The Kosovo War, 25 years later

We’re just a few weeks away from the 25th anniversary of the Kosovo War, which started in March 1999. So, I’d like to do a retrospective on the war’s causes.

This is a long story! It’s going to take at least three posts, and they won’t be short. I think it’s interesting, but it may not be to everyone’s taste, so the rest is below the cut.



To understand Kosovo, you have to start with Bosnia.

When Yugoslavia collapsed, six countries took its place. One of the successor states was Bosnia, where a three-cornered war erupted between ethnic Serbs (supported by Bosnia’s neighbor Serbia), ethnic Croats (supported by Bosnias’s neighbor Croatia), and Bosniaks.

Over three years of war, 1992-1995, about 80,000 people had died in Bosnia, most of them civilians. The Bosnian war had also seen the protracted siege of Sarajevo, a peaceful small European city that had hosted the Winter Olympics just a few years earlier, with gruesome scenes of destruction and suffering beamed directly into European media. And then of course the conflict had also included mass ethnic cleansing by all sides; the institution of “detainment” camps that were unpleasantly reminiscent of the concentration camps of WWII; and several horrific massacres, most notably at Srebrenica. From a prewar population of just 4.2 million or so, about 600,000 Bosnians were refugees; of these, about half were spread across Europe, with another 10% or so going to the United States and Canada. At the time, these were the largest refugee flows Europe had seen since the 1940s.

Of course Bosnia was not the only conflict in the former Yugoslavia. The early 1990s had a brief shooting war as Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia; the creation of two breakaway Serb “republics” on the territory of Croatia; the near complete destruction of the city of Vukovar; and massive damage to the coastal town of Dubrovnik, a cultural landmark that had also been a popular vacation destination for many Europeans. However, by early 1995 Bosnia had been the main center of violence in the former Yugoslavia for some time. And it was Bosnia that focused Europe’s attention, with non-stop coverage by European print and broadcast media, and a great deal of public attention and indignation.

Rightly or wrongly, the government of Serbia — at that time, dominated by populist strongman Slobodan Milosevic — was widely perceived as the main driver of the conflict. Certainly Milosevic’s government was supporting the breakaway Serb regions in Croatia, and also supporting and subsidizing the Bosnian Serbs in their efforts to seize as much as possible of Bosnia. There are lengthy “whose fault” arguments on these points which I won’t reprise here.  My own take is, all sides were morally sketchy, all sides committed atrocities, but the Serbs were the worst if only because they had more guns and more resources.

The key point is that by early 1995, the Bosnian war was entering its fourth year, and most European governments were under heavy pressure from public opinion to do something about it. The US government felt less pressure from public opinion, but the Clinton administration had come to realize that two years of attempted diplomacy had accomplished exactly nothing.

At that point — mid 1995 — the Bosnian Serbs were, very broadly speaking, winning the war. Although they were only about 35 to 40 percent of the population, they had managed to seize and control over half of Bosnia’s land area. They had failed to take Sarajevo, but they had control of most of Bosnia’s agriculture and industry. They were the most numerous single group; they had been disproportionately dominant in the army and police before the war; and they were strongly supported by Serbia, which gave them arms, supplies, and financial and logistical support.  Their “Republika Srpska” breakaway state was de facto independent from what remained of the Bosnian government.  So the Bosnian Serbs had no compelling reason to stop fighting.  And by the summer of 1995 they were threatening some of the “safe areas” that had been set up for Bosniak refugees. Given their track record, there was a reasonable fear that this could lead to another round of ethnic cleansing and massacres.

So NATO decided to intervene. In August 1995, NATO launched Operation Deliberate Force, a series of air strikes against the Bosnian Serb military. Operation Deliberate Force has been mostly forgotten, but it was this — not the Kosovo conflict a few years later — that was the first intervention by NATO in the former Yugoslavia. Indeed, as far as I know it was the first significant use of offensive force by NATO anywhere, ever.

Operation Deliberate Force was a pretty complete success.  (This may be why it has gone completely down the memory hole.)  The Bosnian Serbs couldn’t continue their offensive against opponents backed by NATO airpower. Indeed, it soon became clear that they would be forced back and would lose ground. So they appealed to Milosevic for more assistance. But Milosevic had no interest in spending more money and effort to support the Bosnian Serbs in an impossible fight against NATO. After all, they had already achieved their major war goals: they had seized half of Bosnia, driven out all of the non-Serb populations, secured all the border with Serbia, and set up an effectively independent government. Capturing Sarajevo would be nice but was hardly necessary; the “Republika Srpska”, the ethnic Serb state within Bosnia, was already a going concern. So, Milosevic refused any further help.

