The NATO Bombing of Serbia

MAR 24 1999 · 12:00

USAF F-117 Nighthawk returns from a strike mission over Yugoslavia during Operation Allied Force, 1999. Place: Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo) Figures: Javier Solana, NATO secretary-general issuing the activation order · General Wesley Clark, NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe · Slobodan Milošević, Yugoslav president · Bill Clinton, US president · Tony Blair, British prime minister · Yevgeny Primakov, Russian prime minister turning his plane around mid-Atlantic Operation Allied Force The Rambouillet negotiations collapse on 19 March 1999 when the Yugoslav delegation refuses an annex granting NATO forces freedom of movement through all of Yugoslavia. Five days later, at 19:00 UTC on 24 March, Operation Allied Force begins: the first sustained military action in NATO's fifty-year history, conducted without a UN Security Council resolution because Russia and China would have vetoed one. The legal basis offered is a doctrine of humanitarian necessity, articulated as the operation proceeds rather than before it begins. The campaign lasts 78 days. NATO flies approximately 38,000 sorties, drops several thousand precision munitions, kills an estimated 500 Serbian civilians (Human Rights Watch's lower-bound figure) including in the bombings of the Radio Television of Serbia building in Belgrade and the Chinese embassy on 7 May (a CIA targeting error that triggers a diplomatic crisis with Beijing). The Yugoslav army largely preserves itself; the campaign's pressure on the Belgrade leadership comes from infrastructure strikes and Russian withdrawal of diplomatic support. Sovereignty Overridden Milošević accepts NATO's terms on 3 June; the bombing ends on 10 June with UN Security Council Resolution 1244 placing Kosovo under UN administration. Kosovo declares independence in February 2008, recognized by approximately 100 states but blocked from UN membership by the Russian and Chinese vetoes that the 1999 campaign had been designed to bypass. The Westphalian principle of non-intervention codified in UN Charter Article 2.7 (see [[un-charter-1945]]) has, in this case, been treated by NATO as overridable when a Great Power coalition is willing to override it. The precedent is contested across the next twenty-five years. Russia cites it explicitly when annexing Crimea in 2014 and again when invading Ukraine in 2022 (see [[invasion-of-ukraine-2022]]). China cites it as evidence that Western humanitarian rhetoric is a cover for unilateral force. The 2005 Responsibility to Protect doctrine (see [[responsibility-to-protect-2005]]) is the formal post-hoc attempt to put the Kosovo precedent on a multilateral legal basis. Whether that attempt has succeeded is the question that hangs over every subsequent intervention debate, from Libya 2011 to Syria's chemical-weapons crises. Video: AP Archive footage from Belgrade during Operation Allied Force, March 1999. Air raid sirens sound through the streets; tracer fire and explosions illuminate the city as NATO conducts its first sustained bombing campaign against a European capital since 1945.