Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity | Kosovo

Kosovo was ineluctably tied to Serbia at the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389, wherein the victorious Muslim Turks left the dead for blackbirds to scavenge, according to Serbian folklore. Kosovo was then etched in Serbian ethno-religious consciousness as a place of Serbian torment and sacrifice, ushering in five hundred years of Turkish domination. The Battle of Kosovo marked the end of the Serbian empire. The Turks conquered Albania by 1468, but although most Albanians converted to Islam, they maintained their separate ethnic identity.

Ottoman rule was ending by 1878. Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, and Bulgaria amassed troops and finally succeeded in driving out the Ottoman forces in the Balkan Wars (1912–1913). The geographical extent of Albania was reduced at the behest of France and Russia, leaving more than half of the total Albanian population outside the borders of the diminished state, and placing the area of Kosovo within Serbia. The Serbian victors massacred entire Albanian villages, looting and burning anything that remained. European press reports estimated that Serbs killed 25,000 Albanians.

From the end of the Balkan Wars to World War II, Albanians lived under Serb domination. Their language was suppressed, their land confiscated, and their mosques were turned into stables, all part of an overt Serb policy designed to pressure Muslim Albanians to leave Kosovo. The cycle of revanchism (revenge-based conflict) continued when a part of Kosovo was united with Albania by Italian fascists during World War II and Albanian Nazi collaborators expelled an estimated forty thousand Serbs.

A postwar Constitution, adopted in 1946, defined Yugoslavia as a federal state of six sovereign republics. Kosovo was granted autonomy, allowing it to have representatives in the federal legislature yet keeping its internal affairs under Serbian control. In 1948, Yugoslavia broke away from Stalin's Russia, a move that pitted the Albanian Kosovars against the country of Albania, which was staunchly pro-Russian. Yugoslav and Albanian border guards clashed along the Albanian border, and the Yugoslav secret police intensified its persecution of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. As Serbs persecuted Albanian-Kosovars, the Kosovars harassed Serbs in turn.

Demographic studies from 1979 show that Albanian Kosovars had the highest population growth rate in Europe, especially in rural areas. Increasing numbers of young ethnic Albanians were under the age of 25 and unemployed, fueling dissent. When the President of Yugoslavia, Croat-born Marshall Tito, allowed an Albanian-language university to be established in Kosovo, it became the center of Albanian national identity. Following Tito's death in 1980, students demonstrated for better living conditions in 1981, inspiring construction and factory workers to take to the streets in protest throughout Kosovo.

Retribution was immediate and harsh. The Yugoslav army was sent to Kosovo, killing Albanians and arresting people for "verbal crimes," for which substantial prison sentences were imposed. The press, local governments, and schools were purged of the Albanians who held such jobs (most such employees were Serbs). At the same time, approximately 30,000 Serbs left Kosovo (according to Yugoslav government estimates), ostensibly because of Albanian retaliation. Critics, however, have suggested that the Serbs left for economic reasons. The Yugoslav government economic policy toward Kosovo was one of resource extraction. Wealth, in the form of minerals, was siphoned out of Kosovo for the benefit of the other republics, with very little ever coming back to the impoverished area.

In the mid-1980s Serb-Kosovars complained to the Yugoslav government that the escalating ethnic Albanian birthrate constituted a willful plot against the Serbs. Ethnic Albanian women stopped going to governmentrun hospitals to have babies, fearing that Serb doctors would kill their babies to reduce the birthrate. In 1987, Slobodan Milosevic attended a meeting in Kosovo during which a raucous crowd of Serbs tried to push their way in. Milosevic commanded the police to let "his" Serbs through, establishing himself as the savior of Serbs outside the borders of Serbia. Critics allege that the event was arranged in advance. After Milosevic was elected President of Serbia in 1990, Albanian police officers in Kosovo were suspended from their jobs and replaced with 2,500 Serb policemen imported from Belgrade.

