DISINFO: The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was a genocide
SUMMARY
The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 – deliberately aimed at hitting all environmentally dangerous targets in order to provoke an environmental disaster throughout the region – was a genocide.
RESPONSE
NATO launched a campaign of air strikes against Serbia beginning on the 24th of March 1999 to stop Belgrade's crackdown against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. The primary purpose of the campaign was to end violence and repression and force Milosevic's to withdraw his military, police and para-military forces from Kosovo (see NATO statement from 1999). Genocide, as defined by the United Nations, means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. This was not the purpose of the NATO air strikes. Pro-Kremlin disinformation frequently distorts the number of civilian casualties of NATO bombing. See Polygraph's debunk three years ago. Read more about disinformation about the war in former Yugoslavia.