Long history of rebellion in Serbia's Kosovo region
Key facts about Serbia's turbulent Kosovo province

Long history of rebellion in Serbia's Kosovo region
02:38 p.m Mar 02, 1998 Eastern

BELGRADE, March 2, Reuter
 - The following is an outline chronology of unrest in Serbia's Kosovo province since World
War Two:

1945
 - As World War Two drew to a close and Nazi forces were driven out of Yugoslavia, some
10,000 ethnic Albanian rebels battled 40,000 Yugoslav troops for control of Kosovo. No
casualty figures have ever been published, but historians say the death toll was high.
Serbia, communist Yugoslavia's largest republic, imposed a clampdown in the early 1950s
and dozens were killed in various incidents.

1968
- Ethnic Albanian students, encouraged at being given a first tentative measure of self-rule
by President Josip Broz Tito, staged mass protests.

1974
 - New Yugoslav constitution grants Kosovo autonomy.

1981
 - Kosovo Albanians demanding a separate republic within Yugoslavia rioted and many
students were arrested. At least nine people died and hundreds were injured. Troops were
sent in and martial law was briefly imposed.

1988
 - More than 6,000 Serbs and Montenegrin residents of Kosovo staged a mass protest
over alleged harassment by ethnic Albanians.

1989
 - To a background of strikes and protests by ethnic Albanians, Serbian leader Slobodan
Milosevic began to remove from the Yugoslav constitution the rights of autonomy Kosovo
had been granted in 1974. Street violence erupted when Kosovo's assembly approved
new Serbian controls over the province. Clashes between police and rioters escalated to
gun battles, with more than 20 people killed and scores arrested.

1990, January
 - Police used tear gas, trucheons and water cannon on thousands of ethnic Albanian
demonstrators. The unrest escalated and on January 28 police shot dead at least 10.

1990, February
 - Yugoslavia sent troops, tanks, warplanes and 2,000 more police to Kosovo. By the end
of February more than 20 people had been killed and a curfew imposed.

1990, July
 - Ethnic Albanian legislators in the province declared Kosovo province independent from
Serbia. Belgrade dissolved Kosovo's autonomous assembly and government. Strikes and
protests rumbled on.

1991
 - Neighbouring Albania's parliament recognised Kosovo as an independent republic.

1992, May
 - Writer Ibrahim Rugova was elected president of the self-proclaimed republic after an
election held in defiance of Serbian authorities.

1992, October
 - Serb and ethnic Albanian leaders in Kosovo held face-to-face peace talks for the first
time in three years.

1993
 - Police said they had arrested more than 30 ethnic Albanians on suspicion of preparing
an armed uprising.

1995, July
 - A Serbian court sentenced 68 ethnic Albanians for up to eight years in prison for
allegedly setting up a parallel police force.

1995, August
 - Serbian authorities said they had settled several hundred Croatian Serb refugees in
Kosovo, drawing protests from ethnic Albanian leaders.

1996
 - Serbia signed a breakthrough deal with ethnic Albanian leaders to return Albanian
students to mainstream education after a six-year boycott of state schools and colleges.

1997, January
 - the Serb rector of Pristina University was badly injured by a car bomb. Within weeks, at
least 26 ethnic Albanians had been arrested in a series of police raids and a suspected
leader of the outlawed Liberation Army of Kosovo was killed in a gunbattle with police.

1997, March
 - Four people were injured when a bomb exploded in the centre of Pristina. The state
prosecutor charged 18 alleged members of the illegal "National Movement for the
Liberation of Kosovo" with terrorism offences. Hopes began to fade that President
Slobodan Milosevic would try to win relief from remaining international sanctions against
Yugoslavia by restoring some degree of autonomy to Kosovo.

1997, September
 - Armed men staged simultaneous night attacks on police stations in 10 Kosovo towns
and villages. As the number of guerrilla incidents increased, clashes also continued
sporadically betwen police and peaceful protesters.

1997, October-December
 - Attackers launched a grenade and machinegun raid on a Serb refugee camp, but there
were no casualties. Separatists claimed to have shot down a Yugoslav Airlines training
aircraft.

1997, December
 - A Serbian court sentenced 17 ethnic Albanians to a total of 186 years in jail on terrorism
charges.

1998, January
 - An ethnic Serb politician was killed in apparent retaliation for a police action 24 hours
before in which an ethnic Albanian was reported killed.

