The 1999 NATO Bombing: A Legacy of Strain in Serbia-West Relations
The close relationship between China and Serbia stems not only from historical and ideological ties, but also from a shared memory.
Chinese President Xi Jinping's recent trip to Europe has elicited an array of feelings domestically. While his first stop, France, invited good-natured teasings from Chinese netizens, his second destination, Serbia, sparked a wave of enthusiastic support. The close relationship between China and Serbia stems not only from historical and ideological ties but also from a shared memory of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, which devastated the Chinese embassy as well as killed three Chinese nationals.
In our interview with Mr. Jan Oberg, he generously shares his experiences of living and working in a region tragically inundated with bombing, wars, lies, and deceit, which makes the current conflict feel like a heart-wrenching déjà vu.
By Jan Oberg, November 2023
1974 was my first visit to Yugoslavia, and I think I've been there about a hundred times since then, back and forth doing missions and writing about it. In my foundation, we produced the largest-ever report written about Yugoslavia's dissolution and why it should not have happened that way.
It fell apart for a lot of reasons. If you want the 30s short one, this was a group marriage. Group marriages are difficult. The West exploited the fragmentation that they could use in, if you will, histories, trauma, I mean both the Croats and the Serbs, and the Bosnian Muslims have their traumas from the Second World War, where thousands of people were killed. So they could have been, if you will, saved by different Western policies if that was what the West wanted, but the West always wanted to split, divide et impera,split and rule, divide and rule. They saw the possibility of getting all these small republics, which they could rule and one by one get into the European Union and NATO, something that should never have been done.
It was painful for many of us who knew Yugoslavia and loved Yugoslavia. I considered it my third country to see what happened without any knowledge about the complexity, because Yugoslavia was probably intellectually the most complex conflict anywhere on earth. And it's characterized by the fact that if you do a little thing here, it will have repercussions throughout Yugoslavia. They didn't understand that; they didn't understand the solutions that Kosovo was part of an autonomous province, part of Serbia, like Vojvodina was an autonomous part of Serbia.
They invented the idea, for instance, that Slobodan Milošević, whom I met and carried messages back and forth to the Kosovo Albanian leadership, had a genocide going on the Albanian people. Clinton went up and said, 'In Milošević, we have a new Hitler in Europe.' And the moment you say Hitler, you can get people to believe anything because it's so complex that nobody understands anything. There were not five people in the ministries of foreign affairs of the European Union who knew anything substantial about the complexity of Yugoslavia. So everything they did was wrong.
It's as simple as that everything they did was wrong. They were ignorant. They were totally ignorant about the complexities, the histories, the structures, the economies, and all that, and how it worked together. It was a formidable statesmanship to keep Yugoslavia together, all the religions, all the nationalities, all the histories, all the traumas. And so, the solution was to put in again at that time, pumping weapons.
And who did the West pump weapons to? To those who had been with Hitler and Mussolini, the Croats, the Bosnian Muslims, and the Kosovo Albanians, all had good relations with the Western fascists. Serbs were the ones who paid the price and fled to Norway. They were the ones who were slaughtered in Jasenovac together with Jews and Gypsies.
And we didn't side with those because we said Serbs are the bad guys, and why are the Serbs the bad guys?
'Because they were the small Russians, the wrong Christians, the Orthodox, whom we can't, in the Protestant world can't trust.'
'And then they had a dictator. His name was Slobodan Milošević. When we got rid of him, everything will be fine in Yugoslavia,' as stupid a theory as the one that says that 'without Mohamed Farrah Aidid in Somalia, everything will be fine in Somalia, without Saddam Hussein in Iraq, everything will be fine in Iraq, without Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, everything will be fine in Libya.'
This obsession with focusing on the top leader and thinking if we get rid of him, everything will be fine.
I want to give you a personal story. In 1999, as we know, NATO bombed the hell out of the place in order to get a second Albanian state in Europe, which is very unusual, namely Kosovo as an independent state, which is the cradle of Serbia, and they wouldn't accept that as an independent state.
Shortly after that bombing, I had a meeting with the then-president who had taken over after Milošević. His name was Vojislav Koštunica. I sat with him in his dark, little, personal flat in Belgrade. And he didn't live in a big posh place.
He said, ' Jan, I want you to know that we've just been told by NATO, who destroyed us a few months ago and used depleted uranium weapons, we've just been told that we will not be able to enter the European Union before we become members of NATO.'