In the spring of 1990, thousands of Albanian schoolchildren became sick and were hospitalized, and it was rumored that Serbs had poisoned them. When Albanian parents attacked Serb property in response, Milosevic immediately transferred another 25,000 police to the area. Serb police were allowed to keep Albanians in jail for three days without charges, and to imprison anyone for up to two months if they had been charged with insulting the "patriotic feelings" of Serbs. The conflict in Kosovo and the Serb annexation of the province in 1987 led to concerns in the other republics that Serbia was intending to transform Yugoslavia into "Greater Serbia." However, the pattern of revanchism in response to the mounting human rights abuses was broken when Albanians turned to passive resistance, following the model of non-violence espoused by Mahatma Gandhi.

The Serb war against Bosnia from 1992 to 1995 worsened the situation for Albanians in Kosovo. This time, Albanians suffered from the anti-Muslim fervor of Serbs and the hardships resulting from the economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations in response to the war. The Bosnian war ended with the negotiation of the Dayton Accords in 1995, but Kosovo was left out of the discussion. Disappointed Kosovars watched Western diplomats congratulate Milosevic on his peacemaking efforts. Albanian Kosovars continued their practice of passive resistance until 1997, when the country of Albania collapsed into chaos and Kosovo was flooded with weapons from across the border. The ethnic majority, Albanian Kosovars, now had access to weapons, a serious concern for the Serbs. Suspected members of the newly formed Kosovo Liberation Army were arrested and charged with "hostile association," a charge that was never denied.

A Serb policeman was murdered in 1998, prompting a police attack on a village in which one hundred Albanians were killed. Further massacres of Albanians continued to fuel the mobilization of the Kosovo Liberation Army. As Muslim refugees streamed into Albania, Serbs lined the borders with landmines. An estimated 270,000 Albanians fled to the hills of Kosovo. In the fall of 1998, NATO authorized air strikes against Serb military targets and Milosevic agreed to withdraw his troops. By the winter of 1998, however, the United States was proclaiming that Serbs were committing "crimes against humanity" in Kosovo.

Negotiations to offset the looming humanitarian disaster and end the alleged Serb crimes were fashioned in Rambouillet, France, in early 1999. The peace plan proposed by the United Nations was rejected by both Serbs and Albanian Kosovars. The political blueprint called for NATO troops to be placed in Kosovo to over-see peace and protect the combatants from each other, but Serbia rejected the presence of foreign troops on its soil. A United Nations force, similar to the peacekeepers in Bosnia might have been accepted, but the West insisted on a NATO force. The ostensible reason for this insistence was that the West wanted to avoid a replay situation that occurred in Bosnia. There, the peacekeepers were forced to stand by idly and watch Bosnian women and children be killed. For their part, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) refused to comply with the Rambouillet mandate that they disarm. There had been too many instances in Bosnia, they argued, where Muslims disarmed and put themselves under the protection of the United Nations, only to be murdered by Serbs. This had occurred in Srebenica in 1995, when approximately seven thousand boys and old men were murdered by Serbs while in a United Nations designated safe-haven.

With the negotiations stalled, Serbia sent 40,000 troops to the border of Kosovo, exploiting the break in diplomacy to further what appeared to be preparations for an all-out occupation of Kosovo. Fearing a blood bath, knowing the far superior military strength of the Serb army, and with knowledge of the atrocities committed in Bosnia, the Albanians agreed to the stipulations of the Rambouillet treaty. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians were hiding in the winter hills, thousands more were displaced, and over 2,000 civilians had been killed. The KLA signed the treaty. NATO threatened Serbia with bombing if it refused to sign, but NATO had made such threats before, and the powers in Belgrade had no reason to believe action would be taken against them this time. Despite the NATO rhetoric, they refused.

