Europe

Xi criticises Nato over 1999 Belgrade embassy bombing ahead of Serbia visit

Chinese president invoked 25th anniversary of the bombing of the Chinese embassy in the former Yugoslavia during the Kosovo war to call for unity between Beijing and Belgrade

Chinese president Xi Jinping reviewing troops with France's president Emmanuel Macron at Tarbes airport at the start of his visit to the village of Bagnere-de-Bigorre and the adjacent Pyrenees ski resort of La Mongie on Tuesday. Photograph: Aurelien Morissard/pool/AFP

Joe Leahy in Beijing and Marton Dunai in Budapest
Tue May 7 2024 - 20:03

China’s president Xi Jinping has lashed out at Nato over its “flagrant” bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 as he sought to cement ties with Serbia ahead of a visit to the Balkan country.

Mr Xi, who is travelling in Europe for the first time in five years, departed for Serbia on Tuesday from the French Pyrenees, where French president Emmanuel Macron hosted him on the final day of a state visit.

In a letter published in the Serbian media outlet Politika, Mr Xi invoked Tuesday’s 25th anniversary of the bombing of the Chinese embassy in the former Yugoslavia during the Kosovo war to call for unity between Beijing and Belgrade.

“Twenty-five years ago today Nato flagrantly bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, killing three Chinese journalists...This we should never forget,” Mr Xi said, according to an English version of the article. “The China-Serbia friendship, forged with the blood of our compatriots, will stay in the shared memory of the Chinese and Serbian peoples.”

READ MORE

The Belgrade neighbourhood, home to the former embassy, was on Tuesday decked in Chinese and Serbian flags. At a small demonstration this week two Serbian communist parties hung banners to welcome the Chinese president, including one suggesting similarities between Serbia and China: “Kosovo is Serbia – Taiwan is China”.

Belgrade claims its former province broke away illegally, while Beijing claims Taiwan as part of its territory and strives to bring it under its control.

Mr Xi’s European trip will also include Hungary.

Chinese academics have praised Mr Macron’s advocacy of a more independent European stance on the global stage, while Serbia and Hungary are seen as more pro-Russia despite the Ukraine war.

Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić, who will host Mr Xi, was propaganda minister for former leader Slobodan Milošević during the Nato bombing of Belgrade.

The bombing remains a “source of persistent resentment in Serbia towards Nato and the US in particular”, said Milos Damnjanovic, an analyst at BIRN, a Belgrade think tank. “[It] creates a sense of solidarity between China and Serbia.”

Nato has said the Chinese embassy bombing was an accident that happened during a war to protect Kosovans from Serbian aggression.

China is the biggest foreign investor in Serbia and accounts for 8.5 per cent of Belgrade’s foreign loans, according to Branimir Jovanovic, a researcher at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. “In a way this is a failure of the EU and the West in general that China is so prominent,” Mr Jovanovic said. “The West leaves space that China is more than willing to step into.”

Mr Macron and his wife had lunch with Xi and his wife at a Pyrenees mountain restaurant close to the village where the French president’s grandmother is buried. The lunch was intended as a more personal encounter, mirroring a visit Mr Macron made last year to Guangzhou for a tea ceremony with Xi in a city where the Chinese president’s father had resided.

During Mr Xi’s visit French and Chinese companies signed deals including metro construction contracts for France’s Alstom. Shares in French cognac makers Pernod Ricard and Rémy Cointreau rose on Tuesday after France extracted a temporary reprieve from threatened Chinese special import tariffs on EU brandies.

LATEST STORIES