Kosovo War

The term Kosovo War or Kosovo Conflict is often used to describe two sequential and at times parallel armed conflicts in the Serbian province of Kosovo:


 * 1) 1996–1999: Conflict between Serbian and Yugoslav security forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an ethnic Albanian guerilla group.
 * 2) 1999: War between Yugoslavia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization between March 24 and June 10 1999,

Background
Tito's death on May 4, 1980 ushered in a long period of political instability, worsened by growing economic crisis and nationalist unrest. In Kosovo growing Albanian nationalism and separatism in response to persecution led to growing ethnic tensions between Serbs and Albanians.

In March 1989, Milošević announced an "anti-bureaucratic revolution" in Kosovo and Vojvodina, curtailing their autonomy. Milošević and his government claimed that the constitutional changes were necessary to protect Kosovo's remaining Serbs against harassment from the Albanian majority.

With Kosovo's Communist Party effectively broken up by Milošević's crackdown, the dominant Albanian political party position passed to the Democratic League of Kosovo, led by the writer Ibrahim Rugova. In September 1991, the shadow Kosovo Assembly organized a referendum on independence for Kosovo. The referendum achieved a 98% vote in favour of the creation of an independent "Republic of Kosovo". In May 1992, a second referendum elected Rugova as President of Kosovo. The Serbian government declared that both referendums were illegal and their results null and void.

The slide to war (1996–1998)
On April 22 1996, four attacks on Serbian civilians and security personnel were carried out virtually simultaneously in several parts of Kosovo. A hitherto unknown organization calling itself the "Kosovo Liberation Army" (KLA) subsequently claimed responsibility.

The U.S. held an "outer wall of sanctions" on Yugoslavia which had been tied to a series of issues, Kosovo being one of them. These were maintained despite the Dayton Agreement to end all sanctions. The Clinton administration claimed that Dayton bound Yugoslavia to hold discussions with Rugova over Kosovo.

In early April, Serbia arranged for a referendum on the issue of foreign interference in Kosovo. Serbian voters decisively rejected foreign interference in this internal affair. The KLA had claimed much of the area in and around Decani and ran a territory based in the village of Glodjane, encompassing its surroundings. So, on May 31, 1998, the Yugoslav army and the Serb Ministry of the Interior police began an operation to clear the border of the KLA. NATO's responsed to this offensive with Operation Determined Falcon.

All through June and into mid July, the KLA maintained its advance. In mid-July the KLA captured Orahovac. On the 17th of July 1998 in the two close by villages to Orahovac, Retimlije and Opteruša, all the Serb males were kidnapped and later found dead.

A new set of KLA attacks in mid-August triggered Yugoslavian operations in south-central Kosovo-Metohija south of the Pristina-Pec road. This wound down with the capture of Klecka on 23 August and the discovery of a KLA-run crematorium in which some of their victims were found.

The 1st of September featured a KLA offensive around Prizren, causing Yugoslavian military activity there. In Metohija, around Pec, another offensive caused condemnation as international officials expressed fear that a large column of displaced people would be attacked. This followed the fall of Donji Ratis where the KLA kept a mass grave; about 60 bodies were found there of recently "disappeared" Serbs and other Kosovo citizens.

In early mid-September, for the first time, some KLA activity was reported in northern Kosovo around Podujevo. Finally, in late September, a determined effort was made to clear the KLA out of the northern and central parts of Kosovo and out of the Drenica valley itself. During this time many threats were made by Western capitals but these were tempered somewhat by the elections in Bosnia. The other major issue for those who saw no option but to resort to the use of force was the estimated 300,000 displaced Albanians, 30,000 of whom were out in the woods, without warm clothing or shelter, with winter approaching.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Macedonia, Christopher Hill, was leading shuttle diplomacy between an Albanian delegation, led by Rugova, and the Yugoslav and Serbian authorities. It was these meetings which were shaping what was to be the peace plan to be discussed during a period of planned NATO occupation of Kosovo.

During a period of two weeks, threats intensified, culminating in NATO's Activation Order being given. Richard Holbrooke went to Belgrade with General Michael Short in the hope of reaching an agreeing with Milošević with regards to deploying a NATO presence in Kosovo. Discussions led to the Kosovo Verification Agreement on October 12, 1998.

Officially, the international community demanded an end to fighting. It specifically demanded that the Serbs end its offensives against the KLA{{fact}, whilst attempting to convince the KLA to drop its bid for independence. Moreover, attempts were made to persuade Milošević to permit NATO peacekeeping troops to enter Kosovo.

A ceasefire was brokered, commencing on October 25, 1998. A large contingent of unarmed OSCE peace monitors (officially known as verifiers) moved into Kosovo.

The ceasefire broke down within a matter of weeks and fighting resumed in December 1998 after the KLA occupied some bunkers overlooking the strategic Priština-Podujevo highway, not long after the Panda Bar Massacre, when the KLA shot up a cafe in Peć.