NATO began bombing strategic targets in Kosovo on March 24, 1999, in response to Serbia's "Operation Horseshoe." Fanning out into the region in a pattern that took on the shape of a horseshoe, Serb soldiers went village-to-village, killing and burning, forcing those who could to run for their lives. To many, it looked as if the NATO bombings caused the extraordinary events that followed. Within three days of the bombing, 25,000 Albanian Kosovars were fleeing in terror. Within weeks 800,000 were fleeing. Serbian border guards took their identification papers and money, destroying any proof they ever existed.

Televised satellite technology yielded pictures of mass graves. Serbs then moved the remains and burned their victims, leaving the victims' families with no way of knowing what had happened to their missing relatives. A common means of disposal was to throw bodies into a well or water supply, rendering the water undrinkable. Cultural monuments and Islamic religious sites were destroyed. Reports estimated that up to 20,000 rapes and sexual assaults were committed against Albanian women. Albanian residents in Mitrovica were expelled, their houses and mosques burned, and women were sexually assaulted during attacks beginning on March 25, 1999. Albanians in other areas, most notably Pristine, were also expelled or killed, and women here, too, were sexually assaulted.

By May 20, 1999, one-third of the Albanian population had been expelled from Kosovo. The refugee crisis overwhelmed Macedonia and Albania, threatening to undermine the weak economies of both countries and flood the rest of Europe with refugees and asylum seekers from Kosovo. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, convened to prosecute war crimes in Bosnia, indicted Milosevic for crimes against humanity in Kosovo on May 27, 1999, and NATO escalated its air strikes. With questionable legality, NATO bombed the capital of Serbia, Belgrade, accidentally including in its targets a maternity hospital and the Chinese embassy. On June 2, 1999, Milosevic capitulated to the terms of NATO, and within ten days, Serb troops began pulling out of Kosovo. Between mid-June, when the NATO troops were deployed, and mid-August, 1999, more than 755,000 Kosovars returned to Kosovo.

The situation was reversed for the Serbs. There were an estimated 20,000 Serbs in Pristina, Kosovo, before the NATO bombing. By mid-August, the United Nations High Commission of Refugees reported only 2,000 Serbs left in the capital city, and increasingly violent attacks on the Serb population by Albanian Kosovars were on the rise. Albanian Kosovars used the same tactics that Serbs had used against them, forcing Serbs to sign over their property and possessions and leave. Nearly 200,000 Serb refugees from Kosovo fled into Serbia and Montenegro as the Albanian-Kosovars returned. Again, the departure was abrupt and fearful. The United Nations and NATO asserted their presence in the area, providing the appearance of protection for the now targeted Serbs. Nonetheless, tensions between ethnic Serbs and Albanian erupted into violent conflict again in Kosovo in March 2004. Albanian violence against Serbs was especially pronounced in areas where the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia had documented atrocities committed against Albanians, especially around the areas of Mitrovica and Pristina, Kosovo. The violence in March 2004 left nineteen dead. Serbian Orthodox monasteries were demolished, and Serb houses and property were burned and destroyed. Intense debate regarding the partition of Kosovo from Serbia and Serbs from Albanian Kosovars was given new immediacy, but all sides were entrenched in their oppositional positions.

The trial of Milosevic by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia commenced on October 29, 2001, in which he was charged with genocide, crimes against humanity, murder, and persecution (including command responsibility for the sexual assaults on Kosovo Albanian women and the wanton destruction of religious sites) in Kosovo. The prosecution rested its case in February 2004, with the United Nations allowing the defense, judgment, and appeals processes to extend through 2010. The legacy of ethnic cleansing touched everyone throughout the former Yugoslavia. Thousands of Roma (Gypsy) who lived in Kosovo and the surrounding areas remained homeless and have been overlooked by the judicial process. For the Kosovars—both Albanian and Serb—history and experience have provided no solid template for establishing peace.

SEE ALSO Ethnic Cleansing; International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia; Milosevic, Slobodan; Nationalism; Peacekeeping; Prevention; Rape; Reconciliation; Safe Zones

Kathleen Z. Young