(24 Mar 2000) English/Nat
In a display of defiance and anti-Western sentiment, thousands of Serbs - mostly government supporters - gathered at rallies across Belgrade on Friday to mark one year since the start of NATO airstrikes against Yugoslavia.
Top government officials laid flowers and wreaths on the ruins, including the destroyed Chinese Embassy bombed in May last year.
Traffic in downtown Belgrade was blocked during the festivities, pupils were released from schools and workers from factories to join the crowds.
Up to 5-thousand people - some carrying pictures of Slobodan Milosevic - attended the state-sponsored rally in the centre of Belgrade to mark a year after the start of the 78-day air campaign that ended the Yugoslav president's crackdown against Albanians in Kosovo.
Other festivities - denounced by the opposition as bizarre and irrational - were planned on Friday throughout the country by Milosevic's supporters.
A rock concert was also held to mark the occasion.
However, it attracted fewer people than the organisers expected.
The NATO bombing campaign forced Milosevic to withdraw his forces and hand Kosovo over to NATO peacekeepers and U-N administrators, who now find themselves struggling to end reprisal attacks by ethnic Albanians against the province's dwindling Serb community.
The gatherings in Belgrade included a marathon race that went by government and other buildings destroyed during the air strikes.
Only some 100 metres from the state rally on Belgrade's Republic Square, an anti-Milosevic student group "Otpor" (Resistance), distributed leaflets calling on Serbs to "resist the regime".
NATO defence chiefs, including secretary general Lord George Robertson and NATO commander, General Wesley Clark, were scheduled to arrive in Kosovo on Friday afternoon.
SOUNDBITE: (English)
"This is the message: resistance to aggression. The point is we are struggling with the situation here, and we are showing resistance to any kind of aggression here in our country."
SUPER CAPTION: Student protester
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