Kosovo War
The Kosovo War (Albanian: Lufta e Kosovës, Serbian: Косовски рат, Kosovski rat) was an armed conflict in Kosovo that lasted from 28 February 1998 until 11 June 1999.[57][58][59] It was fought between the forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (i.e. Serbia and Montenegro), which controlled Kosovo before the war, and the Kosovo Albanian separatist militia known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The conflict ended when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervened by beginning air strikes in March 1999 which resulted in Yugoslav forces withdrawing from Kosovo.
"Kosovo crisis" redirects here. For the crises in North Kosovo, see North Kosovo crisis.
The KLA was formed in the early 1990s to fight against the discrimination of ethnic Albanians and the repression of political dissent by the Serbian authorities, which started after the suppression of Kosovo's autonomy by Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević in 1989.[60] The KLA initiated its first campaign in 1995, after Kosovo's case was left out of the Dayton Agreement and it had become clear that President Rugova's strategy of peaceful resistance had failed to bring Kosovo into the international agenda.[61] In June 1996, the group claimed responsibility for acts of sabotage targeting Kosovo police stations, during the Kosovo Insurgency.[62][63] In 1997, the organisation acquired a large amount of arms through weapons smuggling from Albania, following a rebellion in which weapons were looted from the country's police and army posts. In early 1998, KLA attacks targeting Yugoslav authorities in Kosovo resulted in an increased presence of Serb paramilitaries and regular forces who subsequently began pursuing a campaign of retribution targeting KLA sympathisers and political opponents;[64] this campaign killed 1,500 to 2,000 civilians and KLA combatants, and had displaced 370,000 Kosovar Albanians by March 1999.[65][66]
On 20 March 1999, Yugoslav forces began a massive campaign of repression and expulsions of Kosovar Albanians following the withdrawal of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) and the failure of the proposed Rambouillet Agreement.[65][67] In response to this, NATO intervened with an aerial bombing campaign that began on March 24, justifying it as a "humanitarian war".[68] The war ended with the Kumanovo Agreement, signed on 9 June 1999, with Yugoslav and Serb forces[69] agreeing to withdraw from Kosovo to make way for an international presence. NATO forces entered Kosovo on June 12.[70][71] The NATO bombing campaign has remained controversial.[72] It did not gain the approval of the UN Security Council and it caused at least 488 Yugoslav civilian deaths,[73] including substantial numbers of Kosovar refugees.[74][75][76]
In 2001, a UN administered Supreme Court based in Kosovo found that there had been a systematic campaign of terror, including murders, rapes, arsons and severe maltreatments against the Albanian population, but that Yugoslav troops had tried to force them out of Kosovo, but not to eradicate them, and therefore it was not genocide.[77] After the war, a list was compiled which documented that over 13,500 people were killed or went missing during the two year conflict.[78] The Yugoslav and Serb forces caused the displacement of between 1.2 million[79] and 1.45 million Kosovo Albanians.[80] After the war, around 200,000 Serbs, Romani, and other non-Albanians fled Kosovo and many of the remaining civilians were victims of abuse.[81][82][83]
The Kosovo Liberation Army disbanded soon after the end of the war, with some of its members going on to fight for the UÇPMB in the Preševo Valley[84] and others joining the National Liberation Army (NLA) and Albanian National Army (ANA) during the armed ethnic conflict in Macedonia,[85] while others went on to form the Kosovo Police.[86]
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) convicted six Serb/Yugoslav officials and one Albanian commander for war crimes.
Democratic League of Kosovo and FARK
The Democratic League of Kosovo (DLK) led by Ibrahim Rugova had been the leading political entity in Kosovo since its creation in 1989. Its parallel government in exile was led by Bujar Bukoshi, and its Minister of Defence until 1998 was the former Yugoslav colonel Ahmet Krasniqi.[250] DLK politicians opposed the armed conflict and were not ready to accept KLA as a political factor in the region and tried to persuade the population not to support it.[251] At one point Rugova even claimed that it was set up by Serbian intelligence as an excuse to invade,[252] or to discredit DLK itself.[253] Nevertheless, the support for KLA even within DLK membership and specifically in the diaspora grew, together with the dissatisfaction with and antagonism toward DLK.[254] KLA initial personnel were members or former members of the DLK.[253][255] With the changes of the international stance towards KLA and its recognition as a factor in the conflict, DLK's position also shifted. The Armed Forces of the Republic of Kosovo, known as FARK, were established in order to place DLK as a military factor in addition to a political one. A parallel paramilitary structure such as FARK was not received well by the KLA.
