Latest Updates

Over its first 15 months the international mission in Kosovo has a number of accomplishments to its credit.

In the fall of 2000, for the first time in their history, the people of Kosovo are being promised the opportunity to participate in democratic, internationally supervised local elections.

This report is the product of seven months of field research conducted by teams of local and international personnel in Kosovo and Albania in 1999, as part of the International Crisis Group’s Humanitarian Law Documentation Project.The Project was conceived in the spring of 1999, as violence and destruction in Kosovo forced hundreds of thousands of men, women and children from their homes, many seeking shelter in neighbouring Albania and The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (hereafter referred to as Macedonia).

Mitrovica has become the linchpin of Kosovo’s future united status.  The stakes are high.  If the international community cannot re-establish Mitrovica as a single city, efforts to preserve a united Kosovo will also fail.

The end of the war over Kosovo brought the transformation of the guerrilla army that started it. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA – or UÇK in the Albanian acronym) has been formally demilitarised, but in various manifestations it remains a powerful and active element in almost every area of Kosovo life.

With the immense challenges facing the international community in its effort to secure and rebuild Kosovo, one critical outstanding matter that has received very little attention is the ongoing detention in Serbian prisons of several thousand Kosovo Albanians. 

After an unprecedented, multilateral military intervention in Kosovo succeeded in expelling Serb forces and enabling the return home of more than a million displaced persons, the international community embarked on the ambitious, long-term project of securing, rebuilding, and establishing the rule of law in Kosovo, while setting the territory on the path to self-governance.

The enterprise known as Trepca is a sprawling conglomerate of some 40 mines and factories, located mostly in Kosovo but also in other locations in Serbia and Montenegro.

The agreement signed on 20 September between the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and KFOR commanders transformed the KLA into a 5,000-strong, nominally multiethnic civilian force - the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC).

More than four months have passed since the start of the deployment of the United Nations in Kosovo.