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Comment by randerson | Hacker News Reader

Considering large portions of Belgrade are still in ruins to this day due to NATO bombings, it's hard to escape the constant reminders of what "foreign powers" have already done to them.

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Not true. Pretty much the only thing that is in "ruin" is the old defense ministry building which is kept that way for the current governments propaganda purposes.

What you just described is the biggest damage done by the '99 bombing. I dare to say larger than any material damage. That's the thing that pushed Serbs on the other side of the "west/east dichotomy" and any kind of marketing campaign will hardly paint Western countries as friends or allies. That's valuable ammunition put into hands of local populists. Not that some European leaders mind them ruling Serbia. Would you believe that there is a considerable number of people not willing to get vaccinated by Pfizer or Astra Zeneca Covid vaccines because "those people first bombed us, they're trying to poison us now"?

Yes.

I'd believe the same reaction in Afghanistan, too.

Probably not an apt comparison. Serbia actually is a unified state of sorts, Afghanistan is not and never really has been. How unified states and collections of tribes and warlords react to such things are quite different.

No I've been to Belgrade recently and there are no more bombing ruins to speak of. All of that was cleared years ago. In fact there's a lot of new construction happening in the waterfront area.

Ah, I stand corrected. Been a few years since I visited. At the time, everyone I met seemed to be feeling like a victim of the bombings and harboring some resentment at the west.

Many Serbians do still feel like victims and harbor some resentment at the west. But the 1999 NATO bombings were just one incident in a long litany of complaints (both real and imagined) going back centuries.

They also resent being used as a geopolitical pawn by Russia and China.

I can confirm there were some people who resented Americans/West when I went there. Luckily my Serbian coworkers would shut them up.

At least I wasn’t Turkish. They definitely resent 500 years of Turkish rule.

The younger generation is much more forward thinking.

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