On 21 September 1998 Ahmet Krasniqi was shot in Tirana.[256] Those responsible were not found, although several theories emerged. The Democratic Party of Albania and its leader Sali Berisha, strong supporters of DLK and FARK, accused SHIK and the Albanian government, which was supporting the KLA,[257] of being responsible.[256] FARK was never a determining factor in the war and was not involved in any battles. It did not number more than few hundred men, and it did not show any commitment to fighting the Serbs, accepting a broader autonomy as a solution rather than independence.[256] Some of the FARK officers were incorporated later under the KLA umbrella.[258] Besides FARK, DLK would also politically and diplomatically oppose KLA and their methods. In a meeting with US President Clinton on 29 May 1999,[259] Rugova, accompanied by Fehmi Agani, Bukoshi, and Veton Surroi, accused KLA of being a left-wing ideology bearer, and some of its leaders as being "nostalgic to known communist figures, such as Enver Hoxha",[260] referring to the People's Movement of Kosovo (LPK) nucleus of KLA,[261] an old underground rival with strong left-wing orientation.[262][263]
Rugova was present at the negotiations held in Rambouillet and supported the Rambouillet Agreement since the first round, but without any influence.[264] Following the ethnic cleansing of the Albanian population, there was close to a total Albanian support for the NATO campaign, including the DLK side. Surprisingly, Ibrahim Rugova showed up in Belgrade as a guest of Milosevic. At a joint TV appearance on 1 April,[265] ending in a Rugova-Milosevic handshake, Rugova asked for a peaceful solution and the bombings to stop.[266][267] In the same conference, Millosevic presented his proposal for Kosovo as part of a three-unit federal Yugoslavian state. Rugova's presence in Belgrade scattered another set of accusations from KLA and its supporters. Besides being 'passive' and 'too peaceful', Rugova and DLK were accused as 'traitors'.[268] Following Rugova's passage to Italy on 5 May, Rugova claimed that he had been under duress and any "agreement" with Milosovic had no meaning.[265] The general opinion expected the DLK structures and its leader to vanish from the political scene of Kosovo after the Yugoslav withdrawal. Rugova himself stayed out of Kosovo for several weeks, while the prime-minister Bukoshi and other leading membership returned. With only a fraction of Kosovo Albanians participating actively in the war, the support for DLK increased again as a way of opposing the arrogance of many KLA leaders who openly engaged in controlling the economical and political life within the vacuum created right before the deployment of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK).[269] In the October 2000 local elections, DLK was confirmed as the leading political party.[270]
The feud between KLA and DLK continued in the post-war Kosovo. Many political activists of DLK were assassinated and the perpetrators not found, including Xhemajl Mustafa, Rugova's most trusted aide.[270]
Casualties
Civilian losses
In June 2000, the Red Cross reported that 3,368 civilians (mainly Kosovar Albanians, but with several hundred Serbs, and Roma) were still missing, nearly one year after the conflict, most of whom it concluded had to be 'presumed dead'.[271]
A study by researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia published in 2000 in medical journal the Lancet estimated that "12,000 deaths in the total population" could be attributed to war.[272] This number was achieved by surveying 1,197 households from February 1998 through June 1999. 67 out of the 105 deaths reported in the sample population were attributed to war-related trauma, which extrapolates to be 12,000 deaths if the same war-related mortality rate is applied to Kosovo's total population. The highest mortality rates were in men between 15 and 49 (5,421 victims of war) as well as for men over 50 (5,176 victims). For persons younger than 15, the estimates were 160 victims for males and 200 for females.[273] For women between 15 and 49 the estimate is that there were 510 victims; older than 50 years the estimate is 541 victims. The authors stated that it was not "possible to differentiate completely between civilian and military casualties".