Think of the arrogance that you first destroy, pulverize a country, cut out a part of it. It's much worse than anything Russia has ever done in Ukraine and Crimea. And then you say you must become a member of our destructive organization before you can enter the European Union. I think that Yugoslavia maybe could not be kept together, but it could have been split in a much more peaceful way.
And then comes the very bizarre story, in which the corner of the Chinese embassy slightly outside the centre was destroyed. My Serbian friends in Belgrade said that at that time, we had redefined what CIA is; it now stands for 'Can't Identify Anything' because they allegedly said that it was bombed by mistake.
And when the bombing started by NATO, in Kosovo and Serbia, people ran down to Macedonia, 800,000 disappeared into that country. And the West tried to tell us, I mean those of us who were there and knew it was one big lie, tried to tell us that the 800,000 people had run from Milošević's ethnic cleansing, whereas it happened a few days after NATO's bombing had started. And you know asking Macedonia first to have destroyed its economy, thanks to the sanctions, and then take care of 800,000 refugees that was enough to destroy that country's livelihood.
Did we ever pay compensation?
Did we ever say we apologize for what we did?
Strong people, decent people, are able to say, 'I'm sorry', but low-level people, less intelligent, less mature people, always think that they always do everything right. That's a dangerous philosophy for the rest of the world, particularly when you have too many guns in your hands. It gave me something to reflect on about what it means to have too much power. The Americans have had too much power and have never been humble. God forbid any of the new multipolar world leaders will go the same strange way. Because we have succeeded with certain things, we are no longer humble. The more you succeed and the more power you have, the more humble, the more careful, the more thinking you should do instead of succumbing to the arrogance of power.
As we know, China is coming to Serbia and doing very good work there, and Serbia is basically part of the Belt and Road Initiative. The interesting thing is, if you look at the railway building there, it has gone very nicely in Serbia, which is not part of the European Union, but the part of the railway up to Budapest is not ready yet because of EU bureaucracy.
So I would advise Mrs. von der Leyen to keep her mouth shut up about international affairs and see to it that her own union works and stop talking about Europe because, dear madam, you've never been elected. You profess to be a leader in a democratic European Union with 410 million people, but you've never been elected.
Many of these leaders, government leaders, are war criminals,but they will never be convicted.
I could give you an example.I live in Sweden. I haven't gone that for more than 50 years, but I was born in Denmark and have followed Danish politics closely all these years. It was an extremely peaceful country where we used to say, if we disagree about something, let's drink a beer and talk. In the 90s, something crept in, probably because the Social Democratic Party, as in all other European countries, are no longer social democratic parties, but right-wing, military-oriented countries, powers of countries and governments. And in 1999, Denmark decided with a Social Democratic and a Liberal party to bomb in Yugoslavia, in Belgrade, during the dissolution wars of Yugoslavia. After that, Denmark has participated in bombing in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Iraq. It was a main destroyer together with Norway of Libya, which was way outside the United Nations mandate, which was to protect people, basically, but they pulverized Libya, and then Syria and Iraq again.
Now, the Prime Minister of Denmark is basically a megaphone for Washington. Madame Frederiksen was actually for a period, a possible candidate to become NATO Secretary General. And you may be aware that the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who is no doubt the largest Danish non-convicted war criminal, made Denmark participate in four years of occupation with the Americans of Iraq, against the United Nations, against international law. He was rewarded for that by the Americans and was a personal friend of the Bush family. He was rewarded for that illegal occupation by becoming Secretary General of NATO. My little country is among the worst in Europe.
Q: Why you so adamantly pursue peace, which sounds so utopian and unreachable and so idealistic? Why do you dedicate your life to that?
It's very sweet of you to ask that question.You may think I had a very unhappy childhood, but that is not the case. Probably, I had a very happy childhood. No, that has very much to do with having met people who persuaded me that this was a better thing to do.
When I became a sociologist, I thought I would work with industrial sociology. You know - how workers work in factories, how we make them happier, and things like that. However, I found out that sociology could be used at the global level.
