Djurdjevic Stamenkovski pays tribute to victims of April 6, 1941 bombing of Belgrade

BELGRADE - Serbian Minister of Labour, Employment and Veteran and Social Affairs Milica Djurdjevic Stamenkovski, who also chairs a government committee on cherishing the tradition of Serbia's liberation wars, laid a wreath in the Alley of the Victims of the April 6 Bombing of Belgrade at the capital's New Cemetery on Monday.

She paid the tribute as part of commemorations of the start of WWII in the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941.

Djurdjevic Stamenkovski said the aggression had not taken place because the Kingdom of Yugoslavia had decided to enter WWII, but as an act of retaliation.

"It was an act of retaliation because the majority of the people were against alignment and against a warmongering policy. The Serbs have not changed much - even today, our position is the same: that it is always better to build bridges between peoples than to destroy or burn them," the minister said.

She said thousands of women, children, elderly people and other civilians had been killed in the Nazi bombing and that cultural sites, such as the National Library, had been destroyed as well.

Djurdjevic Stamenkovski also said the April 6 bombing had been an overture to what had followed - the mass executions in Kragujevac and Kraljevo, as well as Jasenovac, Jadovno, Pag and other death camps in the then Independent State of Croatia.

At a memorial service in Belgrade, Minister without portfolio Nenad Popovic said the Serbs would never forget the evil and the suffering inflicted on them by Nazi Germany.

Eighty-five years ago today, Nazi Germany attacked the Kingdom of Yugoslavia without a declaration of war.