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. It was fought between the forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), 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.
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 and other discriminatory policies against Albanians by Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević in 1989. 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 onto the international agenda. In June 1996, the group claimed responsibility for acts of sabotage targeting Kosovo police stations, during the Kosovo Insurgency. In 1997, the organization acquired a large quantity 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; this campaign killed 1,500 to 2,000 civilians and KLA combatants, and had displaced 370,000 Kosovar Albanians by March 1999.
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. In response to this, NATO intervened with an aerial bombing campaign that began on March 24, justifying it on humanitarian grounds. The war ended with the Kumanovo Agreement, signed on 9 June 1999, with Yugoslav and Serb forces agreeing to withdraw from Kosovo to make way for an international presence. NATO forces entered Kosovo on June 12. The NATO bombing campaign has remained controversial. It did not gain the approval of the UN Security Council and it caused at least 488 Yugoslav civilian deaths, including substantial deaths of Kosovar refugees.
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, and that Yugoslav troops had tried to force them out of Kosovo, but not to eradicate them and therefore it was not genocide. After the war, a list was compiled which documented that over 13,500 people were killed or went missing during the two year conflict. The Yugoslav and Serb forces caused the displacement of between 1.2 million and 1.45 million Kosovo Albanians. After the war, around 200,000 Serbs, Romani, and other non-Albanians fled Kosovo and there were reports of abuse directed against the remaining civilians.
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, some joining the National Liberation Army (NLA) and Albanian National Army (ANA) during the armed ethnic conflict in Macedonia, while others went on to form the Kosovo Police.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) convicted six Serb/Yugoslav officials and one Albanian commander for war crimes.
The modern Albanian-Serbian conflict has its roots in the expulsion of Albanians in 1877–1878 from areas that were incorporated into the Principality of Serbia. Muslim Albanians residing in the Sanjak of Niš were quickly expelled after Ottomans had lost control of the region. Modern estimates put the number of expelled Albanians to 50,000–130,000 Albanian refugees. As a result, some Albanian refugees who settled in Kosovo retaliated by attacking the local Serb population. From 1830 to 1876, there had also been a forced migration of up to 150,000 Albanians from the Principality. The conflict became more intense at the end of the 19th century, and in 1901 there were massacres of Serbs by Albanians in Ibarski Kolašin using weapons not handed back to the Ottomans following the Greco-Turkish War of 1897.
Tensions between the Serbian and Albanian communities in Kosovo simmered throughout the 20th century and occasionally erupted into major violence, particularly during the First Balkan War (1912–1913), World War I (1914–1918), and World War II (1939–1945). The Albanian revolt of 1912 in Kosovo resulted in the Ottoman Empire agreeing to the creation of an Albanian quasi-state but Ottoman forces were soon driven out by opportunistic Bulgarian, Serbian and Montenegrin troops. In the ensuing Balkan Wars, at least 50,000 Albanians were massacred in the present-day territory of Kosovo by the Serbian regular army and irregular Komitadjis with the intention of manipulating population statistics before the borders of Albania were recognized during the London Conference of 1912–1913, after the latter proposed the drawing of the borders of Albania based on ethnic statistics. Multiple historians, scholars, and contemporary accounts refer to or characterize the massacres as: localized genocide, extermination, genocide of Albanians or part of the wider genocide against Muslims.
After World War I Kosovo was incorporated into the Serb-dominated Kingdom of Yugoslavia despite the Albanian community's demands for union with Albania. Albanian rebels started the Drenica-Dukagjin Uprisings, which ended with the rebellion being crushed after the fall of the government of Fan Noli in Albania in December 1924 and the subsequent withdrawal of support for the Committee for the National Defence of Kosovo by President Zog. Between 1918 and 1939, Yugoslavia expelled hundreds of thousands of Albanians and promoted the settlement of mostly Serb colonists in the region, while Albanian language schools were prohibited. After the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, most of Kosovo was assigned to Italian-controlled Albania, with the rest being controlled by Germany and Bulgaria. During the occupation, Albanian collaborators persecuted Serb and Montenegrin settlers, with thousands killed and between 70,000 and 100,000 expelled from Kosovo or sent to concentration camps in order to Albanianize the province. The return of the expelled colonists was made next to impossible by a decree from Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito, followed by a new law in August 1945, which disallowed the return of colonists who had taken land from Albanian peasants.
Kosovo in Tito's Yugoslavia (1945–1980)
The end of World War II saw Kosovo returning to Yugoslav control. The new socialist government under Josip Broz Tito systematically suppressed nationalism among the ethnic groups throughout Yugoslavia, and established six republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina) as constituent parts of the Yugoslav federation. Tito diluted the power of Serbia – the largest and most populous republic – by establishing autonomous governments in the Serbian province of Vojvodina in the north and Kosovo in the south. Until 1963, the region was named the Autonomous Region of Kosovo and Metohija and in 1968 it was renamed to the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo.
The period of 1948–1963 in Kosovo was characterized by a brutal crackdown against Albanian nationalists by Aleksandar Ranković and his secret police (the UDBA). In 1955, a state of emergency was declared in order to quell unrest that had purportedly been instigated by terror groups from Albania. Following Ranković's ouster in 1966, Tito and his League of Communists Party granted more powers to republics and attempted to improve the political, social and economic situation in Kosovo. In November 1968, large-scale demonstrations took place in Kosovo which were quelled by Yugoslav forces, precipitated by Albanian demands for separate republics in Kosovo and Macedonia. Albanian students and intellectuals pushed for an Albanian-language university and greater representative powers for Albanians in both the Serbian and Yugoslav state bodies.