Kosovo Crisis (1999)

Kosovo Crisis (1999). In spring 1999, a major crisis erupted over Kosovo, the southernmost province of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, with the forces of Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic escalating a terrorist campaign to drive out the ethnic Albanian Muslim majority and ensure dominance of the historic region by the Serbian Orthodox Christian minority. When Milosevic had earlier revoked the province's semi‐autonomous status and begun the persecution, ethnic Albanians had protested, then formed a rebel terrorist group, the Kosovo Liberation Army, seeking independence. In early 1999, NATO sponsored talks between Kosovo Albanians and Serbs in Rambouillet, France, but although the Kosovo Albanians grudgingly accepted a proposed settlement for broad autonomy for the province for three years (with possible independence afterwards) and 28,000 NATO troops in Kosovo and Serbia to enforce it, the Serbs rejected it.

Milosevic increased his forces in Kosovo and began mass terrorism of the ethnic Albanian population, killing some inhabitants to frighten the rest and burning entire villages. NATO had already authorized the use of force, and on 23 March 1999, President Bill Clinton declared that military means were necessary to halt the Serbian aggression. The next day, NATO forces began an extensive air assault on targets in Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo, the majority of cruise missiles and bombs delivered from American planes and ships. It was the biggest allied military assault in Europe since World War II and NATO's first actual combat, but Serbian forces quickly continued to drive ethnic Albanian refugees—ultimately a million of them—from their homes into neighboring Macedonia, Montenegro, and Albania, as the Kosovo Crisis threatened to spread throughout the Balkans.

In the next ten weeks, NATO waged an escalating air war against military and other targets in Serbia and Kosovo, flying 35,000 missions, including 10,000 in which 23,000 bombs or missiles were dropped. Hampered by bad weather and political fears in the alliance, the air campaign started slowly and ineffectively, but over time, more aggressive bombing and the use of precision‐guided munitions enabled NATO to destroy numerous military targets as well as targets in the urban infrastructure, including ultimately electricity grids and water supplies. NATO estimated that at least 5,000 Yugoslavian soldiers and police were killed (Serbia said 600); in addition, perhaps 1,200 civilians died as a result of mistaken bombings of trains, hospitals, and most prominently, the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. NATO lost only two aircraft, one of them a Stealth fighter, but both American pilots were rescued. By the end of May, a ground offensive along the Kosovo borders by the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army dislodged many Serbian forces out of their hiding places, allowing NATO aircraft to destroy them. The civilian population in the Serbian cities was suffering deprivation from the bombings. Although the British government pressed for a ground attack, political opposition to the war grew within Italy, Greece, and Germany, and the resolve of the NATO alliance showed signs of weakening.

On 3 June 1999, responding to the deteriorating situation and pressed by Russian and Finnish envoys, Milosevic declared that he accepted an international peace plan aimed at ending the Kosovo conflict and allowing the ethnic Albanian refugees to return to what remained of their homes in Kosovo. Under its terms, all of the 40,000 Serbian military and police forces would withdraw rapidly from Kosovo which they did beginning 10 June, following another week of bombing, and some 50,000 foreign troops all under a United Nations flag—many of them, including an estimated 7,000 U.S. forces, from NATO and under NATO command—would move in to police the province. Independence for Kosovo was not part of the new proposal, instead there would be “substantial autonomy” to be decided by the UN Security Council. The sixteen‐member NATO alliance had held together long enough to force Milosevic to let the Kosovar refugees return, but what remained uncertain was the ultimate future of Kosovo as well as the long‐term use of NATO military forces in such wars and peacekeeping operations in the twenty‐first century.
[See also Bosnian Crisis.]

Bibliography

Traian Stoianovich , Balkan Worlds: The First and Last Europe, 1994.
Susan L. Woodward , Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War, 1995.
Miranda Vickers , Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo, 1998.
Greg Campell , The Road to Kosovo: A Balkan Diary, 1999.

John Whiteclay Chambers II