Kosovo: Allied Force and the Noble Anvil

Abstract

One of the last and most dramatic acts in the saga of Yugoslavia’s disintegration took place in Kosovo at the end of the 1990s. By that time, the historical and cultural significance of Kosovo for Serbs (stemming from the highly mythologized Battle of Kosovo in 1389) was clearly at odds with the province’s ethnic composition; as of 1991, the population was 90 per cent ethnic Albanian (Judah, 2000). In many ways Kosovo was both a microcosm and exemplar of the tense dynamics permeating political life during the latter days of the Yugoslav federation. Whereas the 1974 constitutional reform extending ‘autonomous province’ status to Kosovo mollified the aspirations of some of the Albanian majority, still others sought full republican status or even secession and incorporation into a greater-Albanian federation (MccGwire, 2000). Such tensions played out against the backdrop of economic collapse and mounting ethno-nationalist sentiment across Yugoslavia’s major ethnic groups, including the Serb population, in the 1980s (Ramet, 2002).

These two operational monikers refer to the NATO action and the US contingent attached to it (respectively).