Slobodan Milošević

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.

On March 24, 1999, Kosovo's landscape was permanently altered as the first bombs fell from warplanes overhead, and missiles were launched by warships in the Adriatic Sea. Forty Serbian military targets in Yugoslavia were hit in the first 24 hours, mainly in Serbia and Kosovo.

Central to Tarrant's worldview appears to have been a commitment to the so-called "Great Replacement" theory.

This conspiracy theory posits that Muslim immigration to Western countries is a secret plot to "outbreed" white Christians of European ancestry and thus take over their "homelands". A peculiar brand of Islamophobia, it is rooted in anti-Ottoman sentiment.

On a weekday afternoon in the Serbian capital Belgrade, a small watering hole called Luda Kuca - Madhouse - is crammed with elderly but chatty regulars.

"The point is not to force [libertarianism] into Serbian culture but to recognise the elements that are compatible with it here … and then see how those ideas are best adapted to Serbia," Cekarevac, Libek's executive manager, says.

Serbians who have been protesting against the government for the past three months held a silent march on Tuesday to commemorate the 16th anniversary of the murder of Serbia's liberal Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic.

The commemoration was held under the slogan "If we do not succeed today, the only reason is we ourselves" - one of Djindjic's own sayings.

That "crypto-depression" emerges, he said, as a result of the constant portrayal of Serbia by its ruling party and loyal media as enjoying a "golden era".

A central commemoration for the victims of the bombing of Serbia 20 years ago, which NATO carried out in the final phase of the war in Kosovo, will be organized in Nis, southern Serbia on March 24.
Vucic told this to ANSA during the interview.

Isuf Gashi speaks to Kosovo media after being questioned by the Specialist Prosecutor's Office. Photo: BIRN.

"I was interviewed as a suspect," Gashi said after the interview.

He said that he told the Hague prosecutors that the KLA did not commit war crimes.

This is according to Ivan Krastev, the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies based in Sofia, Bulgaria.

In an opinion piece penned for the New York Times, Krastev adds that "Europe's ideological rigidity is admirable, but it is also partly responsible for the region's paralysis."