Kosovo War

The Kosovo War (also referred to as the Kosovo conflict, Albanian Lufta e Kosovës, Serbian Косовски сукоб Kosovski sukob) was an armed conflict in the Yugoslav Wars for control of Kosovo from 28. February 1998 to June 10, 1999. Parties to the conflict were the Kosovo Liberation Army (UÇK), the Yugoslav Army and Serbian forces of law and order, and from 1999 NATO forces led by the United States (US). The NATO operation lasted from 24 March 1999, the date of the first air strike, until 9 June 1999, the date of the agreement reached in the military negotiations.

The reason for NATO's attack in the framework of Operation Allied Force was the failure of Serbian President Slobodan Milošević to sign the Treaty of Rambouillet. NATO's main official goal was to force Slobodan Milošević's government to withdraw its army from Kosovo and thus prevent further Serbian human rights violations, such as the previously perpetrated Račak massacre, in the future. Yugoslavia's official goal was to protect the Serb minority in Kosovo and to repel what it saw as interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. The majority ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo was a province of Serbia within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which at that time consisted of Serbia and Montenegro.

Overview

First conflict phase

The entire violent conflict over Kosovo began earlier and can be divided into two phases. It was an armed internal conflict between the UÇK ("Kosovo Liberation Army"), an Albanian paramilitary organization fighting for the independence of Kosovo, the Serbian-Yugoslav army and the Serbian forces of order of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Second conflict phase

The second, interstate phase of the conflict began on 28 February 1998 and ended on 10 June 1999. From 24 March 1999, NATO attacked the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from the air in Operation Allied Force, at times using over 1000 aircraft. Military conflicts also continued between the Yugoslav armed forces and the UÇK rebels, who received logistical support from Albania.

War Destruction

Throughout the conflict, but especially in 1999, hundreds of thousands of Kosovo's inhabitants were on the run. Some 650 localities were damaged or destroyed, including historically valuable buildings. In Serbia, in addition to the targeted bombing of government buildings, industrial facilities, transport, telecommunications and energy infrastructure objects and all military installations, hundreds of other buildings, including historically valuable ones, were destroyed as collateral damage by NATO's massive air strikes.

Casualties

The total death toll from the bombing of Serbia is estimated at 3500; about 10,000 people are said to have been injured.

War Costs

The costs of the war were estimated by a Bundeswehr study at 45 billion German marks (DM): military costs of NATO: approx. 11 billion DM, costs of humanitarian aid: approx. 2 billion DM, destruction of war in Yugoslavia: approx. 26 billion DM; further economic costs: approx. 4 billion DM, military costs of Yugoslavia: approx. 2 billion DM. The follow-up costs were put at between DM 60 and 600 billion.

Refugees

According to the United Nations High Commissionerfor Refugees (UNHCR), a total of almost 825,000 refugees returned to Kosovo after the end of the war.

Controversial positions

The Kosovo war was controversially discussed: NATO attacked the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia without having a UN mandate to do so and without attacking a member country, thus triggering NATO's case for alliance.

The Kosovo war was described by its proponents as one of the first "humanitarian war operations" and justified as a measure to protect against further human rights violations by the Yugoslav security forces.

The Serbian government complained about secessionist tendencies among large parts of the Albanian population of Kosovo and invoked its right to fight the UÇK, which had been using guerrilla methods since 1997, on Serbian territory.

Backgrounds

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In 1877, the Vilâyet Kosovo was established as a province (administrative unit) of the Ottoman Empire. It covered a larger territory than today's area, including large parts of what is now northern Macedonia. In 1878, Serbia and Montenegro became independent at the Congress of Berlin, while Kosovo and Albania remained within the Ottoman Empire. In 1910, an armed uprising of Albanians broke out in Kosovo against Ottoman rule, and over the following years it expanded into what is now Albania. During the two Balkan Wars (1912/1913), Serbia annexed Kosovo, and Albania became independent. After a brief interruption under the sovereignty of the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, the area remained under Serbian control, first as part of the Kingdom of Serbia, then in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The German invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 led to the collapse of the Yugoslav state. Kosovo and parts of Macedonia were united with Albania, which was already under the rule of fascist Italy.

