Kosovo's Unknown Genocide

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June 9th marked a little-known anniversary. On that day in 1999, Yugoslavia’s army withdrew from Kosovo, following 78 consecutive days of NATO bombing. In return for ceasing its criminal campaign, the US-led military alliance was permitted unimpeded, unchallenged freedom of movement and action throughout the province. The Yugoslav military’s exit instantly opened the floodgates for a genocide of the province’s Serb population to erupt, under the watchful eye of NATO and UN peacekeepers. To this day, the region lives with the cataclysm’s destructive consequences.

NATO’s March - June 1999 aerial assault on Yugoslavia was ostensibly waged to prevent an impending mass slaughter of Albanians in Kosovo. Yet, as a May 2000 British parliamentary committee concluded, all purported abuses of Albanian citizens occurred after the bombing began. Moreover, the alliance’s intervention was found to have actively encouraged Slobodan Milosevic to aggressively neutralise the CIA and MI6-backed, civilian-targeting narcoterrorist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), with which Belgrade was truly at war.

The KLA had for years by this point sought to create an ethnically pure Kosovo via insurrectionary violence, in service of constructing “Greater Albania” - an irredentist, Nazi-inspired entity comprising territory in modern-day Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Yugoslavia’s military departing the province at last provided the Al Qaeda-linked terror group with a grand window of opportunity to achieve that mephitic goal. There was a gap of several days before thousands of NATO and UN “peacekeepers” - known as KFOR - arrived in Kosovo, on June 12th 1999.

By the time they reached Pristina, scores of Serbs had already been murdered or fled Kosovo, their homes and property stolen or destroyed. Despite its official mission being to ensure a “safe and secure environment” in the province, KFOR’s presence did nothing to quell the bloody chaos. Dubbed Operation Joint Guardian, an eponymous account of the effort authored by US military historian Cody R. Phillips records:

“Ethnic Albanians, consumed with hatred…initiated a wave of destruction. Anything Serbian was destroyed or vandalized - even abandoned houses and churches. Much of the violence was clearly organized and deliberate. Each day…American soldiers confronted new expressions of hatred…Radical groups of ethnic Albanians were committed to violence in Kosovo, with the ultimate goal of achieving complete independence from Serbia and bringing along as well bits of territory in Serbia and Macedonia dominated by ethnic Albanians…Chaos dominated as Operation Joint Guardian began in earnest.”

Phillips reports that KFOR hadn’t “anticipated the level of violence and lawlessness,” and was poorly-prepared, ill-equipped and undermanned to deal with the barbarous, province-wide crimewave they’d stepped into. “Murder, assault, kidnapping, extortion, burglary, and arson were reported daily” in Kosovo, the victims invariably Serbs. And these were merely incidents “significant” enough for KFOR to report. Typically, culprits were never identified - “no one saw anything” was “a standard refrain.” Drive-by shootings were commonplace. Meanwhile:

“Abandoned Yugoslav military installations were destroyed, vandalized, or mined. Even grave sites were booby-trapped. Electricity was intermittent, clean water was almost nonexistent. The absence of order and public services was total.”

On a daily basis, Serbs “were attacked throughout the province…routinely…accosted in public buildings, or on the street, then robbed, beaten, or ‘arrested’ and detained in jails” by rampaging gangs of armed Albanian militants. In one Kosovo community, an estimated 5,000 Roma were expelled from their homes, “which were then looted and burned.” Albanians and Bosniaks who remained in Kosovo during the war, perceived by the KLA as loyal to Yugoslavia, “were harassed…some of them also disappeared.”

‘Bad Guys’

Not long after Joint Guardian’s launch, a US Marine patrol responded to a series of arson attacks on homes in Zegra, “a town almost evenly split between Serbian and Albanian families.” Arriving “too late to stop the violence,” their entry to the area was moreover hindered by a flurry of fire from Albanian militants. “Every Serbian home had been put to the torch,” the local Orthodox church had been destroyed, a nearby cemetery vandalized. Almost 600 Serbs were ultimately forced to leave.

Per Phillips, before Joint Guardian’s first week was over, “dozens of Serbs had been abducted by the KLA.” They were never seen again, their bodies never found. Elsewhere, a Serb school official “who had protected an Albanian home and family” during NATO’s bombing campaign, and his wife, were murdered, their “bodies [left] hanging in the town square.” This “level of violence” endured throughout the Operation’s first month:

“The daily routine entailed the same jobs: fight fires, disperse crowds, and quell violence. Caches of weapons and ammunition usually were found every day. Wounded Serbs were treated regularly by Army medics or evacuated to local US medical facilities. The episodes seemed constant and blended into an endless stream.”

