The War That Never Ended

Prologue: When the Sirens Fell Silent

The explosions stop; in the soil, in the body and in memory they leave traces whose lifespan no one has measured.

On 24 March 1999, at 8.07 in the evening, the night over Priština broke open.

In Pavković’s war diary that moment carries no later patina, none of the safe distance of history, none of the calm of someone who already knows how events ended. The city is in darkness, the ground trembles, the building shakes, and the sky is torn by anti-aircraft fire and the tracks of missiles. Everything happens at once: noise, orders, uncertainty, the estimate of where the next strike will fall and the knowledge that there is no going back to the time before the first explosion.

For the commander of the Third Army the war did not begin with a newspaper headline, a television image or a political statement. It began with an hour he had to remember and a responsibility that from that hour on did not allow him to look back. While others were trying to understand what was happening, he had to decide where the units would move, where the command post would be relocated, how the men would be protected and what to do before the next strike.

“Priština was in complete darkness and eerily deserted.”

After that brief silence the strikes came. From then on, time would be measured in alerts, reports, inspections, the dead and the next attacks. The day would no longer begin with morning, but with news of what had been hit during the night. The night would not end with dawn, but with a judgment as to whether the attack had really stopped or had only paused.

The war diary preserves the outward face of those days: where the command was, where the units moved, when positions were attacked, what damage was observed and how one commander made decisions while the most powerful military alliance in the world was operating over his area of responsibility. Its sentences were not written to become evidence one day. That is precisely why they carry particular weight today. They contain no later adjustment of events to an illness that would appear years afterwards. There is only what he saw, heard, learned and ordered at the time.

Eleven days later the diary no longer speaks only of the sky.

On 3 April 1999, near the village of Reljan, south of Preševo, Pavković approached the destroyed relay station on Vučji Kamen together with generals and officers. About a metre and a half from them lay a damaged 30-millimetre round, which the brigade commander said was filled with depleted uranium.

What lay before them was not a weapon at the moment of firing. There was no flame, no impact, no sound to warn of immediate danger. There was only the remnant of a projectile, small enough to walk past and dangerous enough for its presence to change the meaning of the entire place. The men who approached it wore no special protective equipment. They did not know in advance what was lying on the ground. The danger was recognised only when they were already standing right beside it.

“We have come into direct contact with a depleted uranium projectile. We are in a zone of radioactive radiation. I order that we leave this position immediately.”

That one scene contains the entire later lawsuit: a man in a precisely defined place, a recognised weapon, ignorance of the danger at the moment of approach, an order to leave the position and to have the men examined, and then a question that would remain open for decades: what could have entered the body from that event, and what can still be proved today.

The record is valuable also for what it does not contain. There is no story of illness prepared in advance. There is no attempt to find a convenient place of exposure after the fact. There is not even knowledge of the diagnoses that were still to come. There is a recorded wartime event, written down at a time when no one present could have known what significance that scene would one day have for Pavković’s family, his doctors, the experts and the court.

Depleted uranium in this story is not an abstract term of military jargon. It appears as a specific projectile, in a specific place, on a precisely defined day. But between the presence of such a projectile and one man’s illness lies a long and complex path of proof. It requires examining the nature of the ammunition, the way it acts, the possibility of particles being released and dispersed, the routes by which they enter the body, the duration and intensity of exposure, the biological mechanisms and the medical history of the person who fell ill.

That is why this book will not declare a single wartime note to be the final answer. But neither will it deny that note its significance simply because the answer is difficult. The difficulty of proof is not the same as the absence of an event. The passage of time cannot turn a recorded presence into an absence, nor make unimportant the question of whether people were exposed to a danger of which they were not warned in good time and in full.

A war, after all, has more than one ending.

One is announced in a communiqué, signed in an agreement and marked on the calendar. With it the flights, the sirens and the explosions stop. People come out of the shelters, roads reopen, units leave their positions and life begins to return to the streets from which it had been driven.

The other ending begins only when the sirens fall silent.

It remains in damaged ground, in craters that are slowly filled in, in dust that rises again under the wheels, in an unmarked remnant of a projectile and in places where people go on living without always knowing what was left there. It also remains in a body that stays silent for years, with no visible sign that a process may have begun inside it whose consequences will show themselves much later.

This book is set between those two times.

Nebojša Pavković recorded the war year of 1999 as a commander. His gaze was fixed on the army, the territory, the tasks and the people for whom he was responsible. His children, Marija and Darko, much later had to read the same pages differently: as the daughter and son of a man who had fallen ill.