In 1945, Kosovo became an autonomous province within the Republic of Serbia in the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (or Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1963). An idea of a Balkan federation envisaged by the Yugoslav head of state Josip Broz Tito and negotiated in particular with Albania, for which Tito had promised a unification of Kosovo with Albania, failed because of Josef Stalin. Yugoslavia was the first socialist country to escape the influence of the Soviet leadership during Stalin's lifetime and received economic support from the West, which contributed to the country's economic upswing.

Tito tried to strengthen weak ethnic or religious groups against the large population groups. In order to prevent a Serbian predominance in the new state, the "autonomous provinces" of Vojvodina and Kosovo were split off from the constituent republic of Serbia. Until 1948 there was an open border, Albanian immigration to Kosovo was deliberately encouraged, and the Albanians were subsidized to the disadvantage of the Serbs.

The Yugoslav state propagating the slogan "brotherhood and unity" (bratstvo i jedinstvo) was never able to fundamentally resolve the conflicts between the ethnic groups. With the end of the economic boom in the mid-1960s, all the republics began to complain of being at a disadvantage compared to the others. In the 1960s, Adem Demaçi was considered the leading figure of the Albanian resistance movement. Until 1966, the Albanian population was largely exempt from national equality. Through gradual decentralization by means of constitutional amendments in 1967 and 1974, the Yugoslav leadership under Tito subsequently attempted, with some success, to reduce inter-ethnic tensions in the country by balancing the nationalities, but the shift of power from the central to the republics and provinces also led to a strengthening of their self-interests and a weaker will to cooperate. In 1967, the autonomous status of the province, renamed from "Kosovo and Metohija" to "Kosovo", became almost equal to that of the six Yugoslav republics. This exceptionally far-reaching autonomy of Kosovo (as well as Vojvodina) was confirmed in the 1974 constitution and meant extensive self-government. From now on, the two autonomous provinces were federal entities with equal rights in addition to their affiliation with Serbia. The fact that they were not also elevated to the status of de jure republics was intended to prevent them from becoming even more independent and, in the case of Kosovo, from moving closer to Albania. As early as April 1968, the leading Kosovo Albanian communist Mehmet Hoxha demanded republic status for Kosovo, referring to Montenegro. There were demonstrations by Kosovo Albanians in several cities in 1968 demanding republic status for Kosovo. During the energetic use of police to violently end them, one demonstrator died. There was a tendency to reverse the situation and to discriminate in Kosovo against the Serbs, although not to the extent of the earlier discrimination against the Albanians. Among the Slavic population in Kosovo, however, the emancipation process of the Albanians triggered scepticism and uncertainty in the majority. When in 1971 the so-called "Croatian Spring", the most serious crisis with a nationalist background in Tito's lifetime, in which demands were raised up to a Croatian "nation state", discontent was voiced in Serbia about the fact that the Serbs in Croatia did not enjoy autonomy, although they formed a higher proportion of the population there than Albanians and Hungarians in Serbia. As early as 1976, the Serbian leadership, although not publicly and without advocating nationalist positions, called for a constitutional amendment to expand the competences of the Serbian Republic vis-à-vis the provinces, but was sharply criticized for this in the other republics and especially in the provinces.

Intensification of the conflict after Tito's death

The social development of the 1980s and 1990s in Yugoslavia was marked by a severe economic crisis, high unemployment and indebtedness, some of which had their origins in Yugoslavia's last period of growth in the 1970s. Its own economic difficulties were exacerbated by the waning of economic support from the West after Western interest in Yugoslavia waned in the late 1980s with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. The substantial population growth of the ethnic Albanian group in Kosovo, combined with inheritance laws akin to real division, led to fragmentation of land and inhibited productivity in the agricultural sector. In other sectors, too, Kosovo's high population growth cancelled out economic gains by increasing the unemployed and "unproductive" part of the population. The economic gap with the rest of the country grew increasingly wide. Average income had fallen from 48 percent of the level in Yugoslavia in 1954 to a low of 33 percent in 1980. To hide the unemployment rate, which rose from 18.6 to 27.5 percent between 1971 and 1981, young people were encouraged to pursue academic training, but this was not adapted to economic conditions, so that a high proportion of graduates were given few opportunities on the labor market, a factor that contributed decisively to the unrest in the spring of 1981. In 1990, the unemployment rate reached 40 percent.

