The Memories of the NATO bombing in Serbia

Abstract 

The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia lasted from March 24 till June 10 1999. Official state rhetoric about the NATO bombing tends to emphasize victimization and aggression.  Analyzing local perspectives and memories of those intervened upon may allow other discourses to emerge to augment the literature on intervention, which to date has largely ignored the voices of local people. Those attitudes to international intervention in Serbia may be differentiated according to generation, location and political disposition.   This paper reports on preliminary research which explores what international intervention has meant to respondents in Belgrade and documents memories of international intervention among older and younger generations, as well as active members of anti-war NGOs in Serbia, and citizens who were not engaged in activism in the period of the 1990s.