BELGRADE, March 24. /TASS/. A flower-laying ceremony was held on Friday in Serbia’s capital of Belgrade to commemorate the 24th anniversary of NATO’s aggression against Yugoslavia.
The ceremony was led by Minister of Labor, Employment, Veteran and Social Affairs Nikola Selakovic, and was attended by Russian Ambassador Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko, Belarusian Ambassador Valery Brilev, President of the Union of War Veterans of the National Liberation Wars of Serbia (SUBNOR) Vidosav Kovacevic, as well as public figures and numerous ordinary citizens.
The commemoration took place in Belgrade’s Tasmajdan Park, where a monument depicting a child with wings and engraved with the inscription "We were just children" has been erected. The monument portrays Milica Rakic, a three-year-old girl who was killed by shrapnel on April 17, 1999, in the bathroom of her home in a suburb of Belgrade, which was located far from any military facilities. According to the Serbian government, Milica was among the 87 children who were killed in the NATO bombings.
Friday marks the 24th anniversary of NATO’s aggression against Yugoslavia, which was unleashed on March 24, 1999, and lasted for 78 days. The alliance’s leadership argued that the main rationale for the operation, codenamed Allied Force, was to prevent the genocide of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population. According to NATO sources, its aircraft flew 38,000 sorties and carried out 10,000 bombing strikes.
The bombardments killed, according to Serbian estimates, 3,500-4,000 people, and left about 10,000 others (two-thirds of them civilians) injured. Material damages totaled up to $100 billion. During the three months of the bombing campaign, NATO forces dropped 15 tons of depleted uranium in bombs and shells on Serbia. Subsequently, the Balkan country’s cancer rates surged to first place in Europe. In the first ten years following the bombardments, about 30,000 people developed cancer, of which an estimated 10,000-18,000 died.