Kosovo War

The Kosovo War was fought from 28 February 1998 to 11 June 1999 in Kosovo, then a province of Serbia within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It set Yugoslav and Serbian forces against the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an ethnic Albanian insurgent group, and ended after a NATO bombing campaign forced Yugoslav forces to withdraw. Around 13,500 people were killed or went missing, and more than a million Kosovo Albanians were displaced. The last of the Yugoslav Wars, it left Kosovo under United Nations administration.

Albanians and Serbs had clashed over Kosovo since the late nineteenth century. Under Josip Broz Tito, Kosovo, whose population was mostly Albanian, became an autonomous province within Serbia. In 1989 the Serbian leadership under Slobodan Milošević curtailed that autonomy. In 1990 Serbia dissolved Kosovo's assembly and government and took over its Albanian-language media; Albanians were dismissed in large numbers from state jobs, and Albanian teachers and lecturers were pushed out of the schools and university. Kosovo Albanians responded with a policy of peaceful resistance led by Ibrahim Rugova, building parallel schools and institutions and voting in unofficial elections in 1992.

Frustration grew after the 1995 Dayton agreement on Bosnia left Kosovo out. The KLA began attacking Serbian police in the mid-1990s and, after the collapse of order in neighbouring Albania in 1997, acquired large quantities of looted weapons. In early 1998 open war broke out. In March Serbian police assaulted the family compound of the KLA leader Adem Jashari at Prekaz, killing about 60 people, including women and children. Through 1998 Yugoslav forces fought the insurgents in the countryside, and by September the UN Security Council was expressing grave concern at the displacement of over 230,000 people.

Under the threat of NATO air strikes, Milošević agreed in October 1998 to a ceasefire monitored by unarmed observers of the OSCE, but fighting resumed by December. On 15 January 1999 the bodies of 45 Kosovo Albanians were found at Račak, a killing that Western governments condemned as a massacre and that Belgrade denied. Peace talks at Rambouillet, near Paris, followed in February and March. The Albanian, American and British delegations signed the proposed accords on 18 March, but Yugoslavia refused, objecting above all to the stationing of NATO troops on its territory. The OSCE monitors withdrew on 22 March.

On 24 March 1999 NATO began air strikes against Yugoslavia without authorisation from the UN Security Council, citing humanitarian grounds. The campaign went on for some ten weeks. At the same time Yugoslav and Serbian forces carried out mass expulsions, driving well over 800,000 Kosovo Albanians out of the province. NATO's own strikes also caused civilian deaths, at least 488 Yugoslav civilians by one count, including refugees in a convoy hit by mistake, and on 7 May its bombs struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three journalists. In early June, with Russian and Finnish mediators pressing him and Russian support not forthcoming, Milošević accepted an international peace plan.

Under the Kumanovo Agreement of 9 June, Yugoslav forces left Kosovo, and from 12 June a NATO-led peacekeeping force, KFOR, of about 30,000 troops moved in, although Russian troops reached Pristina airport first, causing a tense stand-off. After the war, around 200,000 Serbs, Roma and other non-Albanians fled the province amid revenge attacks.

The UN tribunal for the former Yugoslavia charged Milošević with war crimes and crimes against humanity, and it convicted six Serbian or Yugoslav officials and one Albanian commander over Kosovo. A UN-administered court in Kosovo found in 2001 that Yugoslav forces had waged a systematic campaign of terror against Albanians but that it did not amount to genocide. Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia on 17 February 2008, but its status remains unresolved.

Our 1994 map shows Kosovo as part of Serbia within the rump Yugoslav federation, and our 2000 map shows the same borders after the war, when the province was under UN administration.