Kosovo Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj on Monday sacked a Serb member of his government after she called the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia "a genocide against the Serbian people".
"The statement of the deputy minister of justice, Vesna Mikic, that NATO's bombing was genocide against the Serbian people is unacceptable and represent a language of hatred," Haradinaj wrote on his Facebook account.
"People who denigrate common Euro-Atlantic values have no place in the government and institutions" of Kosovo, he added.
Like Belgrade, the ethnic Serb minority in Kosovo does not recognise the independence of the breakaway territory, but the Kosovo constitution requires that Serbs are represented in the government in Pristina.
Twenty years ago, on March 24, NATO launched an air campaign to force Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic to pull his armed forces out of Kosovo and end the war with independence-seeking ethnic Albanian guerrilla.
The 1998-1999 independence war in Kosovo claimed more than 13,000 lives, mostly ethnic Albanians, and led to a humanitarian and refuge crisis in which hundreds of thousands of people left their homes.
The bombings lasted for three months until Milosevic finally withdrew his troops from Kosovo and Serbia's southern province at the time became a UN protectorate.
Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in 2008, but Belgrade has refused to accept it, and still considers it its southern province.
The Serbian government's office responsible for Kosovo condemned Mikic's sacking.
"By calling the (NATO) aggression on the Serb people genocide... Vesna Mikic expressed a predominant opinion of the Serbian people", the office said in a statement.
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