YUGOSLAV WARS
Many thought that war in the Balkans had ended in 1995. However, in 1997 another conflict, littered with atrocities, erupted in Miloševic’s Serbian-controlled police state
Serbia had long felt that the existence of Kosovo threatened its sovereignty and power in Yugoslavia, but former Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito had been able to suppress this discontent. After Tito’s death in 1980 tensions between Serbia and Kosovo intensified after the Yugoslav state ruthlessly put down Kosovan independence protests in the republic.
Throughout the 1980s future Serbian president Slobodan Miloševic fanned the flames by preying on the Kosovan-Serbian fears of an Albanian uprising and Kosovan independence. He used this trepidation to his advantage as he removed Kosovo’s autonomy, dissolved its legislative assembly and fired the majority of ethnic Albanians from state employment. Feeling mistreated and persecuted, the former members of the Kosovo Assembly set up a shadow government, which ran a referendum in September 1991. The result: ethnic Albanians voted overwhelmingly for independence.
During the wars between Yugoslavia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia under Miloševic effectively turned Kosovo into a Serbian-run police state, as repressive and discriminatory policies were imposed on the region. The police were empowered to commit arbitrary arrests, imprisonment and torture of Albanians simply for their ethnicity, or for having connections to a political organisation, or any organisation that the Serbian government disliked. To further dilute the Albanian influence, Serbians were encouraged to move to Kosovo and have large families. The education system of the ethnic Albanians was also brought to its knees as the Serbian government tried to remove any trace of Albanian heritage in an attempt to thwart the rise of Albanian nationalism.
While this system of oppression was in place in Kosovo, the shadow government, operating underground under President Ibrahim Rugova, attempted peaceful resistance; it worked to finance and empower itself by collecting taxes from the people and donations from Albanians living abroad. However, in 1997 the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which had been set up in the early 1990s to provide military resistance against Serbian oppression, started to conduct risky quick-strike attacks against the Serbian police force and Yugoslav People’s Army (YPA) bases in Kosovo.
This KLA insurgency was successful and by mid-1998 it had captured around one-third of Kosovo. During these attacks, the KLA committed war crimes as it took hostages and conducted summary executions of Serbian police and army officers. The KLA als
