Retired US Army General and supreme commander of NATO forces during the 1999 bombing of FR Yugoslavia Wesley Clark told the CNN that the participation of Jared Kushner’s firm in building a complex at the site of the former defense ministry in Belgrade, which would include a memorial to the victims of the NATO aggression, would be a betrayal of the United States.

Clark told the CNN show “The Lead” he thinks it is great to invest in Serbia, but that he is against the idea of building a memorial to the victims of the NATO aggression at the site of the former defense ministry in Belgrade.

“First of all, the building was empty when we struck it, to the best of our knowledge. And it wasn’t NATO aggression, this was the culmination of a years-long diplomatic effort to persuade Serb dictator Slobodan Milosevic not to go and kill his own citizens in the area of Serbia known as Kosovo,” said Clark.

Anchor Jake Tapper said Jared Kushner’s firm Affinity Partners provided “The Lead” with a part of their contract with Serbia and that it does not expressly include the phrase “NATO aggression.”

Following the signing of the agreement, the Serbian Government said in a press release that the investor has the obligation to build a memorial which, it said, is dedicated to all the victims of the 1999 NATO aggression.

“It is naïve and worrying to put up such a monument and label it as a monument for NATO aggression. It would be a betrayal of the United States, our policy, the brave airmen and airwomen who served in that campaign, the diplomatic effort. It wasn’t aggression, it was diplomacy that Milosevic simply refused, to stop killing innocent people,” Clark stressed.

“That monument is part of the Russian disinformation campaign”

He said Slobodan Milosevic started the aggression in Kosovo in 1998, murdering a family, killing 60 people, including women, children and babies, in the Jashari family.

“We sent Richard Holbrooke in to negotiate, Ambassador Chris Hill was there negotiating, I met three times with Milosevic. The only thing we could think of is: ‘Look, we are going to warn you, please don’t reinstitute, we just stopped the war in Bosnia, don’t start this all over again in Europe!’ The Russians came in and told him: ‘Don’t worry about NATO and just do what you want to do – kill those people.’ And so it started up again,” said Clark.

He also said that, in Rambouillet, the Serbian side was resolute, they said they did not want to negotiate and that they would solve things their way.

“NATO had no choice but to try to stop the ethnic cleansing by a very graduated NATO campaign, of course with diplomacy. And we did stop it,” Clark said.

The retired U.S. Army General described the Serb nation as a “wonderful group of people” but stressed that they have never come to terms with what happened under Slobodan Milosevic.

“He used nationalism to go against the other ethnic groups in former Yugoslavia, and it’s the same pattern we see today with Vladimir Putin. We know that Serbia today is serving as a channel for Russian mischief in Europe – to disrupt NATO, to disrupt the European Union, and making a monument to NATO aggression is part of the Russian mischief disinformation campaign,” said Clark.

He said he hopes Jared Kushner’s firm will not participate in the project after all.

“Build a hotel, build a memorial to all the people who died, including mostly Kosovars who were murdered by Serbian police forces during this campaign, and nothing about NATO aggression. There was no NATO aggression,” stressed the former NATO commander.

The firm Affinity Partners, owned by former US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, signed with the Serbian Government in mid-May an Agreement on Revitalization of the Complex of the Former Federal Secretariat for National Defense, located in Belgrade.

The complex, also known as the General Staff, was designed by Yugoslav architect Nikola Dobrovic, and has the status of immovable cultural property.

In the meantime, the Director of the Serbian Institute for Protection of Cultural Monuments, Dubravka Djukanovic, resigned after she was told to remove the protected status from the General Staff building, or to withdraw from her post.