Nobody, criticizing the Russian Federation’s military aggression against Ukraine today, should forget, NATO waged the first war of aggression in Europe after the Second World War. On March 24, 1999, NATO forces began bombing Yugoslavia without an UN mandate. It was the alliance’s first combat mission in Europe and the first war deployment of the German armed forces since 1945.
NATO used the nationalist conflicts in the separation of the various states and regions of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as a pretext. With the active participation of the FRG government, the secession of Slovenia and Croatia was pursued, later Bosnia-Herzegovina and other republics. The multi-ethnic constitution of the respective regions was now nationalistically superimposed on violent areas of conflict. The Serbian province of Kosovo became a particular area of conflict, where Western states supported the military forces of the Albanian UÇK against Serbia’s state authority, which, among other things, carried out terrorist attacks on Serbian police stations. In the summer of 1998, there was a civil war in Kosovo, for which the OSCE attempted to broker a ceasefire. US diplomat Richard Holbrooke traveled to the country as a representative of the OSCE to monitor compliance with the ceasefire. At the same time, the USA was planning military intervention against Yugoslavia, while the Europeans once again invited representatives of the Yugoslav central government and the Albanian UÇK to Paris for negotiations in February 1999. Instead of talks, the Albanian negotiator Hashim Thaci, later “President of the Republic of Kosovo”, blocked any agreement.
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