Serbia ‘Disappointed’ as UN Security Council Rejects NATO Bombing Debate

Several Security Council members abstained on the Russian proposal for a debate on Monday. Screenshot: webtv.un.org

Serbian Foreign Minister and acting Prime Minister Ivica Dacic said on Monday at UN headquarters in New York that he was “disappointed” that the Security Council declined to hold a debate about the 1999 bombing, which had been proposed by Serbia’s ally Russia.

Dacic argued that “the truth about the NATO aggression 25 years ago against the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was prevented from being heard today”.

Russia proposed the debate to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the start of the Western military alliance’s 78-day bombing campaign, which forced Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s regime to end its repression of Kosovo Albanians and to withdraw its troops and police from what was then a Serbian province.

Other Security Council members objected to holding the debate, so a vote was held about whether it should be on the agenda. Russia, China and Algeria’s representatives voted in favour, but all the other states abstained so the debate wasn’t held.

Dacic criticised the procedure, saying that “just as the bombing of Serbia itself was carried out as a precedent, that a precedent has happened that was not happening here in the Security Council for a long time”.

But Kosovo’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Diaspora, Donika Gervalla Schwarz, called Russia’s efforts to hold the debate “an attempt to draw absurd and unacceptable parallels between NATO intervention and [Russia’s] aggressive war to annex Ukraine territory”.

Gervalla Schwarz, who also was at UN headquarters in New York even though Kosovo is not a UN member state, was accompanied by Vasfije Krasniqi- Goodman, a wartime rape survivor who was recently appointed by President Vjosa Osmani as her special envoy for survivors of sexual assault during the 1998-99 war.

Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, sought to justify the proposal by saying that the debate was important for the current situation in the Balkans.

Nebenzia said that “some Security Council colleagues would probably say that the events of 25 years ago are ‘history’ and have no relevance today. However, it is clear to any reasonable mind that the destruction of a sovereign state led to the chaos that is gaining momentum today, and not only in Kosovo but in the Balkans as a whole.”

France’s representative Nicolas de Riviere argued however that “it’s clear, even for Russia, that the topic proposed for today will not contribute in any way to progress towards settlement of the dispute”.

“It is cynically using the issue of NATO’s military intervention in 1999, and is seeking to justify its war against Ukraine in this manner, as it did in the past, to justify its aggressive foreign policy in Georgia in 2008, and Crimea in 2014,” de Riviere said.

“And it’s doing so to the detriment of the concerned parties, starting with Serbia, who, again, was not consulted before this initiative was launched,” he added.