hen air-raid sirens sounded across Belgrade at 7.45pm on March 24, 1999, people grabbed the bags they had already packed and headed down to their basements with their families and neighbours, ready to wait out an onslaught from the NATO planes in skies above the capital.
The first targets were Belgrade, Pristina in Kosovo, Podgorica in Montenegro and several other cities. The day beforehand, it had been announced on national television that Yugoslavia had declared a state of emergency.
The Serbian media, largely controlled by strongman leader Slobodan Milosevic, reacted to the start of the NATO air campaign with typical propagandist rhetoric.
“The military forces of the North Atlantic Alliance, under the diktat and in the interest of the world’s policeman, the US, and on behalf of the Shiptar [derogatory word for Albanians] separatists and terrorists, have brutally violated the territory of sovereign Yugoslavia and threatened the lives of its citizens,” said a statement from the Yugoslav Army, quoted in the first news to be broadcast about the air strikes on the Serbian public TV channel RTS in the evening of March 24.
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