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:

The NATO bombing campaign

NATO's bombing campaign lasted from March 24 to June 10, 1999, involving up to 1,000 aircraft operating mainly from bases in Italy and aircraft carriers stationed in the Adriatic. Tomahawk cruise missiles were also extensively used, fired from aircraft, ships and submarines. The United States was, inevitably, the dominant member of the coalition against Serbia, although all of the NATO members were involved to some degree — even Greece, which played a crucial role despite publicly opposing the war. Over the ten weeks of the conflict, NATO aircraft flew over 38,000 combat missions.

Related Topics:
March 24 - June 10 - 1999 - 1,000 - Italy - Adriatic - Tomahawk - Cruise missile

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The proclaimed goal of the NATO operation was summed up by its spokesman as "Serbs out, peacekeepers in, refugees back". That is, Serbian troops would have to leave Kosovo and be replaced by international peacekeepers in order to ensure that the Albanian refugees could return to their homes. However, the summary had an unfortunate double meaning which caused NATO considerable embarrassment after the war, when over 200,000 Serbs and other non-Albanian minorities fled or were expelled from the province. A less official reason for the war was given by Madeleine Albright when she said, "What's the use of having the world's best military when you don't get to use them?", a remark which allegedly caused the U.S. Army Chief of Staff to question her sanity. It is also suggested that a small victorious war would help give NATO a new role.

Related Topics:
Serbs - Madeleine Albright

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The campaign was initially designed to destroy Serbian air defences and high-value military targets. It did not go very well at first, with bad weather hindering many sorties early on. NATO had seriously underestimated Milo?evi?'s will to resist: few in Brussels thought that the campaign would last more than a few days, and although the initial bombardment was more than just a pin-prick, it was nowhere near the concentrated bombardments seen in Baghdad in 1991 and 2003. On the ground, the fighting worsened and within a week of the war starting, over 300,000 Kosovo Albanians had fled into neighboring Albania and Macedonia, with many thousands more displaced within Kosovo. By April, the United Nations was reporting that 850,000 people – the vast majority of them Albanians – had fled their homes.

Related Topics:
1991 - 2003

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The cause of the refugee exodus has been the subject of considerable controversy, not least because it forms the basis of United Nations war crimes charges against Slobodan Milo?evi? and other officials responsible for directing the Kosovo conflict. The Serbian side and its Western supporters claimed that the refugee outflows were caused by mass panic in the Kosovo Albanian population, and that the exodus was generated principally by fear of NATO bombs. It was also alleged that the exodus was encouraged by KLA guerillas, and that in some cases the KLA issued direct orders to Albanians to flee. Many eyewitness accounts from both Serbs and Albanians identified Serbian security forces and paramilitaries as the culprits, responsible for systematically emptying towns and villages of their Albanian inhabitants. There were certainly some well-documented instances of mass expulsions, as happened in Pri?tina at the end of March when tens of thousands of people were rounded up at gunpoint and loaded onto trains, before being dumped at the Macedonian border. Other towns, such as Pe?, were systematically burned.

Related Topics:
United Nations - War crimes - Pe?

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German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer claimed that the refugee crisis had been produced by a Serbian plan codenamed "Operation Horseshoe". While the existence of a plan of that name remains controversial, the United Nations and international human rights organisations were convinced that the refugee crisis was the result of a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing. A postwar statistical analysis of the patterns of displacement, conducted by Patrick Ball of the American Association for the Advancement of Science http://shr.aaas.org/kosovo/pk/toc.html, found that there was a direct correlation between Serbian security force operations and refugee outflows, with NATO operations having very little effect on the displacements. There was other evidence of the refugee crisis having been deliberately manufactured: many refugees reported that their identity cards had been confiscated by security forces, making it much harder for them to prove that they were bona fide Yugoslav citizens. Indeed, since the conflict ended Serbian sources have claimed that many of those who joined the refugee return were in fact Albanians from outside Kosovo.

Related Topics:
Joschka Fischer - Operation Horseshoe - Ethnic cleansing - American Association for the Advancement of Science - Bona fide

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It is unclear what Milo?evi? may have hoped to achieve by expelling Kosovo's Albanian inhabitants. One possibility is that he wished to replace the Albanian population with refugee Serbs from Bosnia and Croatia, thereby achieving the "Serbianization" of the province. It is quite clear that NATO achieved a considerable moral advantage by the flight, whether desired or not. If so, if desired it was a great success, as it convinced NATO's member states populations that they had to win the conflict. Europe was already finding it hard to cope with previous waves of refugees and asylum seekers from the Balkans, and a further wave of refugees could have dangerously destabilised southeastern Europe. It is arguable that the war in Kosovo was not initially in the direct interests of the NATO states, but the refugee crisis made it so. The television pictures of thousands of refugees streaming across the border were an invaluable morale boost for NATO, making it much easier for the alliance to argue that "Serbian ethnic cleansing" was a greater evil than NATO bombardment.

Related Topics:
Bosnia - Croatia

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NATO military operations switched increasingly to attacking Serbian units on the ground — hitting targets as small as individual tanks and artillery pieces — as well as continuing with the strategic bombardment. This activity was, however, heavily constrained by politics, as each target needed to be approved by all nineteen members states. Montenegro was bombed on several occasions but NATO eventually desisted in order to prop up the precarious position of its anti-Milo?evi? leader, ?ukanovi?. So-called "dual-use" targets, of use to both civilians and the military, were attacked: this included bridges across the Danube, factories, power stations, telecommunications facilities and – particularly controversially – the headquarters of Yugoslavian Leftists, a political party led by Milo?evi?'s wife, and the Serbian state television broadcasting tower. Some saw these actions as violations of international law and the Geneva Conventions in particular. NATO however argued that these facilities were potentially useful to the Serbian military and that their bombing was therefore justified. The alliance also maintained that it tried very hard to avoid civilian casualties during its bombing campaign.

Related Topics:
Montenegro - ?ukanovi? - Dual-use - Danube - Yugoslavian Leftists - Geneva Conventions

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At the start of May, a NATO aircraft attacked an Albanian refugee convoy, believing it was a Serbian military convoy, killing around 50 people. NATO admitted its mistake 5 days later, but the Serbs accused NATO of deliberately attacking the refugees. On May 7, NATO bombs hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists and outraging Chinese public opinion. The United States and NATO later apologized for the bombing, saying that it occurred because of an outdated map provided by the CIA. This was challenged by a joint report from The Observer (UK) and Politiken (Denmark) newspapers http://www.guardian.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,2763,203214,00.html which claimed that NATO intentionally bombed the embassy because it was being used as a relay station for Yugoslav army radio signals. The bombing strained relations between China and NATO countries and provoked angry demonstrations outside Western embassies in Beijing.

Related Topics:
May 7 - CIA - The Observer - Beijing

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By the start of June, the conflict seemed little closer to a resolution and NATO countries began to think seriously about a ground operation — an invasion of Kosovo. This would have to be organised very quickly, as there was little time before winter set in and much work would have to be done to improve the roads from the Greek and Albanian ports to the envisaged invasion routes through Macedonia and northeastern Albania. At the same time, however, Finnish and Russian negotiators continued to try to persuade Milo?evi? to back down. He finally recognised that NATO was serious in its resolve to end the conflict one way or another and that Russia would not intervene to defend Serbia despite Moscow's strong anti-NATO rhetoric. Faced with little alternative, Milo?evi? accepted the conditions offered by a Finnish–Russian mediation team and agreed to a military presence within Kosovo headed by the UN, but incorporating NATO troops.

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