And before that, I was at a high school in Aarhus, Denmark, I think I mentioned that I was born in Denmark, and there I had a headmaster of the school who was out of the normal. And I will always be very grateful to him. He would come in and say, ' Well, the teacher in mathematics today is ill, and I will teach you this lesson instead. I'm not too interested in mathematics, but I'd like to talk with you about when I met Einstein.' He also talked about Albert Schweitzer, whom he had met, and said he was a staunch believer in nonviolence and Gandhian thinking. He wrote books about generals who at the time in the 50s and 60s were for disarmament.
So this dear man, Aage Bertelsen, gave me in a very important period of my life, between 16 and 18 at high school level, some inspiration. I can say that he and his wife were also
the main organizers of the rescuing of Jews from Denmark to Sweden during the Second World War. He also wrote a book called 'October 43'. I got pacifism, nonviolent thinking and Gandhian in my high school. I mean, today, that type of school leader would be impossible. He would be stopped for political censorship or something like that.
And then I ran into peace research at Lund University, a dear friend, Professor of Sociology, Håkan Wiberg, who gave a little 5-point course, 2 months of peace studies. And I said, Wow, I'm not going to do industrial sociology. I'm going to do peace studies and work globally, and he took me down. Now, it comes full circle. He took me down to Dubrovnik in 1974 and said Jan, something interesting is happening down there.
At the time, Johan Galtung, the Norwegian,world leader in peace, some call him the father of peace studies, was the director of the center in Yugoslavia. And I said to Johan, do you remember where we met?
He said, 'No, I don't remember.' 'We met here in '74?'
'No,' I said, 'we met in '68 at my high school in Aarhus, Denmark, because the director there had invited you, Johan Galtung, to come and speak.'
I've been a pupil of Johan Galtung and other people since then.
And I would like to disagree with one formulation of yours. Peace is not unrealistic; it's not even idealistic. It's damn rational, and there are no limits to what people can achieve together. If they could stop fighting each other using weapons and wasting human, technological, and economic resources on militarism, there would be no limit.
Humanity can do the most incredible things, but we can't do it if we kill each other. And if we spend all our awakening time finding out how to make each other's enemies and how to speak badly about other people and speak about 'enemies everywhere' instead of... Why do we have enemy analysis? We don't have a friendship analysis.
So if you ask me, the totally unrealistic path is those who have nuclear weaponsand keep on doing militarism, and armament, and produce new weapons all the time and waste tremendous ecological human intellectual and cultural resources on such a stupid thing. It's a disease of humanity, more or less in different parts, but it exists everywhere.
If we could stop that, I know that's a big thing, and I may not see that in my lifetime; I'm 72. But if we could stop it, and that's a vision I have. We do our best, my wife and I and the 50 people in the TFF, we do our best to prepare for the period that comes after the warfare and after the militarism, after the empire of the United States has gone. Now, when that has declined, like the Soviet Union has declined, we will create, we will be able to create a much better world.
The only doubt I have is not if it is right. The doubt I have is will the United States empire go down with a bang or with a whimper? Gorbachev was a formidable visionary and a peaceful person who could have blown up the world with his nuclear weapons. Say the Soviet Union is gone, socialism is gone. We have lost the game. Boom. Hitler could have done it if he had nuclear weapons in his bunker in Berlin.
We don't know who sits in the White House. The day the Americans find out that we have no empire, nobody's listening to us anymore, we got to change. Will they go down with a bang or a whimper? I hope it will be a whimper. I hope the United States will go down with grace and not go down in the sense of becoming a third-world country or something like that, but go down from its empire, stop imperialism, stop militarism, stop dominating. That will make the United States a much better country. And it'll make a much better world.
The only thing you must promise me never to say is that peace is less realistic because the most unrealistic is to keep on doing what we do at the moment and hope that humanity will survive. Either we will not survive because we blow it up with nuclear weapons, or some other kind of mass warfare, which we are closer to now than we have ever been since 1945. So, it is realistic by any standard to work for the reduction of violence, and it's unrealistic to work for the increase of violence.
And that's my background. And I am stubborn enough to keep on doing that until I can neither speak nor think nor talk anymore.
Head to The China Academy website to learn more.
"China's Belgrade embassy was the only target the CIA provided in the course of the war," says CIA Director George Tenet. C.I.A. Says Chinese Embassy Bombing Resulted From Its Sole Attempt to Pick Targets. By Eric Schmitt. "Nato bombed Chinese deliberately". Sun 17 Oct 1999 03.23 BST. NYT. July 23, 1999