundeswehr in places like Pristina once the NATO columns finally rolled that the Milosovich regime realised that the days of using force underscored by state terrorism in the form of genocidal or democidal tactics to hold "Yugoslavia" or "Greater Serbia" together were over. Boots and bayonets on the ground trump aerial bombardment every time.

It took me years to be able to share a room or a dinner table with a Serb after what I saw there and in other places in ex-Yugoslavia. Perhaps this was irrational but PTSD does funny things to people. I realise now that many Serbs, especially youngsters, were against Milosovich and his maniacs, and that even as our glorious leaders were cuddling up to the Serbs as their new best friends, there were many young refuseniks languishing in prison camps whose crime was to have refused to do their national service in Kosova or, as Serbs call it, Kosovo. I cannot recall any Western politicians calling for their release after the war. I remember humans rights groups trying to raise the question and being told by the new regime's spokespeople in Belgrade that it was an internal matter.

One can of course understand the Serb viewpoint. Conservative Serbs sometimes ask us how we would feel if the Muslims of Bradford in the UK or the Hispanics of Florida suddenly declared their regions independent and threw white people out of their homes. However, the Kosovars were genuinely scared of the Belgrade regime and with good reason, given the human rights record of the Milosovich dictatorship since the rekindling of the civil war in 1990. Extreme savagery and cruelty have been hallmarks of Balkan conflicts for centuries and the behaviour of all sides in the 1990s continued this tradition.

Whether the NATO bombing of Serbia was morally defensible or not, it did play a part in bringing that dreadful conflict to an end - until the next time our Balkan cousins succumb to bloodlust - and you would have to have been there, amongst the Kosovars, to experience their gratitude to Washington and London first hand as they saw the thugs and killers sent by Belgrade on the run. Sure, some elements of the U?K were rather nasty themselves but that's another discussion.

Anyway, this display hints at the real underlying attitudes of many Serbs in general. They are not sorry for what their country did. They're just sorry that Milosovich screwed up and lost the war. They'll take Western aid, funded by our taxes, and they'll throw us the occasional war criminal or discredited dictator in exchange for positive headlines but they would do it all again if they got half a chance. They should have been subjected to national reeducation of the kind we imposed upon the Germans in 1945 through the denazification programme. The only thing keeping them more or less civilised, rather like the Turks, is the prospect of EU membership and all that lovely money they stand to receive, all paid for by our taxes.

Meanwhile, their true nature is glimpsed in this display, with that rhetorical tosh about our "aggression against Yugoslavia". Utter tommyrot! It was a military campaign against the Milosovich regime. It was perhaps the last morally justifiable Western military intervention on record, with the exception of Britain's expedition to Sierra Leone in 2000. Milosovich and his henchmen needed stopping and, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it was time for war-war rather than jaw-jaw. Of course civilians were killed. That's the price of war. And it is a terrible price. Buildings are blown to smithereens and people are killed. We find it harder to bear when they look like our buildings and our people, that's all.

One of my uncles, who participated in the liberation of Europe in 1944 and 1945, accepts that the bombing of German cities like Dresden and Hamburg was terrible but still bristles when he hears the term "war crimes" in connection with the bombing campaign because he remembers entering Belsen on the second day. A part of him still feels that the Germans got their just desserts. And then he feels bad for harbouring such sentiments. Of course most of the Serb civilians killed in 1999 by our bombs didn't deserve to die. But nor did the Kosovars subjected to Serb barbarism.

Perhaps if you had stood beside me on a few occasions in Kosova and Northern Albania in 1999, confronted by the victims of Serb aggression, your feelings towards the Serbs you worked with at the time, who seem to have been very much a part of the Milosovich regime, might have been a little different. I am not suggesting that you should not remember them with sympathy but let's not forget that they were, for the most part, enthusiastic supporters of what Milosovich and his henchmen were trying to achieve. In 1945, we said "Never Again!" so Milosovich had to be stopped and all the handwringing and dialogue in the world wasn't going to work. Simple as that.

It seems that even when Milosovich's generals did turn up for talks with the NATO delegation, which included Generals Wesley Clark and Mike Jackson, the latter had to point out very forcefully to the Serbs that they were there not for negotiations but to hear and accept the terms imposed by NATO. In other words, they were the commanders of a defeated - and morally discredited - army. Some accounts allege that General Jackson pointed his service pistol at them to emphasise his points. Knowing Jackson, that may be true. The Serbs certainly the tent left in a hurry and had to be coaxed into returning. Jackson was subsequently removed from his post, leaving the far more malleable Wesley Clark there as a safe pair of hands from our leaders' viewpoint, given that they were already preparing to do business with Belgrade.

One always has to follow the money or the smell of the money in order to gain a broader understanding of these things.

