The Kosovo War was a conflict which occurred towards the end of the Yugoslav Wars that occurred throughout the 1990s as Yugoslavia fragmented into six countries (later seven after Montenegro seceded from Serbia in 2006). Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia had all established their independence by the end of 1995, some peacefully and some through wars of varying degrees of severity, the worst being the Bosnian War. Kosovo remained a part of the Yugoslav rump state, now dominated by Serbia. The ethnic situation here was complicated by the intermixing of ethnic Serbs and Albanians. Beginning in 1995 an Kosovar Albanian insurgency began, one which eventually led to the Kosovo War early in 1998 as the Yugoslav government cracked down in an effort to retain control over the region. This lasted for nearly two years and eventually drew NATO in the conflict. Peace negotiations resulted in Kosovo becoming a self-governing part of Yugoslavia and it subsequently declared its independence in 2008. The Kosovo War created one of the last large scale humanitarian crises and refugee migrations of the twentieth century.[1]
The Kosovo War chronology of events
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia which emerged under the control of Josip Broz Tito and the Yugoslav communists in 1945 controlled much of the Balkans, specifically the region covered by the modern-day countries of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Kosovo and North Macedonia. Although there wasn’t a form of ultra-nationalism followed by Tito and his government, the Serbs had always held an unequal share of power within Yugoslavia, dominating other ethnic groups within the country such as the Croats, Slovenes, Bosniaks, Macedonians and Kosovar Albanians.[2]
This arrangement was held together between the 1940s and 1970s as Tito offered strong centralized leadership, but cracks began to show in the 1980s. Then, in the early 1990s, as the Cold War came to an end and revolutions occurred across Eastern Europe, the Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians and Bosniaks moved to release themselves from Serb domination. Macedonia seceded peacefully from Yugoslavia. Slovenia managed to become independent after a very brief conflict in 1991. Croatia’s war of independence with the government in Belgrade was more protracted between 1991 and 1995, but the worst conflict of all came in Bosnia. Here the Yugoslav government and ethnic Serbs in Bosnia resorted to ethnic cleansing and genocidal massacres in one of the worst conflicts in Europe since the Second World War.[3]
The situation in Kosovo, the mountainous region lying landlocked between Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Albania was more complicated. Where regions like Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia were dominated by ethnic Slovenes, Croats and Macedonians, Kosovo had a majority population of Kosovar Albanians, but also a substantial minority population of Kosovar Serbs, especially in the north in Mitrovica province. This made the Yugoslav government in Belgrade particularly determined to retain control over Kosovo even as the rest of the Federal Republic collapsed in the 1990s.[4] Nevertheless, in the course of 1995 and 1996 an insurgency conflict began in Kosovo as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began a guerilla war against the Yugoslav government with the goal of establishing an independent Kosovo dominated by ethnic Albanians. This eventually became a full scale war in the spring of 1998 after the KLA had obtained extensive arms supplies and the Yugoslav government responded by sending in a growing number of army divisions.[5]
The Kosovo War would last for 15 months, from February 1998 to June 1999. The initial Yugoslav crackdown became more and more violent in the course of 1998, leading to thousands of deaths and the displacement of over 350,000 Kosovar Albanians. After a fresh intensification in March 1999, the United States intervened and NATO began a bombing campaign against Belgrade designed to force the Yugoslav government of Slobodan Milosevic to desist from its course in Kosovo. This had the intended effect and on the 9th of June 1999 the Kumanovo Agreement was reached whereby Yugoslav forces withdrew from Kosovo and were replaced by NATO peacekeeping forces. Kosovo nominally remained part of Yugoslavia for several years to come, but declared its full independence in 2008. Tensions continue along the border region between Serbia and Kosovo to this day. There was extensive migration associated with the conflict, both in the shape of the refugee crisis which it created in 1998 and 1999, and in the form of the migration of the Serb minority from Kosovo in the years since.[6]
Extent of migration associated with the Kosovo War
Of the 2.2 million or so people who lived in Kosovo in 1997 on the eve of the outbreak of the full war, an estimated 1.3 million were displaced by the war, either internally or externally. Unsurprisingly, because of the ethnic affinity between the people of Kosovo and the country, a huge proportion of those who left Kosovo headed south-westwards over the border to Albania. Upwards of half a million Kosovans ended up in Albania temporarily. At the height of the refugee crisis in the spring of 1999, 4,000 Kosovans were recorded as crossing the border to Albania alone in just one hour. Ultimately tens of thousands of Kosovans ended up taking refuge in countries further afield. In the long run, the Kosovo War also led to the migration of tens of thousands of ethnic Serbs from Kosovo to Yugoslavia (later Serbia) after the war.[7]
Demographic impact of the Kosovo War
The democratic impact of the Kosovo War was clearly felt most keenly in Albania, with well over 100,000 refugees also arriving into Macedonia. Yet, many of those who crossed the border into these countries in 1998 and 1999, returned home once the war ended. Conversely, those who became refugees in other European countries during the conflict often ended up remaining in their country of refuge. Hence, one will find significant Kosovan communities today in countries like Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Turkey and Norway.[8]
The more long term impact has been the further dilution of the Serb minority within Kosovo. In the middle of the twentieth century, Serbs constituted nearly 20% of the population of the Kosovo region. This figure had already begun to decline significantly by the 1990s, with Serbs making up not much more than 10% of the population by the 1990s. Yet the concentration of these was greatest in the north and districts such as Mitrovica had a Serb majority in some places. This has been further diluted since, with many ethnic Serbs choosing to leave Kosovo and migrate north to Serbia. This has been compounded by anti-Serb policies followed by successive governments in Pristina, the Kosovan capital, since 1999. Serbs make up just an estimated 6% of the population of Kosovo today, with the number falling from around 145,000 in 2015 to just around 100,000 in 2024.[9]
See also
Explore more about the Kosovo War
- The Kosovo War: A Recapitulation on JSTOR
- A Kosovo Chronology on PBS
- Kosovo at the National Army Museum
References
- ↑ https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/kosovo
- ↑ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/karadzic/bosnia/yugopolitics.html
- ↑ Catherine Baker, The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s (London, 2015).
- ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/62382069
- ↑ Henry H. Perritt Jr., Kosovo Liberation Army: The Inside Story of an Insurgency (Champagn, Illinois, 2022).
- ↑ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/kosovo/etc/cron.html
- ↑ https://reliefweb.int/report/albania/here-come-kosovars-may-1999
- ↑ https://www.msf.org/kosovo-refugees-statistics
- ↑ https://www.crisisgroup.org/europe-central-asia/balkans/kosovo-serbia/toward-normal-relations-between-kosovo-and-serbia