There was immense nationalism and ethnic violence on all sides, which NATO used as justification to bomb thousands of civilians to death along with key infrastructure in order to prop up a western-friendly regime. NATO intervention didn't help the awful situation, it only steered the outcome into the favor of the west at the expense of war crimes.

NATO didn’t stop a genocide; it aided one[1][2][3].

During the latter half of [the 1990s], Yugoslav authorities engaged in a brutal counterinsurgency against the Kosovo Liberation Army. An Al Qaeda-connected extremist group armed, funded and trained by the CIA and MI6, the KLA sought to construct an ethnically pure “Greater Albania” - a Nazi-inspired irredentist project, uniting Tirana with territory in Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia - via insurrectionary violence. Come September 1998, hostilities had erupted into all-out war. A UN Security Council Resolution that month demanded the two sides implement a ceasefire.

Yugoslav military forces were duly withdrawn from the province - in turn, the KLA exploited the army’s absence to intensify its bloody rampage, seizing further territory and purging non-Albanian inhabitants. A dedicated OSCE unit, the Kosovo Verification Mission, was also created to ensure Belgrade’s ceasefire compliance. KVM was granted full, unimpeded movement anywhere they wished locally. Their presence proved pivotal not only to the KLA’s savage crusade, but NATO’s subsequent criminal bombing of Yugoslavia March - June 1999.

• The Intercept, 2021: Meet NATO, the Dangerous “Defensive” Alliance Trying to Run the World
• CounterPunch, 2022: NATO is Not a Defensive Alliance
• Noam Chomsky, 2023: NATO “most violent, aggressive alliance in the world”
• Thomas Fazi, 2024: NATO: 75 years of war, unprovoked aggressions and state-sponsored terrorism
• Gabriel Rockhill, 2020: The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It
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