Račak incident


KLA attacks and Serbian reprisals continued throughout the winter of 1998–1999, culminating on January 15 1999 with the Račak incident. The incident was immediately (before the investigation) condemned as a massacre by the Western countries and the United Nations Security Council, and later became the basis of one of the charges of war crimes leveled against Milošević and his top officials. The details of what happened at Račak are still controversial.

NATO decided that the conflict could only be settled by introducing a military peacekeeping force under the auspices of NATO, to forcibly restrain the two sides. A set of diplomatic initiatives was announced simultaneously on January 30, 1999:


 * NATO issued a statement announcing that it was prepared to launch air strikes against Yugoslav targets "to compel compliance with the demands of the international community and [to achieve] a political settlement".


 * The Contact Group issued a set of "non-negotiable principles" which made up a package known as "Status Quo Plus"—effectively the restoration of Kosovo's pre-1990 autonomy within Serbia, plus the introduction of democracy and supervision by international organisations. It also called for a peace conference to be held in February 1999 at the Château de Rambouillet, outside Paris.

The Rambouillet Conference (January–March 1999)
The Rambouillet talks began on February 6, with NATO Secretary General Javier Solana negotiating with both sides. The Serbian delegation was led by then president of Serbia Milan Milutinović, while Milošević himself remained in Belgrade.

In the end, on 18 March, 1999, the Albanian, American and British delegation signed what became known as the Rambouillet Accords while the Serbian and Russian delegations refused. The accords called for NATO administration of Kosovo as an autonomous province within Yugoslavia; a force of 30,000 NATO troops to maintain order in Kosovo; an unhindered right of passage for NATO troops on Yugoslav territory, including Kosovo; and immunity for NATO and its agents to Yugoslav law.

While the accords did not fully satisfy the Albanians, they were much too radical for the Serbs, who responded by substituting a drastically revised text that even the Russians, traditional allies of the Serbs, found unacceptable. Among many other changes in the proposed new version, it eliminated the entire chapter on humanitarian assistance and reconstruction, removed virtually all international oversight and dropped any mention of invoking "the will of the people [of Kosovo]" in determining the final status of the province.



In the week before the start of NATO bombing, Željko Ražnatović appeared at the Hyatt hotel in Belgrade where most of Western journalists were staying and ordered all of them to leave Serbia.

The international monitors from the OSCE withdrew on March 22, for fear of the monitors' safety ahead of the anticipated NATO bombing campaign. On March 23, the Serbian assembly accepted the principle of autonomy for Kosovo and non-military part of the agreement. But the Serbian side had objections to the military part of the Rambouillet agreement, appendix B in particular, which it characterized as "NATO occupation". The following day, March 24, NATO bombing began.

Russian peacekeepers
Following the military campaign the Russians expected to have an independent sector of Kosovo{{fact}, only to be unhappy with the prospect of operating under NATO command. Without prior communication or coordination with NATO, Russian forces entered Kosovo from Bosnia and seized the Pristina airport. Eventually a deal was struck whereby Russian forces operated as a unit of K-FOR but not outside the NATO command structure.

Reaction to the war
The legitimacy of NATO's bombing campaign in Kosovo has been the subject of much debate. NATO did not have the backing of the United Nations Security Council because the war was opposed by permanent members, China and, in particular Russia, who had threatened to veto any resolution authorising force. NATO argued that their defiance of the Security Council was justified based on the claims of an "international humanitarian emergency".

Criticism was also drawn by the fact that the NATO charter specifies that NATO is an organization created for defence of its members, but in this case it was used to attack a non-NATO country which was not directly threatening any NATO member.

There was, however, criticism from all parts of the political spectrum for the way that NATO conducted the campaign. NATO officials sought to portray it as a "clean war" using precision weapons. The U.S. Department of Defense claimed that, up to June 2, 99.6% of the 20,000 bombs and missiles used had hit their targets.

Targets of the NATO bombing campaign
The destruction of bridges over the Danube greatly disrupted shipping on the river for months afterwards, causing serious economic damage to countries along the length of the river. Industrial facilities were also attacked, damaging the economies of many towns.

Only state owned factories were targeted, leading many to suspect that the bombing campaign was partly designed to prepare the way for a free market-based reconstruction by wealthy foreign powers.

Perhaps the most controversial deliberate attack of the war was that made against the headquarters of Serbian television on April 23, which killed at least fourteen people. NATO justified the attack on the grounds that the Serbian television headquarters was part of the Milošević regime's "propaganda machine".

Civilians killed by NATO airstrikes
Yugoslavia claimed that NATO attacks caused between 1,200 and 5,700 civilian casualties. NATO acknowledged killing at most 1,500 civilians. Human Rights Watch counted a minimum of 488 civilian deaths (90 to 150 of them killed from cluster bomb use) in 90 separate incidents. Attacks in Kosovo overall were more deadly - a third of the incidents account for more than half of the deaths.