Meanwhile, there were two additional factors in play: Croatia and the Bosnian Croats. In August 1995 the Croatian army launched the extremely successful Operation Storm, wiping the breakaway “Republic of Serb Krajina” off the map in less than a week. Operation Storm had been prepared long in advance, with tacit technical and logistical support from several NATO members, including Britain, the USA, and France. Nevertheless, the Croatian army achieved complete strategic and tactical surprise. The Serb parastate collapsed and over 100,000 ethnic Serb refugees fled into Serbian Bosnia and Serbia itself.

Then just a few weeks later, in September, the Bosnian Croats inside Bosnia launched Operation Mistral. While much smaller than Operation Storm (the Bosnian Croats were much fewer in number and less well equipped than the Croatian army), Operation Mistral was also a modest success, and the Bosnian Croats seized several towns that had been held by the Bosnian Serbs. From a Serb POV, this raised the possibility of Bosnian Croat and Bosniak ground troops moving forward with the direct support of NATO airpower — or, even more alarming, the possibility of direct intervention by the newly invigorated Croatian army on the ground in Bosnia.

The Bosnian Serbs had some modest air defenses: they did manage to shoot down one or two NATO planes. But they really had nothing that could counter the multiple threat of NATO bombing, Croat/Bosniak attacks under NATO air cover, and the possibility of intervention by the Croatian army. So, almost overnight, the Serbs went from pushing forward and winning the war to falling backwards and losing the war. Also, they now had the alarming fate of the “Republic of Serb Krajina” in front of them: their brother ethnic Serb parastate had been wiped right out of existence in a week. Their only option now was to beg for help from Milosevic in Belgrade — and, if he refused, to quickly negotiate a deal before they lost even more ground.

So when Milosevic did indeed refuse to help, that forced the Bosnian Serbs to accept a cease-fire and, ultimately, a negotiated peace. The bombing started in August 1995; it ended less than a month later, in September, with a cease-fire. By December 1995 a peace treaty had been signed, the famous Dayton Accords. The Accords have been heavily criticized, then and since — but they ended the war in Bosnia, full stop.

So Operation Deliberate Force was a success by any reasonable standard. Unfortunately, the nature of that success was misunderstood. American and European political and military leaders saw that after three and a half years of bloodshed, ethnic cleansing, and massacre, a firm stand and three weeks of bombing had solved the problem, or anyway had at least ended the war and stopped the killing. This gave everyone the idea that problems in the former Yugoslavia could be solved by a quick bombing campaign. When confronted with the power of NATO, the Bosnian Serbs had quickly backed down. So, if confronted with similar overwhelming force in Kosovo, Milosevic and Serbia would probably back down in much the same way.

There were two problems with this analysis. The first problem was that while Milosevic didn’t care that much about Bosnia, he cared very much about Kosovo. In Bosnia, it was a question of whether ethnic Serbs would control 52% or 49% of the country, and whether they would have complete de facto independence or whether they might have to give insincere lip service to a very weak Bosnian central government. From Milosevic’s POV, these issues were pretty secondary — almost trivial, really. He had most of what he wanted in Bosnia: a large ethnically cleansed pure-Serbian buffer state along his western border, de facto mostly independent, beholden to him and his government and effectively controlled by Belgrade. The precise details of that state’s borders and authority were minor and negotiable.

But Kosovo, on the other hand, was existential. Kosovo was, in the opinion of every Serb, a province of Serbia.  The fact that Kosovo was mostly populated by ethnic Albanians who didn’t want to be part of Serbia was completely irrelevant.  Serb rule over Kosovo was a core interest to multiple actors — the Serbian public generally, Milosevic’s party and supporters particularly, and Milosevic himself. Milosevic could let his Bosnian Serb clients give up some scraps of land in Bosnia and accept the nominal sovereignty of a toothless Bosnian government. That was really no big deal. But losing Kosovo?  Kosovo, an integral part of Serbia?  That, he could not afford and would not accept.

The second problem was that Europe’s leadership forgot that Operation Deliberate Force was just one part of a three-pronged strategy. It happened alongside Operation Mistral (offensive by Bosnian Croats, boots on the ground inside Bosnia) and Operation Storm (highly successful offensive by Croatian army, threatened massive invasion by ground forces). In Kosovo, one of those prongs (threat of invasion) would be completely absent, while another (local combatants in theater) would be much weaker. So while in 1995 in Bosnia the Serbs had folded quickly in the face of a brief air campaign, in 1999 in Kosovo things would be rather different.