Kosovo

Home > Places > Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and the Balkans > Former Yugoslavian Political Geography

Kosovo , Albanian Kosova, Serbian Kosovo i Metohija and Kosmet, officially Republic of Kosovo, republic (2002 est. pop. 1,900,000), 4,126 sq mi (10,686 sq km), SE Europe, a former province of Serbia that unilaterally declared its independence in 2008. Located on the Balkan Peninsula, it is bordered on the north and east by Serbia, on the south by Macedonia, and on the west by Albania and Montenegro. Prishtinë (Priština) is the capital and chief city.

Land, Economy, and People

Kosovo is largely mountainous, with the North Albanian Alps in the west, the Sar Mts. in the south, and the Kopaonik range in the west. Surrounded by the mountains are the fertile valleys of Kosovo and Metohija; the land is drained by the Drin, Ibar, and Južna Morava rivers. Agriculture, stock raising, forestry, and mining are the major occupations. There are rich deposits of lignite (brown coal), lead, nickel, zinc, and other minerals. Unemployment is very high, because of the disruptions caused by the end of Communist rule and the struggle for independence, and the economy is dependent on foreign aid.

Kosovo's population before 1999 was about 80% Albanian; ethnic Albanians now make up about 88% of the inhabitants. Serbs are the largest minority, concentrated especially in the north along the Ibar River. The Albanian, Serbian, Bosniak, and Turkish languages are spoken. The main religions are Islam (largely Albanians), the Serbian Orthodox church (largely Serbs), and the Roman Catholic church.

Government

Kosovo is governed under the constitutional framework of 2001, which was established by the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). UNMIK retains some authority in the country despite Kosovo's declaration of independence (which has not been recognized by the United Nations). The president, who is the head of state, is elected by the Kosovo Assembly to a five-year term. The government is headed by the prime minister, who is chosen by the Kosovo Assembly. Members of the 120-seat, unicameral Kosovo Assembly serve three-year terms; 100 members are directly elected, 10 seats are reserved for Serbs, and 10 seats are reserved for other minorities. Administratively, Kosovo is divided into 30 municipalities.

History

Anciently inhabited by Illyrians and Thracians, Kosovo was settled by the Slavs in the 7th cent. The region passed to Bulgaria in the 9th cent. and to Serbia in the 12th cent. From 1389, following the Turkish victory at Kosovo Field , to 1913, it was under Ottoman rule, and the Albanian and Turkish population greatly increased; by 1900 Albanians were the dominant ethnic group in the region. Partitioned in 1913 between Serbia and Montenegro, it was incorporated into Yugoslavia after World War I. Most of the region was incorporated into Italian-held Albania from 1941 to 1944. Following World War II, Kosovo became an autonomous region within Serbia. In 1990, demands for greater autonomy were rebuffed by Serbia, which rescinded Kosovo's autonomous status. Albanians were repressed and Serb migration into the region encouraged; in response Albanians pressed for Kosovo's complete independence.

Harsh Serbian repression and a breakdown in negotiations to settle the issue provoked NATO into attacking Serbia by air in Mar., 1999. Serbia responded by forcing hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians to flee Kosovo, creating an enormous refugee problem; perhaps 1.5 million Albanian Kosovars were expelled from their homes or fled. An estimated 7,000 to 10,000 Kosovars were killed by Serbian forces. An agreement resulted in the end of the bombing campaign and withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo in June, and NATO peacekeepers entered the province. Many Serbs fled; those that remain are largely in areas bordering Serbia.

In municipal elections in 2000, Ibrahim Rugova 's moderate independence party, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), won 60% of the vote; Serbs boycotted the polls. The 2001 elections for the provincial assembly, in which Rugova's party won 46% of the vote, saw greater Serb participation. Differences between Albanian parties delayed the formation of a government until Mar., 2002, when a power-sharing agreement led to the election of Rugova as president. Real power, however, resided with the UN adminstration that was imposed after NATO forces entered Kosovo.

The process of rebuilding was slow and marred by retaliatory Albanian attacks on Serbs and other non-Albanians. In Mar., 2004, there was a major outbreak of anti-Serb rioting that many observers believe was orchestrated to drive Serbs from areas of mixed population. Assembly elections in Oct., 2004, resulted in a plurality for Rugova's party, which formed a coalition government with Rugova as president. Kosovo's Serbs largely boycotted the vote.

