War crimes were committed by all sides during the Kosovo War, which lasted from 28 February 1998 until 11 June 1999. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), the vast majority of abuses were attributable to the government of Slobodan Milošević, mainly perpetrated by the Serbian police, the Yugoslav army, and Serb paramilitary units. During the war, Yugoslav forces killed between 7,000–9,000 Kosovo Albanians, engaged in numerous acts of rape, destroyed villages, and displaced nearly one million people. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA or the UÇK) has also been implicated in atrocities, such as kidnappings and summary executions of civilians. Moreover, the NATO bombing campaign has been harshly criticized by human rights organizations and the Serbian government for causing roughly 500 civilian casualties.

In 2015, the Humanitarian Law Center released a list of people who were killed or went missing from 1 January 1998 to 31 December 2000, including 8,676 Kosovo Albanian civilians, 1,196 ethnic Serbs and 445 civilians who were members of other ethnicities such as Romani people and Bosniaks.

Background

By the 1980s, Kosovo Albanians constituted a majority in Kosovo. During the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of Serbs and Montenegrins left Kosovo, including some 57,000 during the 1970s alone. Socio-economic conditions, migration from underdeveloped areas, an increasingly adverse social-political climate and direct and indirect pressures were cited as the reasonings behind the departures. Slobodan Milošević gained political power by exploiting the grievances of Kosovo Serbs and pandering to the rising nationalist movement in Serbia.

Milošević abolished Kosovo's autonomy in 1989. With his rise to power, the Albanians started boycotting state institutions and ignoring the laws of the Republic of Serbia, culminating in the creation of the Republic of Kosova which received recognition from neighbouring Albania. Serbia (now in union with Montenegro as FR Yugoslavia) tried to maintain its political control over the province. With the formation of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a large number of Kosovo Albanians joined or supported the movement. The Serbian police and Yugoslav army response was brutal. In 1998, international sanctions were applied to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia because of persecution of Kosovo's Albanians by Yugoslav security forces.

Yugoslav war crimes

Persecution and ethnic cleansing

During the armed conflict in 1998, the Yugoslav army and Serbian police used excessive and random force, which resulted in property damage, the displacement of the population and the death of civilians. In the summer of 1998, hundreds of thousands of Albanians were driven from their homes.

The withdrawal of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe monitors on 20 March 1999, together with the start of NATO's bombing campaign, encouraged Milošević to implement a "campaign of expulsions". The Yugoslav government maintained that the refugee crisis was caused by the bombings. It was alleged that the expulsions were part of an operation codenamed Horseshoe. However, the existence and implementation of this specific plan has not been proven. Nevertheless, Yugoslav army, Serbian police and Serb paramilitary forces in the spring of 1999, in an organized manner, initiated a broad campaign of violence against Albanian civilians in order to expel them from Kosovo and thus maintain the political control of Belgrade over the province.Heinz Loquai: Der Kosovo-Konflikt. Wege in einen vermeidbaren Krieg. Die Zeit von Ende November 1997 bis März 1999 (in German)

According to the verdict of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the Federal army and Serbian police systematically attacked Albanian-populated villages after the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia that began on 24 March 1999; abused, robbed and killed civilians, ordering them to go to Albania or Montenegro, burned their houses, and destroyed their property. Nemanja Stjepanović claimed that within the campaign of violence, Kosovo Albanians were expelled from their homes, murdered, sexually assaulted, and had their religious buildings destroyed. The Yugoslav forces committed numerous war crimes during the implementation of a "joint criminal enterprise" whose aim was to "through the use of violence and terror, force a significant number of Kosovo Albanians to leave their homes and cross the border in order for the state government to retain control over Kosovo." The ethnic cleansing of the Albanian population was performed in the following way: first the army surrounded a village, followed by shelling of the village, then the police entered it, often with the army, and then crimes occurred (murders, beatings, expulsions, sexual violence ...).