There was also a routine “predictability” to how Serbs were “bullied” into leaving Kosovo - “remote villages were especially sensitive to the unofficial pattern.” First, “roving bands” of Albanian militants would subject local Serbs to ever-escalating “intimidation tactics”, to the extent “threats became unbearable.” If these activities “failed to achieve the desired end…thugs would break into selected homes and beat the occupants, and one or two token victims would be killed.” The process was “very effective” in forcing Serbs to abandon the province.

In July, remaining Serb families in the town of Vitina were falsely blamed by Albanian militants for an explosive attack that injured over 30 Serbs, then harassed out of the area. Before leaving, they “gave their houses and remaining property to their Albanian neighbors in gratitude for their friendship and kindness.” Within hours, those houses and their contents were ablaze. According to Phillips, this incident prompted a KFOR commander to lament, “the hatred is so intense and irrational it is unbelievable.”

Come November 1999, the KLA’s post-war blitzkrieg of “murder and kidnap” in NATO-occupied Kosovo had reduced Pristina’s Serb population from 40,000 to just 400. Then, “the killings continued throughout 2000.” Serbs of all ages were regularly shot in the street. One Serb preparing to depart for Belgrade “was killed by an Albanian masquerading as a potential buyer” for his home. 

There are strong grounds to believe - contrary to Phillips’ account of well-meaning, valiant impotence and ineptitude on the part of KFOR - this genocidal crusade was actively encouraged by the KLA’s Western backers. In December 2010, a British “peacekeeper” posted to Kosovo during this time attributed Pristina’s modern day status as “an impoverished, corrupt and ethnically polarised backwater” to NATO’s “unwillingness to control KLA gangsters.” He witnessed first-hand how the group’s foreign sponsors concertedly and consistently “emboldened the KLA to greater brutality.”

Whenever his KFOR team captured the terror group’s fighters on the streets, heavily armed and “intent on murder and intimidation,” his superiors in London ordered them to be freed:

“The violence meted out by the KLA shocked even the most hardened of paratroopers. The systematic murder of Serbs, who were often shot in front of their families, was commonplace. After nightfall, gangs of KLA thugs wielding AK47s, knuckledusters and knives terrified residents of Serbian apartment blocks. Many Serbs fled and their homes were taken by the KLA. The Blair government’s spin machine wanted moral simplicity….The Serbs were the ‘bad guys’, so that must make Kosovo Albanians the ‘good guys’.”

‘Bastard Army’

Come 2001, “both smuggling and signs of an insurgent campaign were escalating in the province, particularly in the mountainous and heavily wooded border areas that separated Macedonia and Kosovo,” where KFOR did not patrol. Contraband entering Kosovo was “not confined to illicit drugs or tax-free cigarettes” - “all too common were firearms and ordnance.” Along the way, “random terror attacks continued,” with hand grenades the “weapon of choice.” Grenades “were both plentiful and inexpensive,” costing about $7 each - “less than the price of a pound of coffee.”

Simultaneously, the KLA’s brutal struggle for Greater Albania continued, with London and Washington’s active support. KFOR stood idly by while KLA insurgents pushed past a five-kilometre-wide “exclusion zone” into neighbouring Macedonia, armed with mortars, and other lethal weapons. This dark handshake was openly condemned by other Western powers. A European KFOR commander bitterly remarked in March 2001:

“The CIA has been allowed to run riot in Kosovo with a private army designed to overthrow Milosevic. Now he’s gone the US State Department seems incapable of reining in its bastard army.”

The Empire’s extensive technical and material sponsorship of the KLA extended to evacuating 400 of the group’s fighters from Skopje, after they were encircled by Macedonian forces. This backing was pivotal to the terror group occupying and controlling almost a third of the country’s territory, by August 2001. At that point though, due to European pressure, the US rescinded all assistance to the KLA. Local leaders duly inked a peace deal on August 13th 2001.

Macedonian artillerymen prepare to fire on KLA positions, May 2001

In return for constitutional and administrative changes ensuring equal rights for Albanians in Macedonia, KLA insurgents stopped fighting and handed in many of their weapons to NATO, while receiving amnesty from prosecution. Mere weeks later, the 9/11 attacks took place. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s cofounder and Osama bin Laden’s deputy, has been fingered as “the person who [could] do the things that happened” on the fateful day. Coincidentally, one KLA unit was led by his brother.