1998, February-March
 - Gunbattles left 16 Albanians and four police dead. Tens of thousands protested in
Pristina against the violence, and street clashes erupted.
 

Key facts about Serbia's turbulent Kosovo province
02:59 p.m Mar 02, 1998 Eastern

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, March 2, Reuter
 - These are the key facts about Serbia's Kosovo province, where violence erupted at
protests on Monday after weekend clashes between security forces and ethnic Albanians
left at least 20 dead.

POPULATION:
     About 1.95 million, of whom about 90 per cent are Moslem ethnic Albanians. The
remainder are mostly Serbs and Montenegrins.

AREA:
     10,887 sq km (4,252 sq miles), bounded by the Yugoslav republic of Serbia to the north
and east, the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro to the west, the former Yugoslav republic
of Macedonia to the south and Albania to the southwest.

PROVINCIAL CAPITAL:
     Pristina, population about 200,000.

ECONOMY:
     Kosovo is the poorest region of former Yugoslavia, with wages among the lowest in
Europe and unemployment very high. Many travel abroad for work.
     Kosovo has half Yugoslavia's deposits of lignite, lead, zinc and silver, 36 per cent of its
magnesite, and 98 per cent of its chrome. Key industries: electricity, lignite mining and acid
and cement production.

HISTORY:
     The area's earliest known settlers were Illyrians, ancestors of the Albanians. Slavs
settled later, in the 7th to 9th centuries.
     Although Serbs are greatly outnumbered by ethnic Albanians in modern Kosovo, Serb
nationalists regard the region as their historic heartland.
     A supposedly heroic defeat in battle against the Ottoman Turks in Kosovo in 1389 has
been elevated to the Serbs' most powerful national legend, its memory often evoked by
Belgrade leaders in recent years.
     In 1459 the Ottoman empire imposed direct rule which lasted until 1912.
With the collapse of both the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires in 1918, Kosovo
became part of newly created Yugoslavia, which was dominated by a Serbian monarchy
until World War Two.
     Kosovo guerrillas joined other Yugoslavs in fighting Nazi occupiers but were soon
fighting against Yugoslav troops for control of the region as the Nazis retreated. They lost
and in 1945, Kosovo became part of postwar Communist Yugoslavia under Josip Broz
Tito.
In the 1950s Tito's security chief Alexandar Rankovic, a Serb, ruthlessly repressed Kosovo
separatism. But a highly-decentralised federal system introduced in 1974 allowed the
region to develop its own security, judiciary, territorial defence and foreign relations and to
control all social affairs.
     This left Serbia, Yugoslavia's biggest republic, with scarcely any control over the region,
although it remained nominally within the republic.
     Civil unrest broke out in 1968 and in 1981, fuelled by the confrontation between
Albanian desire for greater autonomy and resurgent Serbian nationalism. Martial law was
imposed briefly in 1981 after at least nine died in riots.
     As Yugoslavia began to fragment in the late 1980s, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic
seized on Kosovo as a symbol of Serb grievances.
     Arguing that Albanian separatism had to be stamped out, he engineered amendments
to the Yugoslav constitution dissolving Kosovo's assembly and government and returning
to Serbia control over police, courts, civil defence and official appointments.
     Ethnic Albanians formed an unofficial assembly and government which claimed to have
overwhelming support in Kosovo.
     Elections and a referendum they organised were declared illegal by Belgrade, which
increased tight police and military control of the region during the 1990s and tried to
encourage migration there by Serbs, often refugees from the ethnic wars in Bosnia and
Croatia.
     Albanians accuse police and troops of torture and arbitrary detention of Albanians while
Serbs in the region often describe themselves as intimidated by the overwhelming
Albanian majority.
     The goals of ethnic Albanian activists have varied, with some seeking only autonomy
and a minority calling for unification of the region with neighbouring Albania.
     The Democratic League of Kosovo, the largest ethnic Albanian party, said this year it
wanted to achieve an independent, democratic state in Kosovo through "political and
democratic means."
     Albanian leaders have worked to hard to enlist the sympathy of the United States and
EU governments, who have made improvements in Belgrade's treatment of the region a
condition for the removal of the last international sanctions against Serbia.
     Until recent months, the anti-Belgrade campaign was typified by peaceful activism such
as school boycotts and rallies, rather than the kind of armed political violence that brought
bloody conflict to other parts of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
     The fear of many diplomats is that Kosovo is however a powderkeg whose detonation
could mean full-scale war and draw in Serbia's neighbours.

^REUTERS@