The Dominance of Hostility and Self-Victimization
On June 9th it will be 25 years since the signing of the Military-Technical Agreement, concluded in 1999 at the military airport near Kumanovo, between the governments of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Serbia on one side, and KFOR on the other. The agreement was signed by General of the Yugoslav Army Svetozar Marjanović, General of the Serbian Ministry of Interior Obrad Stevanović, and British General Michael Jackson.
This agreement did not introduce institutional reforms in Kosovo, nor did it provide guidelines for co-existence after the war. It was significant for another reason: the signing of this agreement meant the definitive stop of war crimes in Kosovo and the cessation of the bombardment of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by NATO forces.
Even today, 25 years after the official cessation of the armed conflict, the citizens of Serbia and Kosovo know very little about what preceded this agreement.
From Serbia’s point of view, the war in Kosovo was defensive, and the subsequent bombing is portrayed as NATO aggression against a sovereign country aimed at seizing part of its territory. All these years, particularly after the rise to power of the Serbian Progressive Party and Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia has been commemorating the beginning of the bombing by strengthening narratives of victimization, stories of restoring pride to the Serbian people, and celebrating criminals as heroes.[1] This has created an image of the Serbian people as heroic, proud, and just. The causes of the bombing are not mentioned; instead, Serbs are portrayed as victims of great powers and their interests. Repression against the Albanian population in the early 1990s and the crimes of 1998 and 1999 have been aggressively silenced and deliberately hidden from the public view. Representatives of Kosovo also intensively promote a unilateral memory of the war that celebrates the war heroes of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and presents Albanians as the sole victims of the war, while Serbian and other non-Albanian victims are almost never mentioned. The bombing is celebrated as a humanitarian and liberation mission, with great gratitude to the international community.[2]
While both sides glorify their role as victims, the true victims of the war are either forgotten or instrumentalized for the political goals of ruling elites. Lists of victims, along with documentation of their suffering, were not compiled by state institutions but by civil society organizations. According to the data of the Humanitarian Law Center and the Humanitarian Law Center Kosovo, 13,535 people were killed[3] during the war in Kosovo from 1998 to 2000. In 1998, 2,156 people lost their lives, of which 1,804 Albanian victims, 269 Serbian, 63 Roma, and members of other ethnic groups. Among these victims, the majority were civilians. The highest number of casualties occurred immediately before and during the bombing.
From early 1999 until June 14, 1999, 10,122 people were killed in Kosovo – the majority of whom were Albanian civilians (7,346) and KLA members (1,354), while 385 Serbian civilians and 865 members of the Yugoslav armed forces were killed. From the signing of the Kumanovo Agreement until the end of 2000, 717 Serbs, 307 Albanians, 233 Roma, and members of other ethnic groups were killed, totaling 1,257 victims. After the war, mass graves were found in several locations in Kosovo, as well as in Serbia, such as those in Batajnica, Bajina Bašta, and Petrovo Selo, where the bodies of Albanian civilians killed in Kosovo were transferred in refrigerated trucks. Unfortunately, to this day, numerous cases of missing persons whose bodies have never been found remain unresolved. Additionally, the war brought about a large number of refugees and internally displaced persons and widespread destruction of property. During 1998 and 1999, over 850,000 Albanians were expelled from their homes. The majority of them returned to Kosovo after the war. On the other hand, after the war, or after the withdrawal of Serbian forces, it is estimated that about 230,000 Serbs, Roma, and other minorities left the territory of Kosovo.
Peace Talks
Considering the high number of victims and the war’s devastating consequences, the international community reacted relatively quickly. Learning from its slow response during the war in Bosnia and fearing that crimes such as the genocide in Srebrenica could be repeated in Kosovo, NATO began preparations for military intervention as early as the summer of 1998. In September, Resolution 1199[4] was adopted, requiring that Serbs and Albanians cease hostilities and begin negotiations. In October 1998, a US delegation, led by the special envoy Richard Holbrooke, arrived in Belgrade, and after several days of negotiations, Milošević agreed to certain concessions: the withdrawal of some security forces from Kosovo along with the deployment of an OSCE mission to Kosovo. According to the agreement reached at the time, Kosovo was supposed to receive autonomy but within Yugoslavia. Serbian forces attempted to evade the implementation of some provisions of the agreement, and since the KLA was not involved in these negotiations, they did not consider them binding and used the partial withdrawal of Serbian forces to expand the areas under their control. The conflict escalated again at the end of the year.
