Talk:Civilian casualties during Operation Allied Force

Title should be "Civilian Casualties during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia"?? edit

Looking at the Wikipedia page NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, it seems like "Operation Allied Force" is not the best phrase to use to refer to the bombing because it had multiple codenames. Should this page's title be changed to "Civilian Casualties during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia" to be more consistent with the main article about the bombing? 李艾连 (talk) 22:32, 3 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

@李艾连: Operation Allied Force was the US code name. The remaining 18 NATO member states all had code names of their own. If you started a move discussion I would support it. Amanuensis Balkanicus (talk) 20:23, 5 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

POV Title edit

As it stands, the title of this article is very biased. It seems to imply that the civilian deaths were intentionally caused by the US military, which is an assertion not backed up by the sources. I would suggest changing to title to "Civilian casualties during Operation Allied Force." Also, i'm not sure why each incident needs its own article, as they could all be covered well within this main article. Dchall1 07:11, 17 June 2007 (UTC)Reply

OK for the move, for the articles, I'm going to expand them so merge would make this page enormous --TheFEARgod (Ч) 13:03, 17 June 2007 (UTC)Reply
Second the need for a move on this article. I'm severely tempted to slap a {{POV}} tag on it. It needs a neutral title. Resolute 04:46, 21 June 2007 (UTC)Reply

I would question the need for most of these daughter articles. The Chinese embassy bombing seemed to get a lot of independent media coverage, but are any of these notable outside of the fact that they were one instance of civilian casualties inflicted during Operation Allied Force? Savidan 18:10, 22 June 2007 (UTC)Reply

at the time of the events, those events got a lot of media attention (and wikipedia is not western media-only) --TheFEARgod (Ч) 00:10, 25 June 2007 (UTC)Reply

Knowing how the smart bomb operates with GPRS coordinates and camera tracking, you wish to say that equipment mailfunctioned in 22 cases? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.105.54.146 (talk) 17:09, 21 February 2012 (UTC)Reply

Merger Proposal edit

I've tagged four of the smaller articles for merger into this article. None of them is longer than four paragraphs, and would be better covered within this article. Dchall1 02:04, 13 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

  • Oppose - they are all separate events. Avala 11:19, 13 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
  • Oppose - No proper rationale provided. Subjects are important enough to deserve an article in their own right. --Asteriontalk 22:57, 13 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
  • Oppose - like Asterion --TheFEARgod (Ч) 10:44, 14 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
  • Oppose - there is absolutely no reason for merge. The articles are most likely become much more detailed than sections should be. Nikola 13:28, 16 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
a bit of time passed since the proposal.. I'm closing the merging proposal as oppose prevailed. --TheFEARgod (Ч) 20:35, 30 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

Incomplete edit

The article is incomplete. There are a lot of more incidents.

The 1999 NATO bombing of Novi Sad article could also be included into this corpus (seems separated from the others). --PaxEquilibrium (talk) 18:38, 14 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

feel free to add and source everything you want.--TheFEARgod (Ч) 17:37, 2 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Copyright problem removed edit

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casualty ratio edit

Biased quote edit

According to military historian and Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren:

Yet even the most moral army can make mistakes, especially in dense urban warfare; for every Serbian soldier killed by NATO in 1999, for example, four civilians died.

Legatus est vir bonus peregre missus ad mentiendum rei publicae causa (Henry Wotton). This figure may be right, but is it for the number of people killed by NATO or the causality on both sides during the war (It was an ethnic cleansing campaign that initiated the bombing campaign)? Alternatively as no source is given for who collected the numbers how do we know they do not come from the Serbs a party to the conflict who have a reason to distort the figures? The numbers are not coming from a disinterested party (Oren has a point to make for his country) and as such may well be biased. Without a disinterested (academic) source to back it up or a repost from a similar political motivated source, the quote fails NPOV. -- PBS (talk) 10:31, 7 December 2010 (UTC)Reply

Clearly, Oren is calling NATO a moral army, not the Serbs, since he is talking to Boston Globe. His point is that it was NATO that killed over 2000 civilians and around 500 soldiers (effect from the NATO bombs alone), while NATO is implicitly here "moral army", and he uses this to make a point, to an American audience, that Israel can not be expected not to have civilians killed. He also clearly does not refer to the TOTAL number of civilians, which is well over 5000 (if you add Serbian and Albanian civilians killed, number is probably over 6,000, perhaps 7,000 killed, depending what you count, with Albanian civilians being roughly 2/3 of that number. Total number of Serbian soldiers killed in ALL of conflict is around 1000 (including fights with KLA guerillas, who lost several thousand on their part), so from this is also clear that he DOES NOT refer to the total number of civilians killed (3000 Serbs plus up to 6,000 Albanians if you count ALL of the conflict) vs 5-6,000 total military deaths (1000 Serbs and the rest is KLA), but just the NATO bombing (2000 civilians vs 500 soldiers) which was notoriously ineffective except as a tool to terrorize civilians, DESPITE the purported care that NATO took (but which was frustrated with their inability to overcome Serbian defensive tactics for military, from 5 km above the ground). While he might have had point to made (Israeli interest), he clearly uses these well established facts that have since entered the serious historical discourse (he is military historian, after all), and the statement testifies to the shifting attitudes of the west and NATO, that has since moved on to bomb Libya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, often with even less care about the civilians, killing weddings and similar events in drone strikes etc. Serbs were only the first in this line of interventionism, and many lessons have been learned (not targeting civilians is not one of them) by USA and NATO... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.30.141.53 (talk) 16:08, 17 December 2017 (UTC)Reply


You don`t get the message. Casaulties caused by NATO only had ratio 4:1. Very few soldiers died during that campaign, mainly people in hospitals, babies, employes of TV stations and embassies. Camapign of ethnic clensing was never proven (even it was often in previous Balkan wars) that so called "operation horseshoe"). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.105.54.146 (talk) 17:12, 21 February 2012 (UTC)Reply

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