Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica marked the anniversary of Nato's bombing of Serbia on Monday with an attack accusing the West of cynically grabbing territory in the name of humanitarian intervention.
"Now it is more than obvious that the cruel destruction of Serbia during the Nato bombardment had only one aim: to turn the province of Kosovo into the world's first Nato state," he told the state news agency Tanjug. Nato began bombing strategic targets in Serbia on March 24, 1999, and kept it up for 78 days until the late strongman Slobodan Milosevic agreed to pull his forces from Kosovo and end the killing of Albanian civilians in a counter-insurgency war.
Launching the first war in its history, and freighted with a failure to act in Bosnia, the alliance said it would not stand by and watch another bloodbath in the Balkans by Serb forces. Kosovo has been run by the United Nations and patrolled by Nato troops since June 11, 1999. Its 90 percent Albanian majority declared independence on February 17 with Western support.