وخيانه للاسلام و العالم الاسلامى
Kosovo War: Thousands killed as Serb forces tried to keep control of province
Between March and June of 1999 Serb forces controlled by Slobodan Milosevic employed murder and mass deportation in a doomed attempt to maintain control over the province, nominally a part of Serbia but home to a predominately ethnic Albanian (Kosovar) population.
It is estimated that some 700,000 Kosovars were expelled from their homeland during that period, and that some 11,000 people died as a result of the fighting. The latter figure, although appalling in human terms, is far lower than the estimates issued by Nato and the US State Department during the war to justify the Nato air offensive aimed at ending Serbian military action. They claimed hundreds of thousands of Kosovar men had gone missing during a campaign of ethnic cleansing instituted by the Serbs.
Despite its Albanian population, Kosovo held a distinctive place in Serb national mythology as the spiritual cradle of the nation. Seized by Serbia from the crumbling Ottoman Empire in 1912, the province was granted a degree of autonomy within the Serbian republic in 1974. During the 1980s the drive for Kosovar self-determination resulted in a clamp-down by Belgrade and the withdrawal of autonomous status. Milosevic capitalised on growing Serb nationalist sentiment in 1989 by addressing a huge gathering of Serbs marking the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo.
Full-scale conflict was avoided during the Croatian and Bosnian wars of 1991-1995 but mounting attacks by the Kosovo Liberation Army from 1996 onwards resulted in brutal retaliation by Serb forces in 1998, leaving 300,000 Albanians homeless by October. Fighting resumed in the new year, culminating in January with a massacre of 40-plus Kosovar civilians at Racak.
The western powers warned of military retaliation against Serbia but Belgrade rejected an interim settlement that would have led to the demilitarisation of Kosovo and the insertion of a Nato peacekeeping force.
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