In Belgrade, Serbia, stands the Eternal Flame monument, a site visited to commemorate the victims of the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999. The monument, roughly thirty meters tall, is essentially a slender obelisk that over the years has sparked heated debate. One reason stands out: the monument, the most prominent architectural tribute to those who died, was erected at the behest of Mirjana Marković, wife of Slobodan Milošević, who ruled with an iron hand and was president during the assault. So much so that someone even proposed renaming it in memory of the victims of the late dictator.
Twenty-five years after the NATO campaign began, an anniversary observed this Sunday, Serbia, then the country that fought to prevent the disintegration of that socialist entity, has changed. Yet it has not forgotten, nor fully healed, the painful wound and the terrible crimes attributed to Milošević in those years. Those urban memories of the bombs dropped by NATO also resist collective amnesia.
The operation, launched by order of Spanish Secretary General Javier Solana and without United Nations Security Council authorization, lasted 11 weeks, during which thousands of bombs were dropped and an unknown number of civilians died. Estimates still range from about 500 fatalities, according to Human Rights Watch, to around 2,500, according to Serbian authorities. NATO itself has not replied to a recent inquiry by BIRN regarding this information, as confirmed by this regional investigative outlet.
War over the narrative
[The disagreement over these figures remains one of the great legacies of the controversy, two and a half decades later.] The operation’s declared justification was to avert ethnic cleansing of the Kosovo Albanians in the then Serbian province of Kosovo, following the failure of the Rambouillet conference in Paris.
But this version, defended by NATO and part of Western politics, has been repeatedly challenged, including through testimonies that linger in Serbia, such as that of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. “The Rambouillet text, which demanded that Serbia permit NATO troops in Yugoslavia, was a provocación, an excuse to start the bombing,” Kissinger said in a June 1999 interview with The Daily Telegraph.
Beyond the debate about origins, analysts like Miguel Roán have calmly described what the military operation meant for civilians with the patience that comes with time. In Belgrade, “bombed with graphite bombs,” the city experienced days without electricity and endured scenes of “pain” and “stupor.” Among these events, Roán notes bombings of “a maternity hospital” and the American missiles that struck the Chinese Embassy, allegedly due to a miscalculation by Allied forces.
In total, according to journalistic estimates, there were 11 massive attacks with civilian casualties across the territory that was then Yugoslavia; including two particularly severe assaults on refugee convoys. Hence, according to researchers like Francisco Veiga, the NATO campaign never earned broad “sympathy in European public opinion.” Mazower’s work captures a similar thread: the operation solved one problem, the Serbian persecution of Albanians in Kosovo, but created others that sustained ethnic nationalism and fragile civic traditions.
Bombardments born of mistakes, or described as such by the Alliance, fed into Serbian nationalist propaganda in a country where Milošević already suppressed dissent. A collateral consequence was the assassination of journalist Slavko Ćuruvija in April 1999, after he was accused by a pro-government outlet of supporting the Atlantic campaign. “The dehumanization of restless journalists, accused of betraying the homeland, remains a tool used by politics in Serbia today,” said Ivana Stevanović of the Ćuruvija Foundation.
Still, the operation did result in Serbia’s exit from Kosovo and Milošević’s fall from grace, though it did not end the diplomatic rift between Belgrade and Pristina, a rift that continues to shape the region. The British historian Mark Mazower summarized it in The Balkans: “A problem was solved—the Serbian pursuit of Albanians—while new problems were created, including continued persecution of Albanians by Serbs in Kosovo, and ethnic nationalism in a fragile civic landscape.”
That ongoing friction remains a central thread in the region’s history, a testament to how the echoes of that campaign still shape memories, politics, and identities in the Balkans today.