PK

Edited June 25, 2009 by PKeating

[Gordon Craig]

Prosper,

Well said. There are always two sides to every story and as you said, both sides in the conflict, Albanian Kosovars and Serbs, were guilty of excesses. Your comment about bombing not being the solution to the problem was what was behind my statement that you quoted. It was obvious to me at the time that only boots on the ground would end the conflict. And I agree that the conflict needed to be ended.

We saw the conflict from different perspective. You from being in the zone of the killing, me from being in Belgrade amongs Serbian friends who did not wish anyone any harm. It is difficult to see the necessity of the death of the 18 year old son of one of the cleaning ladies in the Canadian Embassy who was drafted into the Serbian armed forces and killed during the conflict. Regardless of how he died, or others caught up in the conflict through events beyond their control, their deaths seem piontless in the end.

Regards,

Gordon

[PKeating]

Absolutely, Gordon. In the end, it's always the ordinary people, the people just trying to live as best they can, who are hit the hardest of all. The tears of a Serb mother for her conscript son killed in action in a war, essentially, against his own people are no less valid than those of Behdri Maxun, one of dozens from whom I took statements on my way up through Northern Albania to the border. This is his story:

On The Road From Kuk?s?

BEDRI Maxhun - 65 - from Vushtria - 20 km from Pristina

We met Bedri Maxhun on the road from Kuk?s to Tirana. Two big industrial flatbed trucks loaded with stunned-looking people were halted in the sweltering humidity beside a roadside restaurant about 75 miles north of Tirana. Old men and women, adolescents, young children and babies and a handful of men in their 30s and 40s. Exhausted, dirty, many of them obviously in shock, some of them visibly ill. A young girl hung over the tailgate hawking up transparent bile. The inevitable smells of distressed humanity mingled with the smell of putrifaction from the garbage tip outside the kitchen door.

Some Kosovars in the second truck who spoke good German gently handed Bedri Maxhun down from the back of the first truck. Mr Bedri was a fine-looking farmer of 65 in a black beret, tweed jacket, a cardigan over a check shirt, heavy working trousers, and black Oxford countryman?s brogues. He could have been from Brittany. A swollen eye and other marks and bruises indicated that he had recently been badly beaten. As two men held him by the arms and hands for moral support, Mr Bedri told his story, pausing occasionally as he struggled to control the tears welling up in his eyes. Kosovars do not cry, especially not in front of strangers.

?The police cleared us from our houses. They burned the houses down. I left Vushtria on foot with my family. When we were walking along towards Albania, a group of Serb paramilitaries appeared. I think they were Arkan?s men. Tigers. They shot my son and my nephew. In the face. In front of my wife. They kicked me about and riflebutted me in the face and eye. They were screaming things like ?Why do you want a Kosovan Republic? Why do you want NATO here? Tell NATO to help you now!? My daughter paid them 500 deutschmarks not to kill me. That?s all I have to say now. I am sorry but I cannot speak any more??

And then Mr Bedri broke down and cried. His friends led the weeping old man away to the back of the truck where other hands pulled him up. One of the friends said that Mr Bedri?s son was 30 and his nephew just 14. Before the trucks pulled out to continue their long, slow journey to the south, the men caring for Mr Bedri said that he would not mind having his photograph taken because they had explained to him that it was important to record what had happened so that the guilty men could be made to answer for it after the war.

His wife, daughter and daughter-in-law were in visible need of urgent medical attention as the paramilitaries had taken the balance they considered their due from these women 'in kind', so to speak. However, rape being a taboo subject in such societies, they remained in a huddle under a plastic tarpaulin on the back of the flatbed truck, unwilling to allow strangers to witness their shame, with the menfolk twirling rags in an attempt to keep the flies away.

This was common daily fare there but, in the end, no more cruel than the experience of pulling bits of family members and friends from a Belgrade building hit by a 'smart bomb' or missile. Perhaps the medieval savagery of the killers on the ground was more honest, in a way, than the clinical savagery of clean-shaven young NATO airmen pressing buttons at 35,000 feet. Many of the paramilitaries were Russian veterans of Afghanistan and Chechnya and a lot them were high on cheap heroin and alcohol. I met a few of them as well on my travels and they were scary people.

Others were the inevitable lowlife recruited from prisons and gutters by Arkan's officers and NCOs. A few were nationalists and neo-fascist extremists who had bought into the notion that they were defending the edge of Christendom from encroaching Islam, many Kosovars and Albanians being Muslims. However, these people were Catholics in the main before the Ottoman Turks 'persuaded' them to convert to Islam. I don't know if the people who put the Behdri family out of their houses or the savages who held them up ever answered for it but I do know that I and some of my colleagues handed copies of our notes and photos to the Red Cross and other NGOs, and to the war crimes investigators, and that some families were reunited and some perpetrators arrested.

