A U.N. envoy scolded the Serbian government in Belgrade for preventing Serbs from integrating into Kosovo's mainly ethnic-Albanian institutions.
      Joachim Rucker, chief of the U.N. civil administration mission in Kosovo, said the biggest problem is that Belgrade obstructs Kosovo Serbs from taking part in political and economic life in the province, the Serbian news agency Beta reported Friday.
      In an interview with Radio Free Europe, Rucker said he believes a majority of 100,000 Serbs living in Kosovo would wish to be included in Kosovo's democratic and multinational future.
http://www.washtimes.com/upi/20061208-081028-9864r.htm

The Serbs in Macedonia support Belgrade in its policy to retain Kosovo within Serbia, the Macedonian Makfax informs, citing the Chair of the Democratic party of the Macedonian Serbs and an MP in the Macedonian Parliament Ivan Stojilkovic, who was received by Serbia’s PM Vojislav Kostunica in Belgrade. His party press release reads that “Stojilkovic expressed Macedonian Serbs’ support for the demand of consistent policy in retaining Serbia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.”

http://www.focus-fen.net/?id=n101180

HOW DID WE GET HERE:

Kosovo and the rise of Slobodan Milošević (1986–1990)

In Kosovo growing Albanian nationalism and separatism in response to persecution led to growing ethnic tensions between Serbs and Albanians. An increasingly poisonous atmosphere led to wild rumours being traded and otherwise trivial incidents being blown out of proportion.

It was against this tense background that sixteen prominent members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU, from its Serbian initials) began work in June 1985 on a draft document that was leaked to the public in September 1986. The SANU Memorandum, as it has become known, was hugely controversial. It focused on the political difficulties facing Serbs in Yugoslavia, pointing to Tito's deliberate hobbling of Serbia's power and the difficulties faced by Serbs outside Serbia proper.

The Memorandum[5] (PDF) paid special attention to Kosovo, arguing, in obvious error, that the province's Serbs were being subjected to "physical, political, legal and cultural genocide" in an "open and total war" that had been ongoing since the spring of 1981. It claimed that Kosovo's status in 1986 was a worse historical defeat for the Serbs than any event since liberation from the Ottomans in 1804, thus ranking it above such catastrophes as the Nazi occupation or the First World War occupation of Serbia by the Austro-Hungarians. The Memorandum's authors claimed that 200,000 Serbs had moved out of the province over the previous twenty years and warned that there would soon be none left "unless things change radically." The remedy, according to the Memorandum, was for "genuine security and unambiguous equality for all peoples living in Kosovo and Metohija [to be] established" and "objective and permanent conditions for the return of the expelled [Serbian] nation [to be] created." It concluded that "Serbia must not be passive and wait and see what the others will say, as it has done so often in the past."

NATO's bombing campaign lasted from March 24 to June 11, 1999, involving up to 1,000 aircraft operating mainly from bases in Italy and aircraft carriers stationed in the Adriatic. Tomahawk cruise missiles were also extensively used, fired from aircraft, ships and submarines. The United States was, inevitably, the dominant member of the coalition against Serbia, although all of the NATO members were involved to some degree — even Greece, despite publicly opposing the war. Over the ten weeks of the conflict, NATO aircraft flew over 38,000 combat missions. For the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) it was the first time it had participated in a conflict since World War II. In addition to airpower, one battalion from the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division was deployed to help combat missions. The battalion secured Apache Attack helicopter refueling sites and a small team forward deployed to the Albania/Kosovo border to identify targets for Allied/NATO airstrikes.

The proclaimed goal of the NATO operation was summed up by its spokesman as "Serbs out, peacekeepers in, refugees back". That is, Serbian troops would have to leave Kosovo and be replaced by international peacekeepers in order to ensure that the Albanian refugees could return to their homes. However, the summary had an unfortunate double meaning which caused NATO considerable embarrassment after the war, when over 200,000 Serbs and other non-Albanian minorities fled or were expelled from the province. It was also suggested that a small victorious war would help give NATO a new role. Propaganda terms "humanitarian bombing" and "humanitarian war" were employed by the politicians.

At the start of May, a NATO aircraft attacked an Albanian refugee convoy, believing it was a Serbian military convoy, killing around 50 people. NATO admitted its mistake 5 days later, but the Serbs accused NATO of deliberately attacking the refugees. On May 7, NATO bombs hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists and outraging Chinese public opinion. NATO claimed they were firing at Yugoslav positions. The United States and NATO later apologized for the bombing, saying that it occurred because of an outdated map provided by the CIA. This was challenged by a joint report from The Observer (UK) and Politiken (Denmark) newspapers [18] which claimed that NATO intentionally bombed the embassy because it was being used as a relay station for Yugoslav army radio signals. The bombing strained relations between China and NATO countries and provoked angry demonstrations outside Western embassies in Beijing. According to one news source, unnamed high ranking NATO sources confirmed in 2005 that the attack was in fact deliberate: "The NATO sources told Defense & Foreign Affairs that the attack was based on intelligence that then Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic was to have been in the Embassy at the time of the attack. The attack, then, was deliberately planned as a "decapitation" attack, intended to kill Milosevic."

