Speaker after speaker denounced NATO’s unlawful aggression, and stressed the wider significance of the military action of 20 years ago, which not only lacked a mandate from the United Nations Security Council, but was also in breach of NATO’s own charter.

Eva-Maria Follmer-Mueller, president of the Mut zur Ethik Association in Switzerland, described it as “a historic turning point.”

Momir Bulatovic, the prime minister of Yugoslavia in March 1999, called the bombing “a crime which only grows in significance”. He pointed out that it was the first step in a still ongoing war against other countries. He and subsequent speakers, (myself included), noted that since 1999 we’ve had US-led attacks on a series of independently-minded, strategically important and resource-rich sovereign states, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, while others, such as Iran and Venezuela have been subject to intense economic warfare. Each time we’re encouraged to see these conflicts as ‘stand-alones’ with the leader of the target state demonized, usually as the ‘New Hitler,’ and someone who ‘must be stopped’, but actually they are all part of the same war. A war for empire and the global hegemony of the US and rapacious international finance capital.