Civilians killed by Yugoslav ground forces
In August 2000 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) announced that it had exhumed 2,788 bodies in Kosovo, but declined to say how many were thought to be victims of war crimes. Earlier however, KFOR sources told Agence France Presse that of the 2,150 bodies that had been discovered up until July 1999, about 850 were thought to be victims of war crimes.

In June 2000 the Red Cross reported that 3,368 civilians (2,500 Albanians, 400 Serbs, and 100 Roma) were still missing, nearly one year after the conflict. Some of the missing civilians were re-buried in mass graves in Serbia-proper. In July 2001, the Serbian authorities announced the discovery of four mass graves containing nearly 1,000 bodies. The largest grave was found on a Serbian Police training ground in Batajnica just outside of Belgrade.

Although it far exceeds the 4,400 killings reported to human rights groups, statistical experts working on behalf of the ICTY prosecution estimate that the total number of dead is about 10,000. Their higher estimate was based on the controversial assumption that most people wouldn't report the killing or disappearance of a loved one.

The estimate of 10,000 deaths is also used by the U.S. State Department, which cited human rights abuses as its main justification for attacking Yugoslavia.

A study by the Lancet estimated "12,000 deaths in the total population." This number was achieved by surveying 1197 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.

Civilians killed by the KLA
According to a Serbian government report, from January 1 1998 to June 10 1999 the KLA killed 988 people and kidnapped 287; in the period from June 10 1999 to November 11 2001, when NATO took control in Kosovo, 847 were reported to have been killed and 1,154 kidnapped. This comprised both civilians and security force personnel: of those killed in the first period, 335 were civilians, 351 soldiers, 230 police and 72 were unidentified; by nationality, 87 of killed civilians were Serbs, 230 Albanians, and 18 of other nationalities.

NATO
Military casualties on the NATO side were light—according to official reports the alliance suffered no fatalities as a result of combat operations. However, in the early hours of May 5, an American military AH-64 Apache helicopter crashed not far from the border between Serbia and Albania.

After the war, the alliance reported the loss of the first U.S. stealth plane (a F-117 stealth fighter) ever shot down by enemy fire.

Yugoslavian military
The Yugoslav authorities claimed 169 soldiers were killed and 299 wounded. The names of Yugoslav casualties were recorded in a "book of remembrance".

NATO did not release any official casualty estimates.



Aftermath


Within three weeks, over 500,000 Albanian refugees had returned home. By November 1999, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 808,913 out of 848,100 had returned.

An estimated 200,000 Serbs fled Kosovo. The Yugoslav Red Cross had also registered 247,391 mostly Serbian refugees by November. The new exodus was a severe embarrassment to NATO, which had established a peacekeeping force of 45,000 under the auspices of the United Nations Mission In Kosovo (UNMIK).

Gypsies were also driven out after being harassed by Albanians. Since June 12, 1999, as many as 1,000 Serbs and Roma have been murdered or have gone missing as a result of KLA elements and possibly criminal gangs or vengeful individuals.

According to Amnesty International, the presence of peacekeepers in Kosovo led to an increase in the trafficking of women for sexual exploitation.

War crimes
Shortly before the end of the bombing, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević, along with Milan Milutinović, Nikola Sainović, Dragoljub Ojdanić and Vlajko Stojiljković were charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) with crimes against humanity including murder, forcible transfer, deportation and "persecution on political, racial or religious grounds".

Further indictments were leveled in October 2003 against former armed forces chief of staff Nebojša Pavković, former army corps commander Vladimir Lazarević, former police official Vlastimir Đorđević and the current head of Serbia's public security, Sreten Lukić. All were indicted for crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war. {{fact}

The ICTY also leveled indictments against KLA members Fatmir Limaj, Haradin Bala, Isak Musliu and Agim Murtezi, indicted for crimes against humanity. They were arrested on February 17–18, 2003. Charges were soon dropped against Agim Murtezi as a case of mistaken identity, whereas Fatmir Limaj was acquitted of all charges on 30 November 2005 and released. The charges were in relation to the prison camp run by the defendants at Lapusnik between May and July 1998.

On March 2005, a U.N. tribunal indicted Kosovo Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj for war crimes against the Serbs, on March 8 he tendered his resignation. Haradinaj, an ethnic Albanian, was a former commander who led units of the Kosovo Liberation Army and was appointed Prime Minister after winning an election of 72 votes to three in the Kosovo's Parliament in December 2004.

The Serbian government and a number of international pressure groups claimed that NATO had carried out war crimes during the conflict, particularly regarding the bombing of alleged dual-use facilities such as the Serbian TV headquarters in Belgrade. The ICTY conducted an inquiry into these charges. The tribunal has proclaimed that it has no mandate to press charges against NATO for war crimes against civilian population.

Military decorations
As a result of the Kosovo War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation 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.

Due to the involvement of the United States armed forces, a separate U.S. military decoration, known as the Kosovo Campaign Medal, was established by President Bill Clinton in the year 2000.