In the 2008 joint study by the Humanitarian Law Centre (an NGO from Serbia and Kosovo), The International Commission on Missing Persons, and the Missing Person Commission of Serbia made a name-by-name list of war and post-war victims. According to the updated 2015 Kosovo Memory Book, 13,535 people were killed or missing due to the Kosovo conflict, from 1 January 1998 up until December 2000. Of these, 10,812 were Albanians, 2,197 Serbs and 526 Roma, Bosniaks, Montenegrins and others. 10,317 civilians were killed or went missing, of whom 8,676 were Albanians, 1,196 Serbs and 445 Roma and others. The remaining 3,218 dead or missing were combatants, including 2,131 members of the KLA and FARK, 1,084 members of Serbian forces and 3 members of KFOR.[30] As of 2019, the book had been updated to a total of 13,548.[30] In August 2017, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that between 1998 and 1999, more than 6,000 people had gone missing in Kosovo, and that 1,658 remained missing, with neither the person nor the body having, at that time, been found.[274]
– Libyan Jamahiriya leader, Muammar Gaddafi opposed the campaign and called on world leaders to support Yugoslavia's 'legitimate right to defend its freedoms and territorial integrity against a possible aggression.'[339]
The Kosovo War had a number of important consequences in terms of the military and political outcome. The status of Kosovo remains unresolved; international negotiations began in 2006 to determine Kosovo's level of autonomy as envisaged under UN Security Council Resolution 1244, but efforts failed. The province is administered by the United Nations despite its unilateral declaration of independence on 17 February 2008.
The UN-backed talks, led by UN Special Envoy Martti Ahtisaari, had begun in February 2006. Whilst progress was made on technical matters, both parties remained diametrically opposed on the question of status itself.[365] In February 2007, Ahtisaari delivered a draft status settlement proposal to leaders in Belgrade and Pristina, the basis for a draft UN Security Council Resolution which proposes "supervised independence" for the province, which is in contrary to UN Security Council Resolution 1244. By July 2007, the draft resolution, which was backed by the United States, United Kingdom, and other European members of the Security Council, had been rewritten four times to try to accommodate Russian concerns that such a resolution would undermine the principle of state sovereignty.[366] Russia, which holds a veto in the Security Council as one of five permanent members, stated that it would not support any resolution which is not acceptable to both Belgrade and Priština.[367]
The campaign exposed significant weaknesses in the US arsenal, which were later addressed for the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. Apache attack helicopters and AC-130 Spectre gunships were brought up to the front lines but were never used after two Apaches crashed during training in the Albanian mountains. Stocks of many precision missiles were reduced to critically low levels. For combat aircraft, continuous operations resulted in skipped maintenance schedules, and many aircraft were withdrawn from service awaiting spare parts and service.[368] Also, many of the precision-guided weapons proved unable to cope with Balkan weather, as the clouds blocked the laser guidance beams. This was resolved by retrofitting bombs with Global Positioning System satellite guidance devices that are immune to bad weather. Although pilotless surveillance aircraft were extensively used, often attack aircraft could not be brought to the scene quickly enough to hit targets of opportunity. This led missiles being fitted to Predator drones in Afghanistan, reducing the "sensor to shooter" time to virtually zero.
Kosovo also showed that some low-tech tactics could reduce the impact of a high-tech force such as NATO; the Milošević government cooperated with Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime in Iraq, passing on many of the lessons learned in the Gulf War.[369] The Yugoslav army had long expected to need to resist a much stronger enemy, either Soviet or NATO, during the Cold War and had developed tactics of deception and concealment in response. These would have been unlikely to have resisted a full-scale invasion for long, but were probably used to mislead overflying aircraft and satellites. Among the tactics used were:
Military decorations
As a result of the Kosovo War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization created a second NATO medal, the NATO Medal for Kosovo Service, an international military decoration. Shortly thereafter, NATO created the Non-Article 5 Medal for Balkans service to combine both Yugoslavian and Kosovo operations into one service medal.[372]
Due to the involvement of the United States armed forces, a separate US military decoration, known as the Kosovo Campaign Medal, was established by President Bill Clinton in 2000.
The Kosovo Campaign Medal (KCM) is a military award of the United States Armed Forces established by Executive Order 13154 of President Bill Clinton on 3 May 2000. The medal recognises military service performed in Kosovo from 24 March 1999 through 31 December 2013.