Kosovo’s declaration of independence this week might eventually lead cartographers to update their maps of Europe. Not that that’s anything new in the Balkans.
Serbia maintains that Kosovo is still a province that it should have control over, citing a series of historic events that date back hundreds of years. Serbia hasn’t had control realistically, though, since U.N. Security Council resolution 1244 made Kosovo a protectorate in June 1999. That agreement didn’t give the province independence, though, as Serbia and its allies point out.
The U.N. decision came after a 78-day NATO bombing campaign of Yugoslavia that resulted in the withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo. NATO initiated the campaign after a crackdown against the ethnic Albanian population by Serbian forces that some feared was akin to ethnic cleansing.
NATO ground forces entered Kosovo on June 12, 1999. Russian forces, backing their Serbian allies, also entered and set up their own peacekeeping operations. The Russians left in 2003.
The U.S. set up its main camp outside of a town in the southeast part of the province that the Serbs call Urosevac and the ethnic Albanians call Ferizaj. Camp Bondsteel remains today as the largest U.S.-controlled compound in the Balkans.
NATO allies France (north), Italy (west), Germany (southwest) and the United Kingdom (center) also took responsibility for sections of the province. About 40,000 troops from dozens of countries — including some outside the NATO alliance — participated in peacekeeping duties early on, although those numbers have dropped considerably over the years.
Kosovo Force today consists of about 16,000 troops, including about 1,400 Americans.
Modern day Serbia and Kosovo were once part of Yugoslavia, a disparate mix of cultures, ethnicities and languages ruled by Josip Tito from World War II to his death in 1980. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the opening up of Eastern Europe and the election of Slobodan Milosevic as president of Serbia in 1989, several parts of Yugoslavia elected to break free of the republic, one by one.
The Dayton Peace Accords signed in December 1995 ended a bloody conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina — and began a decade-long U.S. and NATO peacekeeping effort there — and left Serbia and Montenegro alone in the former republic. Montenegro gained its independence in June 2006.