After the massacre in Rečak in January 1999, where 45 Albanian civilians were killed, the final attempts to reach a peaceful solution to the conflict were organized in Rambouillet and Paris in February and March 1999. The draft agreement offered a transitional period in which the Albanians would gain autonomy within Yugoslavia, but the possibility of later negotiations about Kosovo’s independence was left open. NATO was supposed to lead a peacekeeping mission during this transitional period, with the OSCE assuming responsibility for its implementation. While the Albanian delegation signed the agreement, representatives of Serbia rejected any possibility of considering Kosovo’s independence and the deployment of foreign troops on its territory. After the failed negotiations in Rambouillet and Paris, NATO began bombing the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which lasted for 78 days.
The Kumanovo Agreement, signed on June 9, 1999, marked the end of the bombing and armed conflicts. According to the agreement, Serbia was forced to withdraw all its police and military forces from the territory of Kosovo in several phases, within 11 days of the agreement coming into force. It was agreed that “under no circumstances shall any forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Republic of Serbia enter, re-enter, or remain on the territory of Kosovo or in the ground safety zone or the air safety zone” without the prior consent of the KFOR commander (Article 4a). The signatories also agreed not to encourage, organize, or support any hostile or provocative actions against any person in Kosovo. Furthermore, it was agreed that international security forces (KFOR) would be deployed in Kosovo with the authority to “undertake all necessary actions to establish and maintain a secure environment for all inhabitants of Kosovo” (Annex B, point 1). The provisions of this agreement were integrated into UN Security Council Resolution 1244, which was adopted a year later.
Consequences 25 Years Later
The KFOR mission initially consisted of around 50,000 members, gradually decreasing over the years to around 3,700 soldiers from 27 countries in recent years. After the deterioration of the security situation in northern Kosovo in 2023, around 700 soldiers arrived in Kosovo. The unstable situation in northern Kosovo shows that local institutions are still unable to guarantee peace and security to all the citizens.
Although 25 years have passed since the end of the war, the relations between Serbia and Kosovo give the impression that the war is still ongoing. Narratives promoted during the 1990s continue to dominate the public space; there is no confrontation with the past or long-term normalization of relations. Authorities in both Pristina and Belgrade promote divisions between victims and heroes on one side and criminals on the other, without a critical assessment of the past and creating space for understanding and a common future. Throughout the entire post-war period, war victims have been marginalized, denied space to share their experiences, not given the truth about their loved ones, or any form of apology or compensation. On the contrary, authorities do everything to instrumentalize them for personal gain, further humiliating and silencing them.
Both in Serbia and Kosovo, we witness the strengthening of nationalism and right-wing populism and the constant production of crises, tensions, and fear of the Other. Under such circumstances, negotiations between Belgrade and Pristina, which have been ongoing for over a decade, do not offer hope for a substantive normalization of relations in the near future. Neither side shows the readiness to implement what has been agreed on, accept the responsibility, and resolve the legacy of the past, and tensions are increasingly being transferred to the civil society. There remains hope that younger generations will find the strength to turn to strengthening solidarity and mutual understanding in their search for answers to today’s problems, choosing peace activists from the 1990s as role models instead of the war criminals imposed on them in the public sphere.
Jelena Lončar is an associate professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade, where she teaches classes related to political sociology. She earned her PhD at the University of York in the United Kingdom. Her research interests include political representation, gender and politics, ethnic relations, and civil society. In recent years, she has been writing intensively about the political representation of women and national minorities, as well as autocratic trends in Southeastern Europe.
[1] https://www.recom.link/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/IV-Decenija-secanja-u-Srbiji.pdf; https://www.hlc-rdc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Politika_secanja_bhs.pdf
[2] https://www.recom.link/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/V-Decenija-secanja-na-Kosovu.pdf
[3] http://www.kosovskaknjigapamcenja.org/
[4] http://unscr.com/files/1998/01199.pdf
