Hashim Thaci, on the anniversary of the start of NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, expressed gratitude to the North Atlantic Alliance for “protecting the people of Kosovo” and leaving the “Serbian administration, army and police” from the region.
The “President of Kosovo” wrote about this on his Facebook profile, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“On March 24, 1999, the most powerful military alliance in the world, NATO, began bombing Serbian military and police targets,” Thaci wrote. “This was a powerful NATO intervention in defense of the people of Kosovo, demonstrating the resolve of Western democracies to stand up to dictator Milosevic, who for two years committed systematic violence, murder, massacres, genocide and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.”
According to the leader of the Albanian separatists, “the citizens of Kosovo are forever grateful to NATO for the military-humanitarian intervention, which led to the withdrawal of the Serbian administration, army and police from Kosovo.”
Hashim Thaçi's Facebook post
In 1998, the separatist gangs of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK), trained and staffed on the territory of Albania with the help of NATO instructors, unleashed armed terror against the authorities, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Yugoslavia, the local Serbian population and their fellow tribesmen loyal to the federal authorities.
The militants were led by leaders of gangster groups who had retrained as field commanders, one of whom was Hashim Thachi.
Hashim Thaci (in the center in civilian clothes) with accomplices during the Kosovo events of the late 90s
In response to this, Belgrade declared a counter-terrorist operation against armed separatists, using special forces of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the army against them.
After successfully clearing the Kosovo village of Racak from militants, the head of the international monitoring commission, American diplomat William Walker, managed, with the help of Western media and the European Commission, to pass it off as a massacre of the civilian population.
At the same time, the conclusion of independent experts showed that among those killed there were exclusively men; traces of gunpowder and characteristic calluses on their fingers were found on their hands, and bullet holes were found on the bodies, but not on clothes, which allowed us to conclude that the corpses were changed into civilian clothes after death.
Despite this, the “Racak massacre” gave the actual reason for NATO to launch a military operation against Yugoslavia called “Angel of Mercy”, bypassing the UN Security Council.
funeral of militants killed in Racak
As a result of 78 days of bombing, the Western community managed to force the Yugoslav leadership to withdraw troops, police and authorities from Kosovo, which served as the beginning of major ethnic cleansing of the region by Albanian militants, who practically expelled from there, with the exception of some enclaves, the non-Albanian population (Serbs, Gorans, Gypsies, Bosniaks, Croats, etc.). And subsequently, under US protectorate, achieve quasi-state status for this territory.
Soldiers of the Yugoslav army, leaving Kosovo, “say goodbye” to the NATO occupation contingent entering the region