...In 1912 the Serbian army took back control over Kosovo from Turkey .... .hence the current Balkan issues between the Serbs and (Moslem) Albanians in Kosovo.....
[Serbs made up] 10.9% of population in 1991.. in 1979 the average per capita income was $795.
Kosovo under Serbian rule (1990–1996). Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević….political changes were ratified in a 5 July 1990 referendum across the entire republic of Serbia, including Kosovo; although most Albanians boycotted it, the result was a foregone conclusion given the much greater population of Serbia proper.....
The impact on Kosovo was drastic. The abolition of its autonomy ..its assembly and government being formally disbanded. .....The only Albanian-language newspaper, Rilindja, was banned and TV and radio broadcasts in Albanian ceased. .. Pristina University, seen as a hotbed of Albanian nationalism, was purged: 800 lecturers at Pristina University were sacked and 22,500 of the 23,000 students expelled. Some 40,000 Yugoslav troops and police replaced the original Albanian-run security forces. A punitive regime was imposed that was harshly condemned as a "police state". Poverty and unemployment reached catastrophic levels, with about 80% of Kosovo's population becoming unemployed…..
The slide to war (1996–1998). ...increasing frustration among the Albanian population of Kosovo. The status of Kosovo was not addressed by the 1995 Dayton Accords which had ended the war in Bosnia, and Rugova's pleas for a United Nations peacekeeping force for Kosovo had fallen on deaf ears.
Continuing Serbian repression had radicalised many Albanians, some of whom decided that only armed resistance.. etc. 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 nature of the KLA was at first highly mysterious. In fact it was initially a small, mainly clan-based but not very well organised group of radicalised Albanians, many of whom came from the Drenica region of western Kosovo. The KLA at this stage consisted mainly of local farmers and displaced and unemployed workers.
...Most Albanians saw the KLA as legitimate "freedom fighters" whilst the Yugoslav government called them terrorists attacking police and (Serbian) civilians. Although the US envoy Robert Gelbard referred to the KLA as terrorists, he later admitted that they were never legally classified as a terrorist organisation by the US government. [6] [7] [8] Shortly after making his claims that the KLA were terrorists, Robert Gelbard was removed from his position as special envoy to Kosovo.
...declarations from European powers demanding that Serbia solve the problem in Kosovo. …..All of a sudden, KLA attacks intensified, … ..
Despite some accusations of summary executions and killings of civilians, condemnations from Western capitals were not as voluble as they would become later, so Serb police went straight after Jashari and his followers in the village of Donje Prekaz. A massive firefight at the Jashari compound led to the deaths of 60 Albanians, of which eighteen were women and ten were children under the age of sixteen[11]. This March 5 event caused massive condemnation out of Western capitals, including Madeleine Albright's declaration that "this crisis is not an internal affair of the FRY". The KLA had their security guarantee and all bets were off.
On the 24th of March, Serbian forces surrounded the village of Glodjane, in the Dukagjin operational zone, and attempted to do to the Haradinaj family exactly what they had done to the Jasharis; wipe them out, down to the last child[12],[13]. Despite their use of helicopter gunships, and a firefight that lasted until nightfall, the Serbian forces were thwarted in their attempts. ..
...During this time, the Yugoslav President Milosevic made an arrangement with Boris Yeltsin of Russia to stop offensive operations and prepare for talks with the Albanians, ....Meanwhile, Richard Holbrooke showed up and had his picture taken with the KLA. This confirmed to the KLA and its supporters, and to observers in general that the US was decisively backing the KLA.
Through June and into mid July, the KLA maintained its advance.
...These offensives led to talk of a new Srebrenica Massacre possibly taking place. During the late August offensive, there were reports of men separated from a group of prisoners in central Kosovo. .....the threats [by international community] intensified once again but a galvanising event was needed. They got it on September 28 when the mutilated corpses of a family were discovered outside the village of Gornje Obrinje; the bloody doll from there became the rallying image for the ensuing war.
....October 25, 1998. A large contingent of unarmed OSCE peace monitors (officially known as verifiers) moved into Kosovo. Their inadequacy was evident from the start. They were nicknamed the "clockwork oranges" in reference to their brightly coloured vehicles (in English, a "clockwork orange" signifies a useless object.)
...KLA attacks and Serbian reprisals continued throughout the winter of 1998–1999, culminating on January 15, 1999 with the Racak 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 MiloÅ¡ević and his top officials. The details of what happened at Racak are still controversial. ...
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". While this was most obviously a threat to the MiloÅ¡ević government, it also included a coded threat to the Albanians: any decision would depend on the "position and actions of the Kosovo Albanian leadership and all Kosovo Albanian armed elements in and around Kosovo." In effect, NATO was saying to the Serbs "make peace or we'll bomb you" and to the Albanians "make peace or we'll abandon you to the Serbs." ....
..The tilting of NATO towards the KLA organisation is chronicled in the BBC Television "MORAL COMBAT : NATO AT WAR" program. This happened despite the fact that General Klaus Naumann (Chairman of NATO Military Committee) stated that Ambassador Walker stated in the NAC (North Atlantic Council) that the majority of violations was caused by the KLA.
…...... MiloÅ¡ević had decided to call NATO's bluff …., believing that the alliance would either not make good on its threat or would do no more than launch a few pinprick raids that could easily be absorbed. Perhaps most fundamentally, MiloÅ¡ević appears to have calculated that he had more to lose by making peace than waging war ”” although the KLA threat had not yet been eliminated, its defeat was nonetheless just a matter of time, to his mind, in the face of the far more powerful Serbian and Yugoslav security forces.
Critics of the Kosovo war have claimed that the Serbian refusal was prompted by unacceptably broad terms in the access rights proposed for the NATO peacekeeping , etc
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….NATO's bombing campaign lasted from March 24 to June 11, 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, despite publicly opposing the war. Over the ten weeks of the conflict, NATO aircraft flew over 38,000 combat missions. For the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) it was the first time it had participated in a conflict since World War II; two German Tornado pilots became the first prisoners of war in this conflict on 27 March 1999. ........ Propaganda terms "humanitarian bombing" and "humanitarian war" were employed by the politicians.
….. By April, the United Nations was reporting that 850,000 people ”” the vast majority of them Albanians ”” had fled their homes.
The cause of the refugee exodus has been the subject of considerable controversy, not least because it formed the basis of United Nations war crimes charges against Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević and other officials responsible for directing the Kosovo conflict. The Yugoslav side .. 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. ... etc.