Kosovo had been the suppressed political problem of Yugoslavia since the 1980s. The autonomous province — formally part of Serbia under the 1974 constitution, but with substantial self-governing institutions — had a population that was approximately 90% Albanian by ethnicity and 10% Serb. The Serbian minority, while small in numerical terms, had immense symbolic importance: Kosovo was, in Serbian historical consciousness, the heartland of the medieval Serbian kingdom, the site of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, and the location of the Serbian Orthodox patriarchal seat at Peć (Pejë).
Milošević's political career, as discussed in the previous chapter, had begun with his 1987 commitment to Serbian Kosovars. In 1989 he abolished Kosovo's autonomous status; the province was reintegrated directly into Serbia. The Albanian-majority political institutions were dissolved; Albanian-language schools were closed; Albanian was removed as an official language. The Albanian Kosovars responded by establishing a parallel state of their own — their own underground schools, their own underground hospitals, their own political parties — under the leadership of the moderate Ibrahim Rugova, who advocated peaceful resistance and international diplomatic engagement.
By the mid-1990s, however, a more militant Albanian-Kosovar response had begun to emerge: the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a guerrilla organisation that conducted increasing armed actions against Serbian police and government targets from 1996 onward. The Yugoslav government responded with progressively heavier counter-insurgency operations through 1997 and 1998. By the autumn of 1998 the conflict had displaced approximately 300,000 Kosovar Albanians.
NATO intervention
The international response, after the failure of the Holbrooke-Milošević negotiations of October 1998 and the Rambouillet conference of February-March 1999, was a NATO air campaign. Operation Allied Force began on the 24th of March 1999 and lasted 78 days, until the 10th of June. The campaign — conducted without UN Security Council authorisation, since Russia and China would have vetoed — was the first major NATO military operation in Europe and the first conducted exclusively against a sovereign state. About 1,500 Yugoslav civilians were killed in the bombing; another 2,500 Yugoslav security forces personnel; approximately 20 NATO aircraft were lost. Within the country, the Yugoslav government accelerated its expulsion of Albanian Kosovars; approximately 850,000 fled across the borders to Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro during the campaign.
The campaign ended with Milošević's acceptance of NATO terms: a Yugoslav military withdrawal from Kosovo, the deployment of a NATO-led peacekeeping force (KFOR), and the establishment of a UN administration (UNMIK) over Kosovo. The province was, in practice, separated from Serbian sovereignty from June 1999 onward, although its formal status remained unresolved.
The fall of Milošević
Milošević survived the Kosovo war politically, but not for long. In September 2000 he called early federal elections, expecting a victory that would consolidate his authority. The Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS), a coalition of eighteen parties under the constitutional lawyer Vojislav Koštunica, won the popular vote. Milošević attempted to claim that no candidate had received an outright majority and that a runoff was required. Massive demonstrations broke out across Serbia.
On the 5th of October 2000, a crowd of approximately 700,000 protesters from across Serbia converged on Belgrade. The federal parliament building was stormed; the state television building was set on fire. The Serbian police and the JNA (with the army's tacit assent) declined to intervene against the crowd. Milošević resigned the following day. The Belgrade demonstrations of 5 October 2000 — known in Serbia simply as "the Fifth of October" — were the last and most consequential of the popular revolutions of the post-Communist period.
Milošević was arrested in April 2001 on Serbian charges of corruption and abuse of power. He was extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague in June 2001, where he stood trial for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. The trial lasted four years and was unfinished at the time of his death from a heart attack in his cell at Scheveningen prison on the 11th of March 2006. He was 64.
Serbia and Montenegro
The final act of Yugoslavia as a state was its formal renaming. In March 2002, under heavy EU pressure, the rump Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia plus Montenegro) agreed to restructure itself as a confederation of two equal partner-states, with a substantial degree of mutual independence. The new constitutional arrangement was approved by the federal parliament on the 4th of February 2003. The country was renamed Serbia and Montenegro on that date. The name "Yugoslavia" — which the country had carried since 1929 — was officially retired.
The new arrangement included a provision for a referendum on full Montenegrin independence after three years. Montenegro held the referendum on the 21st of May 2006; the vote for independence was 55.5%, just above the 55% threshold required by the EU. Montenegro declared independence on the 3rd of June 2006. Serbia became a successor state of Serbia and Montenegro and (by the position of the Serbian government, though disputed) of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Kosovo's independence
Kosovo, which had remained under UN administration since 1999, declared independence from Serbia on the 17th of February 2008. Around 110 countries (including most EU member states and the United States) have recognised the declaration; around 90 (including Serbia, Russia, China, Spain, Greece, and several other EU states) have not. Kosovo holds full or limited diplomatic relations with the recognising states. It is not a member of the UN. It is, in 2026, the youngest sovereign country in Europe, with full participation in international sports federations, its own currency (the euro, used by adoption), and a slowly developing diplomatic recognition.
The successor states
The territory of the former Yugoslavia is, in 2026, divided among seven internationally recognised states: Slovenia (EU member since 2004), Croatia (EU since 2013), Bosnia and Herzegovina (EU candidate since 2022), Serbia (EU candidate since 2012), Montenegro (EU candidate since 2010), North Macedonia (EU candidate since 2005, named change from "Macedonia" in 2019), and Kosovo (partially recognised). Six of the seven are NATO members; only Serbia is not. All seven have, in the years since their independence, undergone substantial economic and political reform, with varying degrees of success.
The next and final chapter takes up what is left of Yugoslavia today — the seven countries, the Yugoslav diaspora, and the strange persistent presence of a country that has officially been gone for a generation.
End of Chapter IX