In the diary they were no longer looking only for the history of the Third Army. They were looking for dates, places, lines of movement and events that might explain what was found after the war in their father’s medical records and tumour tissue. Every recorded location acquired a new meaning. Every visit to an attacked position became a possible place of exposure. Every sentence about the type of ammunition used became part of a question the family could no longer leave unanswered.

In this way the war diary changed its role. What had once been one commander’s operational memory became a map for reconstructing the possible path of a harmful substance into the human body. A private family search met military documents, medical findings and the rules of judicial proof.

Illness, however, does not come with an explanation. A diagnosis establishes what happened in the body, but usually does not by itself say why it happened. Especially when years pass between possible exposure and the onset of illness, the family is left between a medical fact and an unanswered question about its cause. It is precisely in that space that suspicion, the need for expert evidence and the demand that all available data be examined together arise.

Time is no ally of such proof. Strike sites change, traces disappear, objects are removed, memories fade, and documents remain scattered in the archives of different states and organisations. What could have been examined directly in 1999 must decades later be reconstructed indirectly, by connecting records created at different times and for different purposes.

That is why filing the lawsuit was not merely a procedural step. It was an attempt to bring the scattered pieces of a life story and a historical story, at last, before the same body, in the same file and under the same question.

The first lawsuit in this case was filed in the name of Marija and Darko Pavković. It did not declare the family’s suspicion a verdict, nor present the claim in advance as a proven fact. The suspicion was turned into a request that an independent court hear the parties, read the documents, order expert examinations, confront the different findings and assess the evidence.

The sentence “We sued NATO” is therefore not a battle cry in this book. Nor is it a call for revenge, or an attempt to rewrite history through a single court ruling. It is the summary of a decision to bring before the law an organisation that planned and conducted an air operation, held data on the type and quantity of ammunition used and the places where it struck, and then asked to be granted immunity in court proceedings.

The lawsuit could not turn back time. It could not secure the scene again, carry out measurements immediately after the attacks or allow doctors to follow Pavković’s health from the first day of possible exposure. It could, however, demand that what remained on record be explained, and that legal protection not be denied before the evidence had even been considered.

Proof in a case like this resembles assembling a map with missing pieces. Pavković’s diary gives the time, the movements and one specific event of close proximity to a projectile. The White Books preserve the chronology of strikes and destruction. NATO data and United Nations reports speak of depleted uranium ammunition and the places where it was used. The medical records document the illnesses, while the laboratory finding points to a material trace in the tissue.

None of these sources, taken separately, closes the circle. The diary can confirm a man’s presence in a particular place, but cannot by itself explain a biological process. The medical records can confirm the illness, but need not reveal its cause. Data on the use of ammunition can show where it was used, but not automatically how great each individual’s exposure was. A laboratory finding can open an important question about the presence of certain substances, but its significance must be explained by experts.

Only by cross-referencing all these sources does it become visible where a claim rests on evidence, where there is a high degree of probability, and where a gap remains that experts and the court must clarify. That is exactly what judicial proceedings are for: not to remove every uncertainty from the past, which is often no longer possible, but to determine on the basis of the available facts whether the claim has been proved to the standard the law requires.

Above it all stands a procedural obstacle: can NATO be tried at all?

If the question of immunity were answered with a single word, without examining its source, the time it arose, its purpose and its limits, the whole map would remain unread. The court would then not be saying that the evidence was insufficient. It would be saying that it would not even hear it. The difference between those two answers determines whether the right to a court is a real right or merely a promise that ceases when the defendant is powerful enough.

That is why the story of exposure and the story of the right to a court are not two separate subjects. They are two sides of the same demand: that no power be so remote that it need not even answer the evidence, and that the door not be shut on victims before they have had the chance to present what they spent years collecting.

This book does not ask the reader to believe in advance. Nor does it ask that every illness be attributed to a single cause, or that a complex medical question be replaced by a moral conviction. It asks only that the reader look at the whole sequence: the wartime record, the confirmed use of the weapon, the movements of a man, the possible path of a particle into the body, the medical chronology, the laboratory findings and the rules by which such a sequence is assessed.

It also asks the reader to consider who, while the attacks were going on, held information about the ammunition used; who could have warned people of the danger; who after the war could have marked the strike sites, carried out full decontamination and organised long-term health monitoring of those exposed; and who today bears the burden of the missing data that were not collected at the time.

The story begins in the darkness of Priština, at the moment the ground shook and a commander noted the time of the first strike. It continues on Vučji Kamen, beside a damaged projectile that men approached without knowing what lay before them. It passes through years of silence, illness, medical reports and a family’s search for answers.

But it does not end with the last explosion.

Its continuation lies in the courtroom, at the moment when a war diary ceases to be merely testimony about the past and becomes evidence of the consequences of a war that, for some people, never ended.