Serbia Marks NATO Bombing Anniversary as Nationalists Protest

An official state ceremony led by President Aleksandar Vucic was held in the southern Serbian city of Nis on Sunday evening, while at the same time nationalists protested in Belgrade on the anniversary of the start of the NATO military campaign on March 24.

Vucic told about 2,000 Serbians who attended the ceremony in Nis that the NATO bombing was a crime.

"Nobody answered for the crimes; for NATO, the [killed] Serbian civilians were just a mistake. For us, they will never be a mistake and will never be forgotten," Vucic said in an emotional address, during which he shed tears at one point.

The ceremony was also attended by the Serb head of the tripartite presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Milorad Dodik, who said that for him it was unacceptable for Bosnia to join NATO.

"I cannot and will not allow a 'NATO border' to be established on the River Drina," Dodik said, referring to the river that runs between Serbia and Bosnia.

Joining NATO remains a highly unpopular idea in Serbia, where officials say the country will remain militarily neutral, although it is part of NATO's Partnership for Peace programme and concluded an Individual Partnership Action Plan with the alliance in March 2015, considered the highest level of cooperation with NATO for any non-member.

In the capital Belgrade, nationalists held their own march on Sunday evening, carrying banners with anti-NATO and anti-EU messages and slogans celebrating the Bosnian Serb Army wartime commander Ratko Mladic, who was convicted of genocide and war crimes under a first-instance verdict in November 2017.

NATO launched its 78-day campaign of air strikes against Serbia in 1999 in an attempt to force then-President Slobodan Milosevic to accept the terms of an agreement to...