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, by June 1999, the Yugoslav military, Serbian police and paramilitaries had expelled around 850,000 Albanians from Kosovo, and several hundred thousand more were internally displaced, in addition to those displaced prior to March. Approximately 440,000 refugees crossed the border into Albania and 320,000 fled to North Macedonia, while Bosnia and Herzegovina received more than 30,000.

Presiding Judge Iain Bonomy, who imposed the sentence, said that "deliberate actions of these forces during the campaign provoked the departure of at least 700,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo in the short period from late March to early June 1999."

Destruction of settlements Human Rights Watch (HRW) wrote that the Yugoslav army indiscriminately attacked Kosovo Albanian villages. Police and military forces had partially or completely destroyed thousands of Albanian villages in Kosovo by burning or shelling them. According to a UNHCR survey, nearly 40% of all residential houses in Kosovo were heavily damaged or completely destroyed by the end of the war. Out of a total of 237,842 houses, 45,768 were heavily damaged and 46,414 were destroyed.UNHCR GIS Unit, Pristina, Kosovo, "UNHCR Shelter Verification: Agency Coverage," 9 November 1999. In particular, homes in the city of Peja were heavily damaged. More than 80% of the 5,280 homes in the city were heavily damaged (1,590) or destroyed (2,774).

Rapes

Widespread rape and sexual violence occurred during the conflict and the majority of victims were Kosovo Albanian women. In 2000, Human Rights Watch documented 96 cases while adding that "it is likely that the number is much higher". The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted a survey on displaced Albanians and found that approximately 4.3% of the population had been raped, and estimated that there had been between 23,000 and 45,600 female rape victims between August 1998 and August 1999. Other figures put forward for the number of rape victims were 10,000–20,000, the figures however have not been verified, given the lack of investigation into wartime rapes. The 20,000 estimate originated from a World Health Organization report and the US Centers for Disease Control from information gathered by local NGOs. The Kosovo Women's Network gave the figure of over 10,000 girls and women who experienced wartime rape. Due to a lack of prosecutions against perpetrators, there has been a reluctance for women to come forward or testify.

Throughout the duration of the war, members of the Yugoslav army, police and paramilitaries would remove girls and women fleeing for safety from refugee columns and rape them, at times more than once and later released them to continue their journey. Other women had been subjected to rape in their homes, at times in front of their family or in temporary refuges located by the women for their elderly parents or children as they attempted to flee the conflict. Other women stayed in Kosovo and were without protection. The crimes by the Yugoslav military, paramilitary and police amounted to crimes against humanity and a war crime of torture.

Although numbers are difficult to determine, following the conflict, there were cases of women committing suicide, aborting their pregnancies, giving birth to children and later raising them or placing them up for adoption with a few instances of attempted strangulation of their babies. Postwar, the issue of wartime rape did not receive enough attention in the media and in political discourse within Kosovo and victims were left to deal with their experiences in private.

The government has founded a programme to help those victims. As by October 2018, 250 women have signed up, despite pushing on behalf of the Kosovan government by giving free specialized healthcare and trauma counseling for wartime rape survivors. Many of the victims were young girls, from 13 to 19 years old. Many rapes were committed by paramilitaries associated with the Arkan group, where the majority of rapes were carried out in the presence of children and men who were later killed.

Vasfije Krasniqi-Goodman was the first woman to speak publicly about having suffered sexual violence during the Kosovo war. On April 14, 1999, when Krasniqi-Goodman was 16 years old, Serbian paramilitaries and police entered her village of Stanovc, Vushtrri. A Serbian policeman entered her house and later took her to the Church of Babimovc where she was raped by him and another man. Afterwards, she was threatened that her family would be killed if she revealed what had happened.

Victims from rural areas however face difficulties obtaining documents which prove they had medical treatment, gave birth or had abortions as a result of rape from medical centres that were set up for refugees in Albania, North Macedonia or Montenegro after they were expelled from their homes. Victims have also been asked to provide statements they gave to prosecutors in investigations which they were interviewed as victims of rape.

Destruction of mosques, churches, shrines, monuments and other traditional architecture