This article is also available in: Shqip Macedonian Bos/Hrv/Srp

Zanka Stojanovic. Photo by BETA

Zanka Stojanovic, whose son was killed when NATO bombed the RTS studios in Belgrade in April 1999, said that a recent article by American philosopher Noam Chomsky comparing the attack with the shootings at Paris-based satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was being misused by Slobodan Milosevic’s apologists in Serbia.

Stojanovic said in an open letter to Serbian media on behalf of the victims’ families that “local propagandists” were “trying to use [Chomsky’s article] as proof that the victims in Paris and in Belgrade are the same, because in both cases the victims are journalists”.

“They claim that in both cases they were killed by ‘terrorists’, which then means that Milosevic and his generals and academia were innocent as lambs, not just of that crime but of the others as well,” she said.

After the killings at Charlie Hebdo, several journalists and public figures, including Politika newspaper editor-in-chief Ljiljana Smajilovic and Nebojsa Krstic, a former advisor to Serbian President Boris Tadic, compared them to the bombing of RTS, claiming that in 1999 there was no Western condemnation of such an attack on free speech.

The debate intensified after Chomsky wrote that it was an example of Western hypocrisy that “there were no demonstrations or cries of outrage, no chants of ‘We are RTV’ [sic], no inquiries into the roots of the attack in Christian culture and history” when the Serbian broadcaster was bombed.

The missile strike that killed 16 people at the RTS headquarters was one of the most controversial attacks of NATO’s 78-day air war, aimed at forcing Serbia to withdraw its police and military from Kosovo during the 1999 conflict.

Describing RTS as Milosevic’s “ministry of lies”, NATO said it was a legitimate target because it pumped out propaganda in support of the regime.

Soon after the bombing campaign ended, the families of those killed in the RTS building accused Milosevic of “sacrificing” their lives in order to score political points against NATO, as it was clear the government had known the building was a target.

Milosevic was overthrown in 2000 and two years later, the former director of RTS, Dragoljub Milanovic, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for failing to carry out an order to evacuate the building.

Some tabloids in Serbia interviewed Milanovic after the attack in Paris and published headlines quoting him as saying: “I am Charlie, I didn’t know they were going to bomb RTS.”

But Stojanovic said that they were giving front pages to a criminal who was representing himself as a victim.

“Journalists will not write about the 16 people who were killed, about the [Serbian] Army HQ and the Ministry of Defence which are still refusing to provide us documents that reveal that the people inside RTS were left there to die, or about the prosecution which is still refusing to consider the evidence that we provided,” Stojanovic said.

The relatives of those killed in the RTS bombing on April 23, 1999, have been asking for an inquiry for a decade, with the backing of legal activists and NGOs, and accuse the authorities of impeding their efforts to make the facts public.

Their suspicions have been fuelled by reports of an internal memo which supposedly confirmed that defence officials knew beforehand of plans to target the RTS building. However, the defence ministry has denied the existence of any such document.

Despite an announcement from the prosecution that the investigation is at an advanced stage and that the case against those who knew in advance about the NATO attack could soon be brought to trial, no indictment has been issued yet.