Many on the left of Western politics saw the NATO campaign as US aggression and imperialism, while critics on the right considered it irrelevant to their countries' national security interests. Veteran anti-war campaigners such as Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Justin Raimondo, and Tariq Ali were prominent in opposing the campaign. However, in comparison with the anti-war protests against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the campaign against the war in Kosovo aroused much less public support.

There was, however, criticism from all parts of the political spectrum for the way that NATO conducted the campaign. NATO officials sought to portray it as a "clean war" using precision weapons. The US Department of Defense claimed that, up to June 2, 99.6% of the 20,000 bombs and missiles used had hit their targets. However, the use of technologies such as depleted uranium ammunition and cluster bombs was highly controversial, as was the bombing of oil refineries and chemical plants, which led to accusations of "environmental warfare". The slow pace of progress during the war was also heavily criticised. Many believed that NATO should have mounted an all-out campaign from the start, rather than starting with a relatively small number of strikes and combat aircraft.

The choice of targets was highly controversial. The destruction of bridges over the Danube greatly disrupted shipping on the river for months afterwards, causing serious economic damage to countries along the length of the river. Industrial facilities were also attacked, damaging the economies of many towns. In fact, as the Serbian opposition later complained, the Serbian military was using civilian factories as weapons plants: the Sloboda vacuum cleaner factory in the town of Čačak also housed a tank repair facility, while the Zastava plant in Kragujevac made both cars and Kalashnikov rifles. In addition only state owned factories were targeted. No private or foreign owned industrial sites were bombed. Perhaps the most controversial deliberate attack of the war was that made against the headquarters of Serbian television on April 23, which killed at least fourteen people. NATO justified the attack on the grounds that the Serbian television headquarters was part of the Milošević regime's "propaganda machine".

Some critics have accused the coalition of leading a war in Kosovo under the false pretense of genocide.^[3] This was, in fact, no pretense at all. President Clinton of the United States, and his administration, were accused of inflating the number of Kosovar Albanians killed by Serbians.^[4] Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Cohen, giving a speech, said, "The appalling accounts of mass killing in Kosovo and the pictures of refugees fleeing Serb oppression for their lives makes it clear that this is a fight for justice over genocide."^[5] On CBS' Face the Nation Cohen claimed, "We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing...They may have been murdered."^[6] Clinton, citing the same figure, spoke of "at least 100,000 (Kosovar Albanians) missing".^[7] Later, talking about Serbian elections, Clinton said, "they're going to have to come to grips with what Mr. Milošević ordered in Kosovo...They're going to have to decide whether they support his leadership or not; whether they think it's OK that all those tens of thousands of people were killed...".^[8] Clinton also claimed, in the same press conference, that "NATO stopped deliberate, systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide."^[9] Clinton compared the events of Kosovo to the Holocaust. CNN reported, "Accusing Serbia of 'ethnic cleansing' in Kosovo similar to the genocide of Jews in World War II, an impassioned President Clinton sought Tuesday to rally public support for his decision to send U.S. forces into combat against Yugoslavia, a prospect that seemed increasingly likely with the breakdown of a diplomatic peace effort."^[10] Clinton's State Department also claimed Serbian troops had committed genocide. The New York Times reported, "the Administration said evidence of 'genocide' by Serbian forces was growing to include 'abhorrent and criminal action' on a vast scale. The language was the State Department's strongest yet in denouncing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević."^[11] The State Department also gave the highest estimate of dead Albanians. The New York Times reported, "On April 19, the State Department said that up to 500,000 Kosovar Albanians were missing and feared dead."^[12]

The Kosovo war had a number of important consequences in terms of the military and political outcome. The status of Kosovo remains unresolved — formally it is still part of Serbia, but in practice the Serbian government has no say or practical influence over the affairs of the province, which is run as a UN protectorate under a UN-appointed governor. It remains an issue of considerable controversy with Kosovo Albanians continuing to press for independence, a demand which is now widely expected to become a reality in the immediate future.

In January 2006, Contact Group (US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Russia) foreign ministers met in London and issued a statement outlining their vision for Kosovo's future status. Their statement explicitly reiterated that the "Contact Group Guiding Principles of November 2005 make clear that there should be: no return of Kosovo to the pre-1999 situation, no partition of Kosovo, and no union of Kosovo with any or part of another country." The statement also clearly states that "the (status) settlement needs, inter alia, to be acceptable to the people of Kosovo." [26] (PDF) and set a target of achieving a negotiated settlement in the course of 2006.

Milošević survived the immediate aftermath of the war, but the effective loss of Kosovo was a major factor in provoking the popular revolt which overthrew him in 2000. He was subsequently arrested and taken to The Hague, where he died from natural causes in his cell, awaiting trial for crimes against humanity on 10 March 2006.

Despite the successful conclusion of the war, Kosovo exposed gaping weaknesses in NATO. It revealed how dependent the European members had become on the United States military — the vast majority of combat and non-combat operations were dependent on US involvement — and highlighted the lack of precision weapons in European armories. Some right-wing and military critics in the US also blamed the alliance's agreement-by-consensus arrangements for hobbling and slowing down the campaign.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War