Serbian victims feel forgotten 20 years after Nato ‘mistakenly’ bombed them
- Hundreds of civilians were killed by the Western alliance’s bombs but nobody has been held accountable, their relatives complain
On the outskirts of the southern Serbian town of Surdulica a black cross looms above a grave covered in weeds.
This is the final resting place of some of the hundreds of civilians killed by Nato air attacks launched 20 years ago this Sunday, a tragedy survivors feel is as forgotten as the overgrown burial ground.
“No one except for journalists has called us or asked if we need any help, how we feel. Nobody,” said 34-year-old Ivana Mitic.
Mitic’s brother, grandmother, uncle, aunt and cousins died when a Nato bomb razed their home in Surdulica on April 27, 1999, in what the alliance later admitted was a “mistake”.
Nato’s three-month bombardment was said to be an effort to stop Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic’s crackdown on separatist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, a southern province that later declared independence.