Rugova survived an assassination attempt in Mar., 2005, but died of natural causes in Jan., 2006; the following month, Fatmir Sejdiu, a law professor and assembly deputy, was elected to succeed Rugova as president. In 2006 Serbia and Kosovo began discussing the province's final status. The vast majority of the Albanians favored independence, a solution rejected by Serbia, which adopted a new constitution in Nov., 2006, that called Kosovo an inalienable part of Serbia.

In Mar., 2007, after months of talks failed to yield a compromise, UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari presented a proposal for Kosovo's eventual independence to the UN Security Council. Serbia strongly opposed the plan, and Russia, a historical Serbian ally, called for an agreemeent acceptable to both sides, ensuring a veto on any proposal unacceptable to Serbia. Remarks by U.S. President Bush, during a 2007 visit to Albania, that Kosovo would eventually be independent provoked outrage from Serbia's government.

In the Nov., 2007, elections, the Democratic party (PDK) won a plurality; a coalition government, headed by Hashim Thaçi, was formed with the LDK. Sejdiu remained president. In Feb., 2008, Kosovo declared its independence; the action was not recognized by Serbia, and there were demonstrations—some violent—against the move by Serbs in Serbia and Kosovo. Serbia subsequently sought a de facto partition of Kosovo that would give it control over Serb-majority areas there. In June, Kosovo's constitution took effect; at the same, Serbs in N Kosovo established parallel government institutions. Some 16,000 NATO-led peacekeepers remain in Kosovo.

Bibliography

See S. K. Pavlowitch, The Albanian Problem in Yugoslavia (1982); N. Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (1998); M. Vickers, Between Serb and Albanian (1998); T. Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge (2000).

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

Kosovo A disputed territory claimed by Serbia and Albania, which both nationalities regard as central to their cultural identity: It was the birthplace of the first independent Serbian state, and the location where Serbia was beaten into submission by the Ottoman Empire in 1389. At the same time, it was the site where the Albanian hero Skaderberg held back the armies of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century. It was occupied by Serbia before World War I, after which the Albanian majority was discriminated against and repressed. Repression of Albanians increased after World War II, when the Serb-dominated secret police became much more effective. Kosovo's prospects improved with the dismissal of the hardline Minister of the Interior, Alexandar-Markko Rankovic, and in 1974 its distinctiveness was recognized in the new constitution, which gave it autonomous status.

Soon after Tito's death, the Albanian population staged a series of public protests against continued discrimination. The region was one of the poorest in the country, while the few spoils that there were usually went to Serbs. This injustice had become all the more glaring owing to shifts in the relative size of the populations, so that the Serbian minority had decreased from around 30 per cent in 1946 to 10 per cent in the late 1980s, as a result of higher Albanian birth rates and Serbian emigration to Serbia. After renewed demonstrations in 1989, the little autonomy that had remained since 1981 was taken away, and it was fully integrated into Serbia. Unofficial elections were held in 1992, which Serbia refused to recognize. These were won by the Democratic League of Kosovo under Rugova. Tensions increased further during the Bosnian Civil War, as Serbs who fled from Croat-and Muslim-controlled areas were resettled in Kosovo, in a blatant attempt to strengthen Kosovo's ties to Serbia. New elections organized by the Albanian population in 1998 led to the acclamation of Rugova as Albanian President, but when he was sworn in by the Albanian parliament, it was dissolved by Serb police. In protest, the ‘Kosovo Liberation Army’ (UČK) took up armed resistance against the Serbs. In return, Serb army and police units moved in. However, they not only fought the UČK, but also carried out programmes of ethnic cleansing, as whole villages were butchered and buried in mass graves. As the situation escalated and reports of human rights violations surfaced, the US sprang into action.

