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Belgrade - NATO has given to Serbian authorities on Tuesday, information for locating cluster bombs that dropped during the Alliance's 1999 bombing campaign which ended ethnic clashes in the southern province of Kosovo.
The Serbian Defence Ministry stated Tuesday that the coordinates given by NATO would allow for the location and disarmament of all remaining, unexploded cluster bombs on the territory of Serbia.
Though the project of disarming the bombs is expected to be costly, Serbia expects financial help in the project from various countries and international organizations.
It is believed that some 2,000 cluster bombs, containing 380,000 sub-munitions, were dropped on the territory of Serbia during the bombing campaign.
NATO also admitted that the bombs had a five per cent failure rate, meaning that there could still be some 20,000 unexploded bombs scattered around Serbia proper and Kosovo.
While at least 23 Serbian civilians died in the bombing campaign, since then, at least six people, including three children, were killed by exploding cluster bombs, and 12 more persons have been injured.
NATO intervened in the conflict between the Serbian military and freedom-fighting ethnic Albanian rebels in 1999, pushing the Serbian forces out of Kosovo, putting the province under a United Nations administration and NATO peacekeeping mission.
Negotiations for the future status of the province between Serbia, which wished to retain sovereignty over Kosovo, and the province's Albanian majority seeking independence, are being mediated by a team of international envoys representing the United States, Russia and European Union.
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