I'm Serbian, so this resonates very strongly.

To start off, here is an article by one of the journalists who survived the attack: [1]. I'm not sure of his political affiliation and if he was pro-regime or not (the regime at that time was undoubtedly evil), but the way of writing about the tragedy really struck a chord, so it is very relevant. The civilian casualty reports of the attack itself range between 489 and 528[2].

I was only 2 when the the NATO air invasion on Serbia started. At that time, me and my parents were living in a remote town in Eastern Serbia and the main targets were elsewhere. However, there was a factory of chemical compounds near us that was rather high-profile, and they announced it will be targeted soon, so as a precaution we fled to a nearby afer village where my grandparents lived then. They say you usually don't remember anything before the age of three, but there is one picture that I strongly believe came from there. We were all in a basement, with some other people, crammed, and I think I remember the sound of sirens or faint explosions somewhere, but maybe that's just a fake memory. I remember an old, broken fridge in the corner, and when I talked to my parents about this, they say that they remembered the same old fridge in that basement that day.

Only later, when I grew up, I heard the stories of the Radio Television of Serbia building being bombed and the circumstances surrounding it. I don't know enough facts to know if that media outlet was censored and manipulated, or if the director knew that the building will be targeted and left the journalists there to be sacrificed so the regime could use that event for propaganda later. But it doesn't matter in the end. All I know is that people died---journalists who probably just did their job. Journalists who had to be protected, but were instead hung out to dry. The media was most probably censored (that's my perspective from today, but again I don't know most of the facts), but I doubt that any of them had any say in that. The ones who were responsible are higher-up officials.

Those were not the only civilians who died, as mentioned before. For instance, my high school bears a memorial engraving in memory of an 18-year-old student who died when a bridge collapsed near Varvarin[2].

The Yugoslav people from then never had any hate for anyone. It was amidst a huge crisis and they mostly wanted just a better life. We were led by a psychopathic leader who brought incidents like the killing of those journalists and all these civilians. Somehow my country has never succeeded in avoiding evil.

I'm not trying to belittle other incidents. All human deaths are scary and sad. I am scared and sad when hearing about the Charlie Hebdo incident. But it's hardly an isolated case. It seems to happen all the time, and people should be more aware---maybe then, there is a chance of some change in the world for the better.

And a small digression: I remember that PG, in a heavily technical essay that I really liked, mentioned something rather political about Yugoslavia and freedom for people's homelands. Such a political sentiment felt really out of place, so I wrote to him about it---I never got a reply, but that's completely understandable and beside my point here.

[1]: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MAR304A.html

[2]: http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/nato/Natbm200-01.htm

[3]: http://emperors-clothes.com/misc/nota.htm