Where the EU with its economic boycotts had been unsuccessful in bringing about change, NATO started a campaign against Serbia after its leader, Milošević, had refused to compromise. Between 24 March and 10 June 1999, a campaign of air strikes was conducted by NATO, and principally the US forces within it. Although there were a number of civilian casualties, targets were military, political (government offices), infrastructural (notably bridges over the Danube), and economic (affecting power supplies). Ultimately, the Serbs agreed to withdraw their forces. Sanctioned by the UN, KFOR was set up. This was composed of British, German, French, Italian, and US forces which each occupied a different sectors of Kosovo. Under these conditions, Albanians were encouraged to set up limited political institutions, and in 2000, the province's first elections at a local level were won by Rugova's party, the moderate Kosovan Democratic League, with an overwhelming majority. Rugova was also President of an interim administration, but this had only limited powers, as KFOR continued to hold the monopoly of power, with a particular mandate to prevent violence between the Albanian majority and the Serb minority in Kosovo.

Kosovo (or Kosovo Polje, the Field of Blackbirds) The site (in what is now SERBIA) of a decisive battle (28 June 1389) when the troops of the Serbs were defeated by an OTTOMAN force. Although the Serbs enjoyed early success and Sultan MURAD I was killed before battle commenced, his son BAYEZID I took command, and won the battle. Victory opened the way for Turkish invasion of central Europe. A second battle, between Hungarians and Turks took place nearby in 1448 at which MURAD II defeated the Hungarians. The Kosovo area was settled by Muslim Albanians during Ottoman rule.

In 1945 the area became an autonomous region of Yugoslavia. In 1990 it declared independence, but in response Serbia removed its autonomous status. Conflict between Albanian separatists and Serbian troops continued until 1998 when Serbian forces succeeded in driving out and killing huge numbers of Albanians. This prompted NATO to launch airstrikes against Serbia in 1999 and Serbia agreed to a ceasefire and to allow refugees to return.

Kosovo (Albanian: Kosova), Serbia/Serbia and Montenegro Dardania, Kosovo i Metohija A geographic, and predominantly Albanian‐populated, region under Serbian sovereignty—but, in effect, a European‐run colony or protectorate under UN administration since mid‐1999. Previously a Serbian province which enjoyed autonomy in 1974–90. In 1990 it declared independence and Serbia retaliated by abolishing its autonomous status. It declared its independence again in 1998 under the name of the Kosovo Republic, but this was not recognized internationally. The western half is called Metohija by the Serbs and was included in the name in 1946–71; it is derived from the Byzantine Greek metochia ‘land of the monasteries’. Kosovo i ‘and’ Metohija was sometimes shortened to Kosmet. The Albanian version of Dardania (modern Kosovo, south Serbia, and Macedonia) was Dardhë ‘pear’.

Kosovo Autonomous province in s Serbia; the capital is Pristina. Ottoman victory in the Battle of Kosovo Field (1389) broke the power of Serbia. In 1913, it was reclaimed by Serbia and was incorporated into Yugoslavia in 1929. After World War 2, it became an autonomous province of Serbia. In 1974, Kosovo was granted a degree of autonomy. In 1990, the 80% Albanian population demanded greater autonomy. Serbia responded by imposing direct rule. The violent suppression of demonstrations escalated into a full-scale war in 1999. NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia led to a Serbian withdrawal and the reinstatment of Kosovo's autonomous status. In 2002, Yugoslavia became Serbia and Montenegro. Kosovo officially became part of Serbia, but kept its autonomous status. Area: 10,887sq km (4205sq mi). Pop. (1998 est.) 2,222,000.

Kosovo Crisis (1999) the largest military assault in Europe since World War II, and NATO's first combat experience. Prompted by mistreatment of Albanians in the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo, NATO air assaults on Serbia begin March 24, 1999. After a ten-week air war comprising 35,000 missions that delivered 23,000 bombs, President Slobodan Milosevic accepted a Finnish- and Russian-brokered peace plan on June 3. Yugoslavia granted partial autonomy to Kosovo, but Milosevic retained his position.

Kosovo an autonomous province of Serbia bordering on Albania, the majority of whose people are of Albanian descent, and which in 1999 was subjected to ethnic cleansing by Serbian paramilitary forces, resulting in the bombing of Belgrade by Nato.

Kosovo •salvo •arvo, bravo, centavo, multum in parvo, octavo •Sarajevo •in vivo, relievo •ab ovo, de novo, Denovo, Porto Novo, Provo •Kosovo • servo