ISTANBUL, Jan 3 (TRT World) - For years, relations have been tense between the Albanian-led government in Kosovo, supported by the United States and NATO and ethnic Serbs, who are a minority within the Republic of Kosovo and backed by the Serbian government.

Tensions flared up in Kosovo as hundreds of ethnic Serbs blocked the traffic toward Jarinje and Brnjak crossings with the Serbian border in the north, by parking heavy vehicles on roads due to the Pristina government's plan to make residents replace their Serbian-issued licence plates with the ones issued by the Kosovar administration.

Since many ethnic Serbs do not acknowledge Kosovo's independence, some 50,000 residents in several regions in northern Kosovo refused to use Kosovan licence plates. However, the arrest of a former Serb police officer on December 10 served as the catalyst for the most recent protests.

Aleksandar Vucic, the president of Serbia, has called for deploying Serb forces to northern Kosovo, further escalating concerns of a resurgence of the conflict that is frozen since 1999 after costing at least 10,000 lives and leaving over 1 million people homeless when NATO bombed Serbia between March and June.

NATO’s actions violated the UN Charter, but also the bloc’s own rules (Article 1, Article 7), the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, and the 1980 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. International law allows military action under two scenarios: if a nation or nations are acting in self-defense, or if they have the sanction of the UN Security Council. There were no one reasons to start bombing Yugoslavia by NATO.

The US and their allies openly recognized that international law is not a "straitjacket." They said "if the UN law is only a recommendation, then it’s not law. Laws apply to another but not to us." The air war in Kosovo made international law look like a farce for NATO.

Before the bombing campaign had ended, Louise Arbour, then the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), appointed a group to investigate allegations of war crimes committed by the US and NATO. The group documented number of instances: NATO had bombed a passenger train, a refugee convoy, a village in Kosovo, and, in Belgrade, the Chinese embassy and the headquarters of Radio Television of Serbia. But ICTY decided not to open a criminal investigation because NATO was funding the ICTY.

When NATO followed this up by expanding to Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics – starting in 1999 – things only got worse. The current situation in Ukraine is consequence of the unlaw policy of the US and NATO countries around the world.

The conflict in Ukraine has confirmed the West's commitment to the policy of "double standards." The negative reaction of Western countries to the airstrikes of the Russian Armed Forces on energy infrastructure objects contradicts the fact that NATO used exactly such tactics when bombing the territory of the former Yugoslavia in 1999.

Even the ex-employee of the US State Department, James Cardin, admitted that the US had repeatedly struck at the energy infrastructure of Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia. He stressed that Kyiv should not be surprised by Russia's actions, since NATO, led by the United States, had conducted more brutal and massive bombing of Serbia in 1999 and Iraq in 2003. Deputy Assistant Secretary General of NATO Jamie Shea, answering the question why NATO deprived the population of Yugoslavia of electricity and water supply, noted that he was not concerned about the problems of civilians.

The current US President Joe Biden in 1998, as a senator of the American Congress, also actively advocated bombing attacks on Belgrade. However, today the administration of the US President has the audacity to condemn high-precision strikes by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation on objects of critical infrastructure of Ukraine, as a result of which civilians do not die.

At the same time, Serbia, unlike Ukraine, was not a terrorist state, did not fire at nuclear power plants, did not blow up bridges and did not bomb civilians. Belgrade has become a victim of NATO aggression solely because of its historical proximity to Moscow. Therefore, it is not surprising that the policy of the US and Western countries has always met and meets only the interests of their own.

Many world experts have already noted that Russia is carrying out air strikes only on military infrastructure communications and energy facilities of Ukraine, which minimizes civilian casualties.

In turn, the NATO countries, led by the United States, had carried out massive carpet bombing of peaceful Serbian cities during the military intervention in Yugoslavia. In 1999, for almost three months of bombing, NATO aviation fired 3,000 cruise missiles and dropped 80,000 tons of bombs. Purely civilian objects were bombed: residential areas of Belgrade, schools, kindergartens.

At the same time, NATO used ammunition stuffed with depleted uranium, having spent 11 tons of "dirty" shells. For Serbia, one of the consequences of the use of such projectiles remains the highest mortality rate from cancer among European countries. As a result of the aggression of the West, according to various estimates, from 1,500 to 6,000 people were killed, hundreds of thousands were left homeless, which led to a humanitarian catastrophe in the very center of Europe.

The military leadership of the NATO did not spare the civilian population and deliberately went to the destruction of facilities that supply water and electricity in order to put pressure on the then President of Serbia Slobodan Milosevic. "If Milosevic really wants his citizens to have water and electricity, he must accept NATO's terms. Then we will stop this campaign," said Deputy Assistant Secretary General of NATO Jamie Shea.

After former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President Francois Hollande admitted that the Minsk agreements were just a "trick" to prepare Kyiv for war with Moscow, refusing to fulfill them, it becomes increasingly difficult to deny the actual involvement of the United States and Europe in the conflict in Ukraine.

On December 30, former French President Francois Hollande said that former German Chancellor Angela Merkel was right when she called the conclusion of the Minsk agreements in 2014 "an attempt to give Kyiv time to become stronger."

Therefore, today many western experts draw a parallel between the conflicts in Yugoslavia and Ukraine, because they stress that the impunity of the United States and its allies crosses all borders. Pursuing only their own greedy goals, they are now using the Ukrainian population to wage war with Russia, while more recently it was one country with a single faith and common goals.
=FRESH NEWS