Serbia marking 11 years since outbreak of NATO bombing raids.

BELGRADE, March 24 (Itar-Tass) - Day of Remembrance of the hundreds of
people, who died as a result of NATO missile strikes and bombing raids at
the former Yugoslavia, is marked in Serbia Tuesday.
The strikes began exactly on this day eleven years ago and continued
for 78 days.
The official list of the dead has never been published, while the data
cited by different sources mostly has the character of estimation and
differs substantially.
These assessments suggest that NATO's bombings, unleashed in violation
of international law and targeted at a sovereign European country, claimed
from 1,200 to 2,500 lives and left up to 5,000 others wounded or crippled.
NATO interference on the side of Kosovo's Albanian majority turned
more than 200,000 ethnic Serbs and other non-Albanians in Kosovo and
Metohija into refugees or internally displaced persons. Even now that more
than a decade has passed since the end of the armed conflict in the
breakaway province, most of these people still have no opportunity to
return to their homes.
By tradition that has formed over these years, air strike alert sirens
will be switched on in Belgrade and other Serbian cities, which the
North-Atlantic pact picked out as targets for its bomb and cruise missile
strikes in 1999, and wreaths will be laid at the monuments to the victims
of that aggression.
Patriarch Irenaeus, the supreme hierarch of the Serbian Orthodox
Church will lead a remembrance prayer for the Serb and Montenegrin
defenders of homeland at the St Mark's Cathedral in Belgrade.
Leaders of Serb opposition parties will hold a manifestation in the
town of Kosovska Mitrovica in nothern Kosovo in protest of the Albanian
majority government's attempts to establish control over the remaining
Serb-populated enclaves of the province.
Serbia's Democratic Party led by former Prime Minister Vojslav
Kostunica is going to hold a meeting in downtown Belgrade.
The party said that from now on it will observe March 24 not only as
the Day of Remembrance of the victims of NATO's aggression but also as the
day of Serbia's military neutrality.