Kosovo 1999

In 1999, the population of Kosovo was estimated at approximately 2 million people. The economy of the country is largely based on services, agriculture and industry. Its main industries are textiles, furniture and food processing. Kosovo has a long history of strong foreign relations with other countries in Europe, the Balkans and beyond. In terms of politics, Kosovo had a semi-presidential republic with Ibrahim Rugova as President since 1999. His Democratic League of Kosovo Party continued to hold a majority in Parliament after their victory in the 1999 elections. See ethnicityology for Kosovo in the year of 2018.

Yearbook 1999

Kosovo 1999

Kosovo. Visit Countryaah official website to get information about the capital city of Kosovo. The unrest that has characterized the province over the past ten years escalated in the spring. Yugoslav security forces launched an offensive against the Kosovo Albanian guerrilla UCK (Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosovës), the Kosovo Liberation Army, which had increasingly begun to attack Yugoslav police stations and the like. The offensive hit the Albanian civilian population hard, people were murdered, women were raped, housing was shattered and people began to flee mainly to neighboring countries. Following a failed peace conference, organized by the great powers, NATO decided to bomb military targets in Yugoslavia, Kosovo included. Prior to that, observers from the European Security and Cooperation Organization, the OSCE, and international aid workers had left the area for their own safety. According to a report by the OSCE at the end of the year, it was pointed out that the violence against the civilian population in Kosovo increased dramatically after the bombings had started. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians fled in a powerful wave of refugees to Albania and Macedonia, where international aid organizations set up huge tent camps. Some were forced by security forces onto trains and buses that brought them to the border. By the end of the year many had returned to Kosovo, but there were still 175,000 people on the run. How many civilians were killed at the end of the year is unclear. According to the American propaganda during the war, it would have been 100,000 UN war crimes tribunals stated that it was probably 11,000 and stated that it had not been a genocide but a genocide. By the end of the year, 4,000 corpses had been excavated from mass graves. In early June, the Belgrade regime gave way to the bombings and agreed to a peace agreement that included, among other things. This meant that the Yugoslav security forces would be withdrawn and replaced by an international force, KFOR, of just over 30,000 men. Since the return of the Kosovo Albanians, a massive persecution of Serbs, comprising about 10% of the province’s population, started at around two million. Thousands of Serbs fled to Serbia or Montenegro and Serbian houses stood in flames daily. Christian Orthodox churches and monasteries were also destroyed. After the war, UCK, which was hailed as heroes, held a high profile and seemed to see itself as a defense force in an independent Kosovo. It was only long after an extended deadline expired that the guerrillas reluctantly agreed to take off their uniforms and hand in their weapons. UCK was converted according to KFOR: s plans for a fire and rescue corps. How this worked in practice was unclear at the end of the year.

  • Also see Abbreviationfinder.org to see the acronym of RKS which stands for Kosovo and other definitions of this 3-letter abbreviation.

Map of Kosovo Pristina in English

History

Following the defeat of Kosovo Polje (Campo dei Merli) of 28 June 1389, an incurable trauma for the Serbs defeated by the Ottoman forces, the Kosovo remained under Turkish rule until 1912, when the crumbling of the Ottoman presence in Europe began. marked by the two Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913. Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro unleashed the First Balkan War and the defeat that the Ottoman Empire suffered within a few months was ruinous and forced it to surrender almost all its European possessions. The great powers intervened in the peace negotiations and sharpened the internal conflicts of the countries involved in the conflict, imposing among other things the birth of Albania. The Serbian troops also refused to leave the Skopje region and were attacked by the Bulgarians. In the Second Balkan War, in 1913, Bulgaria was defeated by a new alliance between Serbs, Romanians, Montenegrins, Greeks and Turks. The conflict ended in August 1913, with the peace of Bucharest, which assigned Macedonia to Serbia and Greece and only minimally to Bulgaria, Crete to Greece (which had to withdraw from northern Epirus) while Albania became an autonomous principality, devoid of Kosovo. This, in fact, was annexed to Serbia, which however had to give up the port of Durres. The situation in the Balkans remained fluid, settling resentments and desires for revenge, until June 28, 1914 (anniversary of the battle of Kosovo Polje), when the bombing in Sarajevo of Archduke Francesco Ferdinand and his wife lit the fuse of the First War world. At the end of the conflict (November 1918), with the formation of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (from 1929 Kingdom of Yugoslavia), the region of Kosovo remained within the borders established in 1913.

In the years following the First World War, an organization called kaçak was formed in Kosovo – defined by some scholars as a banditry movement and by others as an Albanian armed resistance group – which fought against the Yugoslav army. The resistance was interrupted in 1924, when Ahmet bey Zogu (future king Zog, in 1928) imposed himself in Albania, at that time near Belgrade, who provided him with weapons and men to take power in Tirana. He proceeded to the administrative centralization and the inclusion in key posts of trusted men belonging to his own clan (ghego), making Albania, at first, a presidential republic and in 1928 establishing the monarchy. With the name of Zog I he proclaimed himself ‘king of the Albanians’, indicating that Tirana did not intend to forget the thousands of fellow citizens who were outside the borders of the state, especially the ethnic minorities of Kosovo in Yugoslavia and Epirus in Greece. In reality, Zog was always at the mercy of his powerful neighbors. Thus, in an attempt to distance himself politically from Belgrade, Zog pushed Albania towards Italy. Mussolini, from the second half of the 1920s, had initiated the Italian penetration into Albania to make it the bridgehead of the Italian occupation in the Balkans. The pressure on the Italian side was growing more and more and Zog sought a rapprochement with Yugoslavia,, which in fact subjected Albania to Italian protection. In 1939 the Albanian ‘brother kingdom’ was occupied by an Italian expeditionary force. However, with the annexation of Albania, Italy also inherited all its problems and one of the main ones was linked to the situation of Kosovo, where the Albanian population was subjected to the harassment of the Yugoslav government, which for some time had placed an increasingly intense policy of conservation of the area is underway.

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