Chinese leader Xi Jinping has been in France since Sunday where he met with French President Emmanuel Macron to talk about range of topics but especially the Ukraine war and trade between China and the European Union.

But on Tuesday he traveled to Serbia, and importantly the trip falls precisely on the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, which came in the midst of NATO’s bombing of the Serbs of Yugoslavia during the 1999 Kosovo war.

via AP

Just ahead of arriving in the Serbian capital, Xi wrote a letter which has been published by the Serbian outlet Politika. In it he lambasted NATO and by extension United States for its historic war crime..

“Twenty-five years ago today, NATO flagrantly bombed the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia, killing three Chinese journalists,” Xi’s words introduced.

It happened on May 7, 1999 during US-NATO 78-day bombing campaign over Yugoslavia. That’s when five US Joint Direct Attack Munition guided bombs hit scored a direct hit on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing the journalists.

The US was adamant that it was inadvertent and unintentional, and eventually then President Clinton issued a formal apology to the Chinese government. It had marked the first time in all of modern history that a sovereign government’s military attacked another country’s embassy. It had not even happened once during World Wars I and II.

“This we should never forget. The Chinese people cherish peace, but we will never allow such tragic history to repeat itself,” Xi wrote.

“The Chinese-Serbian friendship, forged with the blood of our compatriots, will stay in the shared memory of the Chinese and Serbian peoples,” he continued.

His emphasis on the line “never forget” is interesting given it is a common line used by Americans when it comes to remembering the 9/11 terror attacks, as well as in the West when it comes to Holocaust remembrance days.

To review of what we’ve featured in a previous post called “America’s Benevolent Bombing of Serbia,” President Bill Clinton commenced bombing Belgrade in the name of human rights, justice, and ethnic tolerance. Approximately 1,500 Serb civilians were killed by NATO bombing in one of the biggest sham morality plays of the modern era. 

As British professor Philip Hammond has noted, the 78-day bombing campaign “was not a purely military operation: NATO also destroyed what it called ‘dual-use’ targets, such as factories, city bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an attempt to terrorise the country into surrender.”

NATO bombing of Yugoslavia

Clinton’s unprovoked attack on Serbia, intended to help ethnic Albanians seize control of Kosovo, set a precedent for “humanitarian” warring that was invoked by supporters of George W. Bush’s unprovoked attack on Iraq, Barack Obama’s bombing of Libya, and Donald Trump’s bombing of Syria.