© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: A person walks past graffiti in the northern part of the ethnically divided city of Mitrovica, Kosovo, February 6, 2023. REUTERS/Florion Goga
(Reuters) – Kosovo will celebrate the 15th anniversary of its declaration of independence from Serbia on Friday.
Here are key facts about the small republic in the Western Balkans:
POPULATION: Around 1.8 million according to the most recent 2011 census, which the local Serbs boycotted. Ethnic Albanians comprise more than 90 percent of the population, Serbs about 5.3 percent, and ethnic groups such as Bosniaks, Turks, and Roma make up the rest. A new census is scheduled for this year.
AREA: Kosovo covers 10,908 square kilometers (4,212 square miles). It is bordered by Serbia to the north and east, Macedonia to the southeast, Albania to the southwest, and Montenegro to the west.
CAPITAL: Pristina.
LANGUAGE: Albanian and Serbian are official languages.
RELIGION: About 90 percent, mostly ethnic Albanians, are Muslim. The other significant denominations are Orthodox Christians, mainly Serbs, and Roman Catholics.
STATE AND GOVERNMENT: A parliamentary democracy with a 120-seat legislature, including 10 seats reserved for Serbs and 10 for other minorities. The government is headed by the prime minister, with the president in a ceremonial role.
ECONOMY: Landlocked and poor, Kosovo hopes its mineral wealth will finally unlock the foreign investment it needs to tackle unemployment of around 30 percent. But many investors are deterred by volatile ethnic tensions. Corruption, smuggling and organized crime are other serious problems that stunt development and undermine Kosovo’s aspirations for EU membership.
HISTORY AND PEOPLE: Kosovo became part of the Kingdom of Serbia in the early 13th century, with a mixed population of ethnic Albanians, Serbs, and Vlachs. The Nemanjic dynasty made Kosovo the spiritual heart of Serbia, ceding land to the Orthodox Church and building monasteries that still stand.
Many Serbs left during the five centuries after the Ottoman Empire defeated the Serbs under Prince Lazar in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, while ethnic Albanians grew in number. Mutual expulsions and migrations to and from neighboring Albania in the early 20th century changed the ethnic composition of Kosovo.
VIOLENCE AND WAR: Ethnic tensions escalated in the 1980s as federal and multinational Yugoslavia began to unravel and economic conditions deteriorated. Populist firebrand Slobodan Milosevic stoked Serbian nationalism as a springboard to the Serbian presidency in 1989 and rescinded Kosovo’s provincial autonomy. He accused Kosovo Albanians of persecuting local Serbs and restricted their rights in education and local government.
After years of passive Kosovar resistance to Belgrade, an armed uprising led by Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas broke out in the late 1990s, prompting a brutal crackdown by the Serb-led Yugoslav federal army and police. Serbian security.
Western powers warned Milosevic that they would not tolerate another wave of Balkan “ethnic cleansing” after the wars in Bosnia and Croatia. Peace talks in France failed and in March 1999 NATO began bombing Serbia to force it to withdraw from Kosovo.
Some 800,000 Albanians fled or were expelled to Macedonia and Albania before Milosevic relented, 78 days later. When his forces withdrew and NATO took over, UN agencies said up to 200,000 Serbs and other ethnic minorities also left.
FROM LIMBO TO INDEPENDENCE: After nearly a decade under a UN transitional administration, backed by tens of thousands of NATO peacekeeping troops, Kosovo declared independence in February 2008. Its status has been recognized by more than 100 UN member states, including the United States and 22 from the European Union. countries, but not Serbia, its great power ally Russia or China.
Serbia has vowed never to recognize Kosovo’s independence. He backs the Serb nationalist minority in northern Kosovo by boycotting the state, creating a de facto partition. Half of the local Serbs, or about 50,000, live in other parts of Kosovo and have integrated into its political and economic life.
In July 2010, the International Court of Justice ruled in an advisory opinion that Kosovo’s declaration of independence had not violated general international law.
Since then, Belgrade and Kosovo have engaged in years of sporadic and inconclusive EU-brokered normalization talks, but without any progress to date. The standoff in northern Kosovo has been marked by repeated violent clashes over the years, with Serbs erecting barricades and clashing with Pristina police trying in vain to assert state authority.