Serbs commemorate NATO bombings 20 years ago this Sunday.

247, by José Reinaldo Carvalho - This Sunday (24) marks the 20th anniversary of the NATO bombings, in the conflict that went down in history as the Kosovo War, which left more than 13 thousand dead.

In several cities, ceremonies were organized to commemorate the beginning of NATO's aggression.

On March 24, 1999, NATO launched an air bombing campaign against the former Yugoslavia, which included Serbia and Montenegro, to force the Serbs to withdraw their troops from the Kosovo region. NATO's aggression was an unprecedented action against a sovereign state in the 50-year history of the Atlantic Alliance.

For 78 days, NATO attacked dozens of military targets, infrastructure, schools, hospitals, and homes, severely impacting the civilian population of the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade.

On June 10, 1999, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic ordered the withdrawal of Serbian troops from Kosovo. In July, the Serbian province was placed under UN administration and in 2008 it declared independence.

Brazilian Socorro Gomes, president of the World Peace Council, is in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, where she is participating in events commemorating the events of 20 years ago and a conference on the role of NATO.

In an interview with Brasil 247, by telephone, directly from Belgrade, she vehemently criticizes the NATO action launched on March 24, 1999: "It was a colossal force, which included the most modern means of aviation and the most sophisticated weapons of mass destruction. NATO's war against Yugoslavia caused irreparable damage, both human and material: thousands of lives, mutilations, and devastation of the country's infrastructure."

The president of the World Peace Council maintains that NATO's bombings against Yugoslavia "were a brutal aggression against a sovereign country, internationally recognized, with full diplomatic, economic, commercial and cultural relations throughout the world, a member of the United Nations since its foundation, with its own government, parliament, court of justice, and Constitution. An organized country, striving for economic and social progress, for its unity, for coexistence among the various nationalities that composed it, a peaceful country that had never threatened the sovereignty of any other nor regional peace."

In a forceful statement, Socorro Gomes says that "the war against Yugoslavia was yet another event demonstrating the threats to world peace, diplomatic balance, institutional order, and international law—a tragic episode, at the expense of the Yugoslav people, demonstrating that the 20th century was ending as an era of the subordination of all nations on the planet to the dictates and strategic interests of American imperialism and its allies, which dramatically illustrates the civilizational regression that has occurred since the destruction of the achievements of socialism in Eastern Europe."

The peace activist states that political and social movements need to learn lessons from those events of 20 years ago so that they are not repeated. "The NATO war against Yugoslavia sounded the death knell for the multilateral system at that time and revealed the designs of US imperialism and its NATO allies to impose unipolar dominance in the world."

Socorro Gomes also denounced the role of the corporate media because, prior to the bombings, there was a dense campaign of disinformation and condemnation of the Yugoslav government.

He pointed out that "the wars in the former Yugoslavia - Bosnia and Kosovo - were the first in which NATO acted outside its geographical area, which established a new geopolitical and strategic framework - the expansion of the Atlantic Alliance, a process that continues to this day."