Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo What Happened Before and After NATO Intervened

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What Happened Before and After NATO Intervened in Kosovo

Imagine waking up one day to the thundering of blows given at the door telling you to “open up or be shot down.” It is the Serb police, and they are telling you that you and your whole family had to leave your home immediately. This is how it went for many Albanian people during what some Serb extremists called “demographic genocide.” This was the beginning of what many would call the Kosovo War, and it lasted from March to June 1999. After NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, something strange happened. Now the people being victimized were the Serbs and anyone who was “friendly” to them. In this paper, I will speak about what happened before and after the war in Kosovo.

Most war victims during the Kosovo War were considered victims of ethnic cleansing, which is the internationally condemned practice of driving out members of other nationalities from territories that had been part of the SFRY (Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) . All of this began with the presidency of Slobodan Milosevic in 1988 who was president of the Serbian League of Communists and also Serbia a year later. He began a campaign to reassert communist dominance as well as Serb dominance. He purged into countries such as Croatia and transformed its army from one that wanted to preserve Yugoslavia to one that wanted unification of all Serb populated territories and eventually create a Greater Serbia. A way that Milosevic felt he could achieve that task was through a strategy of ethnic cleansing and the expulsion and massacres of the non-Serbs.

Milosevic’s main goal in Kosovo was to expel Kosovo Albanians population in an effort to ensure continued Serbian control over the province. Du...

... middle of paper ...

...s to ‘peace’. We see no hope in the ‘peace.’”

Bibliography:

O’Niell, William G., Kosovo: An Unfinished Peace. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner Publishers, Inc., 2002

Juka, S.S., Kosova: The Albanians in Yugoslavia in Light of Historical Documents. New York, NY: Waldon Press, Inc., 1984

Hosmer, Stephen T., The Conflict Over Kosovo: Why Milosevic Decided to Settle When He Did. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001

Doder, D. and Branson L., Slobodan Milosevic. Columbia University Press, 2004. http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0833245

The Indictment: “Kosovo”. 11/16/2004. http://www.un.org/icty/glance/milosevic.htm

Yansong, Lu and Rongbin, Xie, Post-War Kosovo Revisited. People’s Daily (Cn), November 2, 1999. http://web4.peopledaily.com.cn/english/199911/02/print19991102F108/html

Post War Sufferin. 11/16/04. http://www.kosovo.com/home2.html

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