In the mid‑2010s, I lived on Admirala Geprata, a quiet street in central Belgrade just blocks from Nemanjina, where the bombed‑out Yugoslav General Staff complex loomed like a scar that would never heal across the city’s main artery. Every day, walking past its splintered concrete slabs and twisted rebar – remnants of NATO’s 1999 strikes – I felt the weight of that unfinished ruin. It was not abstract history but a daily confrontation: a European capital marked by aerial bombardment, with Hungary’s airfields newly in use for the campaign less than a fortnight after NATO accession.

To understand why the buildings carried such weight, it helps to recall how it came to be. On 24 March 1999, NATO began its air campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In Belgrade, the Yugoslav General Staff complex was struck repeatedly, its monumental slabs torn open and left exposed. For years afterward, the ruin stood as an open wound in the capital: a reminder of a lost country, of a defeated army, of lives taken and a sovereignty shattered. The derelict headquarters became a de facto memorial to those killed during the air campaign, not by design but by endurance.

Two and a half decades later, the question has shifted from how the building was destroyed to what should be done with what remains – and by whom. When investors close to the American administration propose a luxury development on such a site, the dilemma is no longer only architectural or economic. It is ethical. Can you take away a site of national trauma and remembrance and sell it to those who helped destroy it?

Ruins serve as deliberate memory; modern states are selective about which ruins they preserve. Some ruins are cleared quickly, as if in a fever to forget; others are protected, fenced off, and turned into curated sites of memory. This selection is never neutral. It encodes a story about who was victim, who aggressor, and what the nation chooses to remember.

The bombed General Staff complex in Belgrade belonged to this second category. It was not cleared as rubble but left largely untouched for years, both because of practical constraints and because it visually inscribed the 1999 air campaign into the everyday life of the city. Commuters walked past the gutted buildings; tour groups pointed at the gash in the façade; local media wrote of the building as a “wound” in the city’s body. The ruin did not mourn all victims of the Yugoslav wars. Its symbolism was more specific: it stood for the experience of being bombed by NATO, of being the object rather than the subject of Western power.

That is one reason why redevelopment proposals provoked so much controversy. To many Serbs, the complex was not an interchangeable piece of real estate but a material embodiment of a particular trauma, however contested the political narratives around it. Erasing the ruin risked erasing that trauma from the visible city.

Standing before Belgrade’s ruin, it became clear to me that every society touched by violence eventually faces the same ethical tension about memory, rebuilding, and erasure. What Belgrade confronted in the aftermath of 1999 is an ethical dilemma familiar to many societies: how to balance the needs of the living with the demands of memory. The questions raised by Belgrade’s ruin are not unique to Serbia; they recur wherever violence reshapes a landscape and societies must decide what to rebuild and what to leave as testimony.

On this 27th anniversary of the bombing’s start, those walks on Nemanjina return to me amidst debates over Israel’s ravaged border communities — and, across the fence, the far more total devastation in Gaza — what to rebuild, what must remain visibly broken, and who gets to decide. The contexts are not symmetrical, and the histories are not interchangeable. But the underlying dilemma is recognizable: once destruction has marked a place, the question is no longer only how to rebuild, but how to live with what remains — and who has the power to reshape it.

Yet ruins are also expensive. They occupy valuable plots in city centers; they complicate traffic, property values, and urban planning. Governments under pressure to deliver growth and signal “normalization” face strong incentives to monetise such sites. In the post‑socialist Balkans, this often takes the form of partnerships with foreign investors, whose capital and branding promise to anchor the country into global markets and tourism flows.

It is precisely here that the ethical questions sharpen. When the investors are from the same geopolitical sphere that carried out the bombing, redevelopment becomes more than a business deal. It stages a reversal: the power that once destroyed from the air now returns via architectural renderings and investment vehicles, promising glass towers where ruins once stood.

The symbolism is hard to ignore. The state that left the bombed buildings standing as a reminder of 1999 now invites figures associated with the bombers to overwrite it. The story told by the urban landscape shifts subtly: from “we remember what was done to us” to “we have moved on and partnered with those who did it.” Of course, no traffic circle plaque ever spells it out in those words. But cityscapes speak without words.

When it comes to the ethics of selling trauma, there is more than “good taste” at stake. There are at least three ethical dimensions.