The mass demonstrations in Kosovo and the harsh reaction of the Yugoslav state authorities finally triggered Yugoslavia's crisis. Until the end of the 1980s, this conflict remained Yugoslavia's central conflict, to which others were added, initiating a process of disintegration that led to Yugoslavia's disintegration in the 1990s. The individual republics and provinces of Yugoslavia largely disclaimed responsibility for the crisis and increasingly competed for dwindling financial resources.

The fact that Kosovo, as a Serbian province, played a central role in sparking social and national conflicts can be seen as closely related to the situation in Yugoslavia as a whole. Tito had developed an elaborate system of balancing power in the multi-ethnic federation by rotating the eight representatives from the republics and provinces. Thus he countered the Serb and Croat claims to power in Bosnia-Herzegovina with the nation-building of the Bosnian Muslims. To weaken the Serbs, he had strengthened the two Serbian provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina. Soon after his death, however, the divisive forces began to outweigh the cohesive ones.

Whether or to what extent a hasty European - especially German - recognition policy of 1992 towards Slovenia and Croatia then led to an intensification of ethno-nationalist politics and to the spillover of the war into Bosnia and Herzegovina is the subject of heated controversy.

Nationalist polarization in Kosovo until 1992

After the death of Tito in May 1980, who as Yugoslav head of state had strengthened the position of the Albanians in Yugoslavia and limited that of the Serbs, Yugoslavia's political leadership passed to a rotating presidency consisting of the eight representatives of the republics and autonomous provinces.

In 1981, ethnic Albanians in Kosovo demanded republic status for the province within Yugoslavia during various protests. After an initial student protest in Priština against the quality of the cafeteria food, in which displeasure was expressed against the general economic situation, especially of the students, and which was quickly dispersed by the police, a few weeks later, also in other cities, there were serious and increasingly nationalistic riots by Albanians, which were violently put down by the Yugoslav security forces, resulting in numerous deaths and arrests. The Yugoslav government imposed a state of emergency on Kosovo for several months. The majority of protesters appear to have called for Kosovo's republic status, with small but influential groups at Priština University called "Enverists" credited with playing an important role in organizing the protests in a sustained manner. They described themselves as supporters of Enver Hoxha, the CP leader of Albania. In order to achieve their goal of a state without Serbs, armed struggle still seemed pointless to them until 1989, especially since Kosovo was not governed by Serbs. In the 1990s, however, some of them took part in building up the UÇK. The Yugoslav leadership located the masterminds of the events in Albania and saw the demonstrations as the result of a "counter-revolutionary" agitation directed from Tirana, but did not publicly undertake a deeper analysis of the motivation for the revolt of the students and young academics, who suffered from the conditions at the University of Priština and poor job prospects. In 1982, the demonstrations were again accompanied by riots.

The riots and their suppression contributed significantly to the polarization of the ethnic groups of Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo and led to a nationwide strengthening of nationalisms in Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav presidency criticized the emerging nationalist voices and strongly condemned chauvinist views of Albanian and Serb writers, but was reluctant to address the poor economic situation for both ethnic groups, high unemployment and the tense social climate as areas of conflict. In contrast, the political leadership also saw a failed education policy, the use of textbooks and the employment of pedagogues from Albania as responsible for the situation and criticized the inefficiency of the police apparatus, which had not been able to put an end to the uprisings at an early stage. Members of the Serb minority subsequently moved increasingly into the Serbian heartland. However, the conflict continued to smoulder.

In 1983, on the occasion of Aleksandar Ranković's funeral, the first mass nationalist rally of Serbs in Kosovo after Tito's death took place. Ranković, former head of the state security service UDB-a, had enforced Serbian interests in Kosovo by force as Yugoslav Minister of the Interior from 1946 to 1953 and prevented the implementation of Albanian autonomy rights, but had been deposed by Tito in 1966. In the perception of large parts of the Slavic population in Kosovo, the deterioration of neighbourly and inter-ethnic relations in Kosovo coincided with his dismissal in 1966. In 1983, thousands of Serbs protested against the high degree of autonomy granted to the Albanians in the 1974 Yugoslav constitution, which exposed them as an ethnic group to the threat of being pushed out of Kosovo by the Albanians.

