Kosovo War

The term Kosovo War or Kosovo Conflict is often used to describe two sequential and at times parallel armed conflicts (a civil war followed by an international war) in Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia, part of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. These conflicts were:

Consequences of the war

When the war ended on June 10, it left Kosovo in chaos and Yugoslavia as a whole facing an unknown future.

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Aftermath

The most immediate problem — the refugees — was largely resolved very quickly: 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. However, much of the remaining Serb population of Kosovo fled or was driven out by revenge attacks. Gypsies, Turks and Gorans were also driven out after being blamed by Albanians for siding with the Serbs. The Yugoslav Red Cross had 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). Kosovo's Serbian population was soon reduced by over 75%, with NATO apparently unable to provide much security to Serbs outside a few enclaves, most notably the northern town of Mitrovica and the surrounding countryside. Most Serbian refugees have been unable to return and NATO has not yet been able to provide returnees with security guarantees.

Related Topics:
UN High Commissioner for Refugees - Gypsies - Turks - Gorans - Red Cross - UNMIK - Enclave

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The war inflicted many casualties. Yugoslavia claimed that NATO attacks caused between 1,200 and 5,700 civilian casualties. Human Rights Watch counted a minimum of 500 civilian deaths in 90 separate incidents. NATO acknowledged killing at most 1,500 civilians. The majority of deaths appear to have been within Kosovo itself; there were up to 5,000 military casualties according to NATO estimates, while the Serbian figure is around 1,000. Large numbers of Albanian civilians were also killed, although the exact numbers are unclear. Early predictions of hundreds of thousands of deaths proved untrue, but in the months after the war some 2000 mostly Albanian bodies were dug up around Kosovo. Some alleged mass graves were also found in Serbia itself, on Yugoslav military bases or dumped in the Danube. The total number of Albanian dead is generally claimed to be around 10,000, although several foreign forensic teams were unable to verify more than a few hundred dead, and some of those appeared to be Serbs rather than Albanians. The largest mass grave so far found is in Dragodan, an Albanian suburb of Pri?tina. Those bodies so far identified are of Serbs, Gypsies and anti-KLA Albanians, some, or possibly all, of whom were alive when NATO moved in. One explanation is that some of the largest mass graves were cleared before the war's end in an apparent effort to obliterate potential war crimes evidence though it would be amazingly difficult to remove microscopic forensic evidence of the presence of so many bodies. Another explanation is that the whole story is a deliberate lie. Shortly after NATO started bombing the US State Department issued a claim the 500,000 Albanian men were "missing" and by implication dead. The International Red Cross compiled a list of over 3,000 missing Albanians. Most of them turned out to be prisoners transferred to Serbia, and have been released, although some 1,000 are reported to still be in Serbia today. Around 1,500 Serbian civilians were reported missing, believed dead.

Related Topics:
Human Rights Watch - State Department - International Red Cross

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Military effects

Military casualties on the NATO side were remarkably light — the alliance suffered no fatalities as a result of combat operations. The alliance reported the loss of three helicopters, 32 unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) and five aircraft — all of them American, including the first stealth plane (a F-117 Fighter Bomber) shot down by enemy fire. Several of these were lost in accidents and not by enemy action. The Yugoslav armed forces claimed to have shot down seven helicopters, 30 UAVs, 61 planes and 238 cruise missiles. However, these figures were not verified independently and have little support among non-Yugoslav analysts.

Related Topics:
Unmanned air vehicles - F-117

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Despite the heavy bombardment, NATO was surprised to find afterwards that the Yugoslav armed forces had survived in such good order. Around 50 Yugoslav aircraft were lost but only 13 tanks and armored vehicles — most of the targets hit in Kosovo were decoys, such as tanks made out of plastic sheets with telegraph poles for gun barrels. Anti-aircraft defences were preserved by the simple expedient of not turning them on, preventing NATO aircraft from detecting them but forcing them to keep above a ceiling of 15,000ft (5,000m), making accurate bombing much more difficult. Towards the end of the war, it was claimed that bombing by B-52 aircraft had caused huge casualties among Serbian troops stationed along the Kosovo–Albania border. Careful searching by NATO investigators found no evidence of any such large-scale casualties.

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A study by Spiegel and Salama, published in The Lancet, Vol 355, 24 June 2000, estimated "12 000 (95% CI 5500 18 300) deaths in the total population"

Related Topics:
24 June - 2000

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Military decorations

As a result of the Kosovo War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation created its first ever international military decoration, known as the NATO Medal. Eventually, two separate NATO Medals would be established for service in Yugoslavia and Kosovo.

Related Topics:
International military decoration - NATO Medal

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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.

Related Topics:
United States armed forces - U.S. military decoration - Kosovo Campaign Medal - Bill Clinton - 2000

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