First, the question of ownership of memory. A state may own the land, but the trauma attached to that land is not its private property. It belongs, at minimum, to the families of those killed, to veterans, to those who lived under bombardment, and to the wider political community for whom the site has become shorthand for an era. When a government quietly removes heritage protections or signs contracts out of public view, it effectively privatises something that is collectively meaningful. Even if the law allows it, there is an ethical deficit.

Second, the problem of moral asymmetry. The party that bombed – or its allies and beneficiaries – already exercised a decisive form of power. When it later appears as investor or brand on that same site, the asymmetry continues under another guise. The city is invited to be grateful for the investment, to reinterpret its own wound as an opportunity. This can easily slide into a kind of moral gaslighting: the memory of having been bombed must accommodate the logic of the market and the rhetoric of “moving forward.”

Third, the risk of aestheticizing and commodifying the very destruction that produced the trauma. Luxury developments on former battlefields or sites of atrocity often trade – subtly or overtly – on the frisson of history. The bombed‑out past becomes a marketing hook: guests can sleep where history happened, dine above a former bunker, drink cocktails with a view of a once‑ruined façade. Even when done tastefully, this can cheapen remembrance, turning it from a hard moral demand into a consumable ambiance.

From an ethical standpoint, there is a difference between, say, a locally driven museum or memorial complex that critically engages with the past, and a branded hotel whose primary purpose is profit and prestige. One centers the dead and the moral questions their deaths pose; the other centers paying guests.

In the ancient world, there was a brutal clarity to conquest: the victors could plough the defeated city into the ground and sow the soil with salt so that nothing would grow there again. In our century, the methods are more elegant and much more marketable. Instead of salting the earth, we saturate it with capital. Instead of a barren wasteland, we get “revitalized” waterfronts, business districts, and gated resorts. But the logic is eerily similar: erase the enemy’s continued presence in the landscape, make their suffering unseeable, and ensure that whatever grows on that land in future will bear the stamp of the victor’s imagination, not the memory of the people who lived and died there.

Other societies have faced similar dilemmas and chosen differently. In some cases, ruins have been preserved deliberately as warnings: the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Japan, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, parts of Warsaw’s old town in the immediate post‑war years. In other places, like post‑war West Germany, there was intense pressure to clear ruins quickly, both to house the living and to symbolically break with the past. Debates over whether to reconstruct destroyed buildings as they were, to build something new, or to leave a ruin in place have always been debates about history and responsibility, not just about bricks.

What makes the Belgrade case particularly charged is the combination of three factors: the recency of the trauma, the direct role of foreign power in causing it, and the eagerness of domestic elites to court that same power in the realm of capital. When these three converge, the ethical stakes of redevelopment become especially high.

One might object that refusing such projects locks societies into their victimhood, that economic ties with former adversaries can promote peace. There is some truth in that; strict moral quarantine is not a viable long‑term strategy. But reconciliation worthy of the name requires more than allowing those who wielded force to buy the ruins they left behind. It requires acknowledgement, accountability, and a public conversation about how to mark the past. It requires that those most affected have a genuine voice in deciding the fate of emblematic sites.

The problem of whether a site of trauma can be sold to its destroyers brings us back to the core questions.

Can a state remove a site of national trauma and remembrance from the urban and symbolic landscape? Legally, yes. Ethically, only if it does so through a process that takes memory seriously: wide public debate, transparent decision‑making, and provisions for alternative forms of commemoration. Simply downgrading a ruin from “protected monument” to “development opportunity” is not enough.

Can it then sell that site to those who bombed it, or to their close allies? Here, the answer depends on more than legalities and profitability. Selling such a site to actors linked to its destruction risks normalising a brutal asymmetry of power and turning the memory of violence into one more commodity. It may be defended as pragmatism, but it looks, and feels, like something else: a quiet capitulation in the realm of symbols.

If there is an ethical line, it runs roughly here. Redevelopment that is locally driven, historically conscious, and oriented towards broad public use can, over time, reconcile cities with their own tragic sites. But ceding those sites to the very networks that ordered or enabled their destruction crosses into morally dangerous territory. It confuses economic integration with moral repair and turns the ruins of the past into showcases for the prestige of the powerful.

If ruins become opportunities for spectacle or profit instead of sites of reckoning, a society risks losing its moral compass. The dead cannot veto planning decisions. But they can, and should, impose constraints on our imagination.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)