There are memorials across Serbia and Kosovo to commemorate hundreds of people who died during NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, which began on March 24, 1999 and is being marked with an official commemoration in Belgrade on Wednesday evening.

Some of them are huge monuments, like the ‘Eternal Flame’ column in the Serbian capital; others are much more modest, like the engraved stone slab in the Kosovo village of Bishtazhin commemorating 41 ethnic Albanians who were mistakenly killed by a NATO air strike.

The Western military alliance launched its air strikes in an attempt to force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to accept the terms of an agreement to end his military campaign against the Kosovo Liberation Army, which involved widespread ethnic cleansing. But as the bombing continued, Milosevic’s army and police force intensified their war and committed a series of massacres of ethnic Albanian civilians.

The Serbian government estimates that at least 2,500 people died and 12,500 were injured during the NATO campaign, although the exact death toll remains unclear. The air strikes ended on June 10, 1999 after Milosevic agreed to withdraw his forces from Kosovo. He was ousted in an uprising the following year and sent to the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

The ‘Eternal Flame’ monument commemorating victims of the NATO bombing was installed in June 2000 in Friendship Park in New Belgrade on the initiative of Mirjana Markovic, the wife of Slobodan Milosevic. Photo: EPA/KOCA SULEJMANOVIC.

A monument in Tasmajdan Park in Belgrade to child victims of the NATO attacks, with the bronze figure of three-year-old Milica Rakic, who died in April 1999 during the bombing. Photo: BIRN.

A memorial to 377 ethnic Albanians killed by Serbian police and Yugoslav Army forces in the village of Meje/Meja near Gjakovs/Djakovica in western Kosovo on April 27, 1999 during the NATO air campaign. Photo: BIRN.

A memorial to 77 ethnic Albanian civilians killed by NATO air strikes while being used as human shields by Yugoslav forces on May 14, 1999 in the village of Korishe near Prizren in Kosovo. Photo: BIRN.

A memorial to 19 ethnic Albanian civilians killed by Yugoslav forces in a massacre in the village of Poterc in the Klina municipality of Kosovo on March 29, 1999. Photo: BIRN.

A memorial to 41 Kosovo Albanians mistakenly killed by a NATO air strike in the village of Bishtazhin near Gjakova/Djakovica on May 14, 1999. Photo: BIRN.

Bishop Joanikije, the top Serbian Orthodox priest in Montenegro, holds a service at a memorial in the northern Montenegrin village of Murino, where six civilians including three children were killed when NATO missiles hit a bridge on the River Lim on April 30, 1999. Photo courtesy of in4s.

A memorial near the Radio-Television Serbia studios in Belgrade entitled ‘Why?’, dedicated to 16 RTS workers killed in a NATO missile strike on the building on April 24, 1999. Photo: BIRN.

A monument in the Serbian city of Novi Sad commemorating a NATO air strike that demolished a bridge over the River Danube and killed a 29-year-old Serbian man. Photo: BIRN.