In 1986, following a petition against "Albanian nationalism and separatism" signed by 2,000 Serbs, a group of about one hundred Serbs from Kosovo marched to Belgrade and complained to the leadership of Serbia and Yugoslavia about continuing discrimination and the difficult living situation of Serbs in Kosovo. Following the pattern of this "March to Belgrade", many marches were organized in the period that followed and were the focus of media coverage.

Out of dissatisfaction with the situation in Yugoslavia, Serbian academics wrote the SANU Memorandum between 1982 and 1986, in which they called for greater consideration of Serbian interests. This explicitly blamed the Kosovo Albanians for Serbia's perceived plight, lamenting a "genocide against the Serbs in Kosovo". Slobodan Milošević, who had been party leader of the Union of Communists of Serbia since 1986 and president of the constituent republic of Serbia from 1989, used the national reservations to expand his own power and to systematically strengthen Serbia within Yugoslavia.

Organized mass demonstrations ("meetings") beginning in mid-1988 in Vojvodina, Serbia, and Montenegro, such as the one in Belgrade on 19 November 1988 with 350,000 to 1.3 million participants, generated increasingly nationalistic public pressure that became a major feature of politics in 1988 and 1989. Within this framework, in October 1988, Kosovo Albanian party officials Fadil Hoxha, Azem Vllasi, and Kaqusha Jashari, in addition to Kosovo Serbian, were removed from their posts and replaced with politicians considered loyal to Milošević in order to be able to push through the desired constitutional amendment to downgrade autonomy. Against the removal of the politicians, Kosovo Albanians organized strikes and demonstrations demanding the retention of the 1974 constitution.

However, this was contrasted with the "Meeting of the meetings" in Belgrade on 26 February 1989, a huge mass demonstration with media coverage, which called for rigorous action in Kosovo. Mass popular protests led to the overthrow of the political leadership in the Serbian Autonomous Province of Vojvodina on 5 October 1988 and in the Yugoslav Republic of Montenegro, which was suffering particularly from mismanagement, on 11 January 1989. Politicians close to Milošević took over the leadership there.

In February 1989, the Serbian parliament approved by-laws to the Serbian constitution that gradually limited Kosovo's autonomy. There were violent protests against this, including a hunger strike by miners in Trepča followed by a general strike and solidarity rallies with the striking miners. As a result of the protests, a state of emergency was imposed on the province of Kosovo on 1 March 1989 and troops were deployed. In this environment, on 23 March, the Kosovo Provincial Parliament approved the de facto dissolution of the province's autonomy, which was followed by civil unrest that was bloodily put down, with 140 people reportedly killed, according to Amnesty International. Following the closure of the University of Priština and the closure of Albanian clubs, thousands of Kosovo Albanians emigrated because of their social discrimination.

In the summer of 1989, the economic situation improved significantly in terms of industrial production, exports and debt repayment. However, inflation, which directly affected the population, could not be curbed and strikes broke out. In September 1989, Slovenia, which was economically better off, enshrined in its new constitution the right to leave the Yugoslav state. The reasons discussed in the press were, on the one hand, that Slovenia wanted to protect itself from constitutional changes such as those made in Kosovo and, on the other hand, that it had no interest in co-financing Serbian policy in Kosovo without having a say in it. As a result, tensions between Slovenia and Serbia escalated into an economic war from December 1989.

In July 1990, Slobodan Milošević had Kosovo's parliament and government dissolved as part of the so-called anti-bureaucratic revolution.

In March 1991 there were organized Kosovar Albanian mass demonstrations in Priština, which were again brutally put down, with "thousands [...] arrested, possibly hundreds killed" according to the historian and chairman of the Anglo-Albanian Association, Noel Malcom. In September 1991, after a secret referendum held by the Albanian side, the "Republic of Kosova" was proclaimed, recognized only by Albania. In 1992 the Kosovo Albanians elected the writer and pacifist Ibrahim Rugova, who called his ethnic group to the passive resistance, to the president of their republic. The parliament, which had also been elected, was unable to convene, so the government appointed by Rugova had to conduct its official business from exile.

