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The Kosovo war was a war between Serbian military (officially Yugoslavia, but Montenegro did not participate) on one side and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) on the other. NATO bombed Serbia from March 24 to June 10 of 1999, and this is generally considered the timespan of the war, although civil war between KLA and Serb security forces occurred both before and after this time.

Trouble had been brewing in Kosovo for years. Since 1981, Kosovo had been ruled by an autonomous Albanian government which demanded independence from Yugoslavia, while working ceaselessly to eliminate the last remnants of the Serbian population. The situation worsened in 1989, when Kosovo's autonomous status was revoked (ending five decades of ethnic cleansing which saw the Serbian Kosovar population reduced from 61% to less than 5% of the population) by Slobodan Milosevic, prime minister of Serbia at that time. In the mid-90s, armed uprising in Kosovo began, led by the KLA. By summer 1998, the violence had escalated to full civil war in Kosovo, with hundreds dead and as much as 300.000 internal refugees. The international community, spear-headed by NATO and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), decided that something had to be done. A NATO-brokered cease-fire of October 25, 1998 saw a large contigent of OSCE peace monitors to Kosovo.

In December of 1998 the cease-fire between the KLA and Yugoslavia broke down. The following months were marked by military and civilian killings by both sides. On January 15 the Serbian military killed 45 Albanians in Racak.

Peace talks between Yugoslavia and Albanians in Chateau Rambouillet outside Paris broke down on March 19. The proposed Rambouillet Agreement called for unrestricted access by NATO troops not only throughout Kosovo (over which it would have control), but the rest of Yugoslavia as well. NATO would also be immune to the laws of Yugoslavia. These terms were not acceptable to the Yugoslavs, so the Albanian delegation could sign the agreement, knowing that it would not be put into effect.

The international monitors from OSCE withdrew on March 22, for fear of the monitors' safety. NATO started its bombing campaign on March 24, without benefit of U.N. resolution, or the support of neighboring countries other than Albania. With land invasion threatening the militia was armed, but was generally helpless against the NATO high-altitude bombing campaign. NATO's alliance with the KLA (the United States, along with Iran, had been funding, arming, and training the KLA since its inception; the KLA acted as NATO forward scouts during the war) caused an outpouring of anti-Albanian sentiment and atrocities. Kosovars fled the bombing, infrastructure destruction, and inter-ethnic violence in the hundreds of thousands, into neighboring Albania and Macedonia (which quickly closed its borders). U.S. General Wesley Clark called this outcome "entirely predictable." At least eight hundred thousand Kosovars fled the province, including 100,000 who left before the war began. Most of these were ethnic Albanians fled into Albania.

The bombings themselves also exacted a humanitarian toll: bridges were bombed during rush hour, cities known for their opposition to Milosevec were not spared. The bombings have drawn criticism by many experts on international law since international conventions ageed to by NATO countries among others prohibit destroying structures vitally important for human survival, prohibit destroying media organizations, TV and radio towers, journalist studios among other structures. The bombings however violated these agreements by targeting many of these structures including water treatment plants, TV stations and other vitally important sites. Criticism was also drawn by the fact that NATO charter specifies that NATO is an organization created for defence of its members, but in this case it was used to attack a country without any visible threat to any NATO members.

Residental areas were cluster bombed

During the early phase of the war, NATO air power had difficulty attacking Serbian ground forces which were well hidden and dug in. Not desiring to introduce their own ground forces, NATO chose to abrogate the Geneva Protocols and waged war directly against the civilian population. It bombed Serbian factories and infrastructure, destroying Danube bridges,disrupting power supplies, water treatment plants, and other vital civilian installations in May. Faced with the prospect of total destruction, Slobodan Milosevic accepted the conditions offered by a Finnish-Russian mediation team.

The final proposal that ended the bombing rejected the heavy NATO presence throughout Yugoslavia, but Serbia agreed to have a military presence within Kosovo headed by the UN. In practice NATO had more troops on the ground in its KFOR force than the UN did in its UNMIK force.

The Kosovo War was significant from a military standpoint in that it marked the first effective use of low technology local ground forces in combination with high technology air power provided by the United States. This combination would also prove effective in the United States campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001. Given the almost complete survival of the Yugoslav military infrastructure, it is not clear whether this approach would be effective against a totalitarian dictator (who presumably is less concerned about the civilian populations), but it was demonstrably effective against a democracy.

It was also significant in that it demonstrated the impotence of the United Nations and the Geneva Protocols at restraining the aggressive impulses of the world's last remaining superpower.

NATO flew 38,000 combat missions over Kosovo. Yugoslavia claimed these attacks caused between 1200 and 5000 civilian casualties. Human Rights Watch claims a total of only 500 civilian deaths occurred in 90 separate incidents. NATO acknowedged killing at least 150 civilians. NATO lost 5 aircraft, all American including the first stealth plane (a F-117 Fighter Bomber) shot down by enemy fire, but suffered no combat casualties. Yugoslav army was largely intact in Kosovo despite the heavy bombing, and it was a surprise for NATO when they saw the scale of the retreating forces. Around 50 aircraft were lost but only 13 tanks and armored vehicles — most of the targets hit in Kosovo were decoys, and the anti-aircraft defence was preserved during the conflict (radars were mostly turned off) so NATO missions were flown on 5 km altitude. There was up to 5000 military casualities according to NATO estimates, while the official Serbian figure is around 1000. At least 3000 bodies were dug up from mass graves and the International Red Cross compliled a list of over 3000 missing. Because many of the exhumed bodies could not be identified there is probably a great overlap in the Red Cross list and the number of exhumed.