BBC reporter: Serbia today similar to what it was 20 years ago (BBC Serbia, TV N1)
NATO bombing of the then Yugoslavia has been an embarrassing deviation which everyone is ashamed of today, John Simpson, a BBC reporter told British public broadcaster’s office in Belgrade on Wednesday.
Simson, who was covering the NATO intervention in 1999 aimed at stopping Belgrade's forces from, as they said, repression over ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, said it was “an unpleasant experience” from the beginning to the end, which “is forgotten today.”
He said the bombing was far away from being successful as the world leaders had hoped for, and according to him, it ended with help from Moscow which persuaded Belgrade to withdraw its army and police forces from Kosovo.
"Though some 500 Serbia’s civilians were killed, and though bridges, military objects, power plants, and what was outrageous, the Chinese Embassy were destroyed, NATO smart bombs and cruise missiles were not that successful in destroying Serbia’s equipment and weaponry. Most of the tanks and vehicles NATO claimed to have destroyed were just models,” Simpson said 20 years after the bombing.
As far as internal politics in Serbia, according to Simpson, things had not changed much. That’s, according to him, why Serbia today, 20 years after NATO bombing, unpleasantly resembles what it had been then.