The whole Balkan experience was a deeply troubling lesson in how thin our veneer of civilisation really is and how ordinary and even pleasant most of the worst killers turned out to be, crazed junkies and drunks apart. Just as ordinary and pleasant, in fact, as the young airmen who bombed Belgrade and other Serb targets, but perhaps more honest, as I said, about the violence to which they were subjecting fellow human beings. As a society, we Westerners tend to recoil from violence if forced to see it up close and acknowledge it.

We'll cheer in pubs when we hear that some mad mullah has been taken out in his slum lair by a missile or a 'smart bomb', without having a care for all the people around his lair who were killed and maimed too. We'll buy the pilot a pint if we meet him. But we will recoil in horror from, say, an IRA man who blew his target up with a car bomb or a Balkan killer who tied a family together with military telephone cable, doused them in petrol and used them as kindling to burn down the farmhouse, even though their actions are not really so different to those of the airman bombing and burning people to death from a great height.

War is sometimes a necessary evil but those who call for it tend to be those who have never seen it close up or are never likely to be directly involved in it. It is a very serious matter and all too often entrusted to politicians who unleash it without taking any personal responsibility for the consequences and who gull the sheeple with all this nonsense about smart bombs, clinical strikes and all the rest of the phraseology aimed at masking the horrific reality while the usual suspects rake in their profits.

PK

Edited June 25, 2009 by PKeating

[Dragomir]

Absolutely, Gordon. In the end, it's always the ordinary people, the people just trying to live as best they can, who are hit the hardest of all. The tears of a Serb mother for her conscript son killed in action in a war, essentially, against his own people are no less valid than those of Behdri Maxun, one of dozens from whom I took statements on my way up through Northern Albania to the border. This is his story:

His wife, daughter and daughter-in-law were in visible need of urgent medical attention as the paramilitaries had taken the balance they considered their due from these women 'in kind', so to speak. However, rape being a taboo subject in such societies, they remained in a huddle under a plastic tarpaulin on the back of the flatbed truck, unwilling to allow strangers to witness their shame, with the menfolk twirling rags in an attempt to keep the flies away.

This was common daily fare there but, in the end, no more cruel than the experience of pulling bits of family members and friends from a Belgrade building hit by a 'smart bomb' or missile. Perhaps the medieval savagery of the killers on the ground was more honest, in a way, than the clinical savagery of clean-shaven young NATO airmen pressing buttons at 35,000 feet. Many of the paramilitaries were Russian veterans of Afghanistan and Chechnya and a lot them were high on cheap heroin and alcohol. I met a few of them as well on my travels and they were scary people.

Others were the inevitable lowlife recruited from prisons and gutters by Arkan's officers and NCOs. A few were nationalists and neo-fascist extremists who had bought into the notion that they were defending the edge of Christendom from encroaching Islam, many Kosovars and Albanians being Muslims. However, these people were Catholics in the main before the Ottoman Turks 'persuaded' them to convert to Islam. I don't know if the people who put the Behdri family out of their houses or the savages who held them up ever answered for it but I do know that I and some of my colleagues handed copies of our notes and photos to the Red Cross and other NGOs, and to the war crimes investigators, and that some families were reunited and some perpetrators arrested.

The whole Balkan experience was a deeply troubling lesson in how thin our veneer of civilisation really is and how ordinary and even pleasant most of the worst killers turned out to be, crazed junkies and drunks apart. Just as ordinary and pleasant, in fact, as the young airmen who bombed Belgrade and other Serb targets, but perhaps more honest, as I said, about the violence to which they were subjecting fellow human beings. As a society, we Westerners tend to recoil from violence if forced to see it up close and acknowledge it.

We'll cheer in pubs when we hear that some mad mullah has been taken out in his slum lair by a missile or a 'smart bomb', without having a care for all the people around his lair who were killed and maimed too. We'll buy the pilot a pint if we meet him. But we will recoil in horror from, say, an IRA man who blew his target up with a car bomb or a Balkan killer who tied a family together with military telephone cable, doused them in petrol and used them as kindling to burn down the farmhouse, even though their actions are not really so different to those of the airman bombing and burning people to death from a great height.

War is sometimes a necessary evil but those who call for it tend to be those who have never seen it close up or are never likely to be directly involved in it. It is a very serious matter and all too often entrusted to politicians who unleash it without taking any personal responsibility for the consequences and who gull the sheeple with all this nonsense about smart bombs, clinical strikes and all the rest of the phraseology aimed at masking the horrific reality while the usual suspects rake in their profits.

PK

I find this kind of posting insulting and unacceptable. Will the Moderator, please, spare us from the rubbish of this kind on the future.

Dragomir

[SasaYU]

I agree with Dragomir completely. Aren't you gentelman too deep in polics ?

Would moderator please stop this ?

[eitze]

:angry:

Hey - where`s my post in this thread ???

What about the freedom of speech in this forum

eitze

[Nick]

What about the freedom of speech in this forum ?

This forum is to discuss militaria and where appropriate military conflict. Freedom of speech does not fall within this as political topics are off limits. I have removed irrelevant posts and locked this down.