Development and consequences of the Yugoslav Wars

Parallel to the situation in Kosovo, which for a long time still appeared relatively stable, the short war in Slovenia and the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which lasted several years, took place during the disintegration of Yugoslavia and were accompanied by extensive "ethnic cleansing" and war crimes such as the massacre in Srebrenica.

In the end, the EC, the CSCE/OSCE and the UN had not solved the problem of dealing with the parties involved in the conflict and with the armed conflicts and had not established themselves as peacemaking bodies.

A turning point came when the USA intervened in the Bosnian war and with it NATO, which had fallen into a crisis of orientation and legitimacy after the end of the Cold War and was trying to give itself a new security policy remit. In contrast to the EC, the USA clearly placed the blame on the Serbian side. The high stringency of its threat and execution of military force against the Bosnian Serbs gave the USA an enhanced reputation as an interventionist power with the ability to assert itself.

Examples of this strategy of bringing about a political solution to the conflict through massive military intervention are the NATO air strikes (Operation Deliberate Force) against Bosnian Serb troops after the Srebrenicamassacre in 1995, which were coordinated with the UN and led to the Dayton Agreement. The components of threat of force, swift and decisive action, unambiguous determination of a culprit in the conflict, and American dominance became a paradigm of Western crisis intervention in the Yugoslav crisis. With the onset of escalation in the Kosovo conflict in 1997, the West quickly resorted to this intervention paradigm for the supposed resolution of the crisis. However, the conditions of the conflict in Kosovo were in many ways seriously different from those in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Particularly serious was the fact that NATO acted in Kosovo without a mandate from the UN Security Council as a self-appointed and autonomous intervention force. In the absence of legitimacy under international law, a new doctrine of "humanitarian intervention" was created. According to this doctrine, NATO justified its war in violation of international law by referring to a moral obligation to avert an imminent "humanitarian catastrophe".

Developments in Kosovo since 1996

Most Kosovo Albanians boycotted the Serbian parliamentary elections in September and October 1997, and there were serious clashes with the Serbian police in Kosovo. In the presidential and parliamentary elections of the "Republic of Kosova" in 1998, Rugova was confirmed as president. Their peaceful resistance in Kosovo appeared for the Kosovars concerned in contrast to the fight of the Bosnians and the Croats against the militarily superior Yugoslavia, and/or against regional Serb war parties supported by it, in which the west had finally intervened after long hesitation, however, increasingly unsuccessful. Bosniaks and Croats were also granted territories and state independence from Yugoslavia in the Dayton Agreement, while little changed in Kosovo.

In 1996, the UÇK, which was led from Switzerland, assumed responsibility for attacks which at that time were considered by the majority of Albanians to be provocations by the Serbian administration. The underground organization UÇK maintained early ties to "Western" governments and also operated within the framework of so-called "human rights organizations". For example, the leading UÇK representative Shaban Shala, who traveled to Albania in 1996 together with another senior UÇK representative, Azem Syla, for a meeting with British, U.S. and Swiss intelligence officers, was also a leading member of the "Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedom". In Kosovo, the UÇK apparently relied on a loose connection of local units, mainly in the Drenica region and in the Đakovica region.

In the spring of 1996, the UÇK began to engage in armed struggle and undertook operations in Kosovo against state institutions and the civilian population. With attacks such as those on a Serbian refugee home in February 1996 and on Serbian cafés, it spread terror among the civilian population through acts of violence, following the pattern of terrorist organizations, in order to achieve political goals. Since 1997, the UÇK has also targeted suspected and actual collaborators among the population. In February 1996, when approximately 16,000 Serbs expelled from Croatia were settled in Kosovo or housed in refugee camps, mostly against their will, the LKÇK also carried out bomb attacks on Serb refugee camps. On 28 November 1997, the Albanian national holiday, the UÇK made its first public appearance at the funeral of an Albanian teacher who had died under unexplained circumstances.

In the 1998 German report on the protection of the constitution, the UÇK was classified as "operating as a terrorist in its homeland".

1981: Ethnographic starting position in Kosovo at the time of increasing nationalist polarization