The architectural heritage of the Kosovo Albanians during Yugoslav rule was shown institutionalised disregard for decades prior to outright conflict at the end of the 20th century.. "For instance, before the Kosovo War of 1998–1989, Kosovar cultural property such as mosques from the Ottoman age was, with a few exceptions, not protected by Serbian legislation." Numerous Albanian cultural sites in Kosovo were destroyed during the period of Yugoslav rule and especially the Kosovo conflict (1998-1999) which constituted a war crime violating the Hague and Geneva Conventions.. "Reciprocally, architectural heritage associated with Kosovo's Albanian majority has been subjected to institutionalized disregard in the management of Kosovo's cultural heritage and, during the 1998-1999 conflict, catastrophic destruction. While this destruction constitutes a war crime in violation of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, it is also the counterpart to a sanctioned cultural heritage policy carried out for decades before the war." In all, 225 out of 600 mosques in Kosovo were damaged, vandalised, or destroyed alongside other Islamic architecture during the conflict. Additionally 500 Albanian owned kulla dwellings (traditional stone tower houses) and three out of four well-preserved Ottoman period urban centres located in Kosovo cities were badly damaged resulting in great loss of traditional architecture. Kosovo's public libraries, of which 65 out of 183 were completely destroyed, amounted to a loss of 900,588 volumes, while Islamic libraries sustained damage or destruction resulting in the loss of rare books, manuscripts and other collections of literature. Archives belonging to the Islamic Community of Kosovo, records spanning 500 years, were also destroyed. During the war, Islamic architectural heritage posed for Yugoslav Serb paramilitary and military forces as Albanian patrimony with destruction of non-Serbian architectural heritage being a methodical and planned component of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.. "One aspect of this consolidation involved the narration of late-socialist vandalism against Serbian Orthodox graves and cemeteries as "ethnic violence" carried out by Kosovar Albanians against Serbs; another involved the postsocialist destruction of Islamic buildings posed as Albanian patrimony by Serb military and paramilitary forces."
History
Yugoslav Period
For around five centuries being a province of the Ottoman Empire, numerous examples of Ottoman architecture existed in Kosovo. In the aftermath of World War Two, Yugoslavia was governed by communist authorities who implemented various modernisation drives toward changing the architectural landscape and design of urban settlements. These measures were aimed at altering the panorama of a settlement that was deemed to have elements associated with an unwanted Ottoman past and features deemed as "backward".. Starting from the late 1940s, architectural heritage in main urban centres of Kosovo began to be destroyed, mainly conducted by the local government as part of urban modernisation schemes. During the 1950s this process was undertaken by the Urban Planning Institute (Urbanistički zavod) of Yugoslavia with the most prominent example in Kosovo of the socialist modernisation drive being in Pristina. The Ottoman Pristina bazaar contained 200 shops set in blocks devoted to a craft or guild owned by Albanians grouped around a mosque, located in the centre of Pristina. These buildings were expropriated in 1947 and demolished by labour brigades known as Popular Fronts (Albanian: , Serbian: ).. "Kosovo was a province of the Ottoman empire for five centuries and its territory contained many examples of Ottoman architecture, yet only one Ottoman-era monument, the Sultan Murat Turbe, was classified as “cultural monument” in this period; the other such monuments were drawn from the patrimony of the Serbian Orthodox Church.... Premodernity was reified not only by preservation of its treasured signs, however, but also by the elimination of its obsolete components: an abject heritage whose purpose, in modernization, was to be destroyed. This destruction was also institutionalized in socialist modernization. By the 1950s, this modernization was the responsibility of the Urban Planning Institute (Urbanistički zavod) in the capital cities of all republics. Before then, however, destruction was also planned and managed by local governments as part of urban modernization schemes. In Kosovo, beginning in the late 1940s, the destruction of abject heritage took place in each major city, most prominently in Kosovo's capital city of Pristina. The modernization of Pristina was initiated with the destruction of the Ottoman-era bazaar (čaršija) at the center of the city: in 1947, the provincial government expropriated the buildings in the bazaar in the name of urban renewal and then demolished them.... Laid out in the fifteenth century, Pristina's bazaar was composed of some two hundred shops arranged around a mosque (xhami in Albanian, džamija in Serbian); these shops were owned by and operated by members of Pristina's Albanian community. The shops were set within blocks, each devoted to a particular guild or craft.... Like other public works at the time in Yugoslavia, the destruction of Pristina's bazaar was organized by labor brigades called Popular Fronts (Fronti populluer in Albanian, Narodnifront in Serbian)."
In 1952, the Yugoslav government founded the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of Kosovo tasked with dealing with issues relating to cultural heritage in Kosovo. During post-war communist Yugoslavia, only one Ottoman era monument the Tomb of Sultan Murad I was listed as a cultural monument, while state protection status was given mainly to Serbian Orthodox Church architecture in Kosovo. The criteria for listing mosques as historic monuments was much more restrictive than for Serbian Orthodox architecture. Buildings who had protection status received funding for historical preservation, while unlisted mosques, many from the Ottoman period that were renovated during this time was done without the Institute's supervision often resulting in damage or original architectural elements being destroyed. On the eve of the Kosovo conflict, only 15 mosques out of the 600 or more mosques had been awarded the status of historic monument, unlike 210 Orthodox Serbian churches, gravesites and monasteries that had been awarded the status of protected historic monument.. "While the construction of religious buildings in Yugoslavia was restricted from the establishment of Tito's Communist government in 1945 until the relaxation of church-state relations in the mid-1970s, the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of Kosovo, founded in 1952, institutionalized the production of cultural heritage in Kosovo and provided another field on which an ideology of culture would play itself out. By the time of last year's war, some 210 Serbian Orthodox churches, monasteries, and gravesites were listed as protected historic monuments in Kosovo, including over forty churches built between the 1930s and the 1990s. In contrast, only fifteen of the more than six hundred mosques in Kosovo were listed as historic monuments, even though well over half of these mosques date from the Ottoman era (fourteenth through nineteenth centuries). As the criteria for considering mosques as “historic monuments” were far more restrictive than those for Serbian Orthodox buildings, Kosovo's cultural heritage was materially transformed: while listed buildings received all funds designated for historic preservation, the renovation of unlisted mosques was undertaken without the Institute's supervision and frequently resulted in the damaging or destruction of original architectural elements."
Kosovo Conflict (1998-1999)
The Kosovo conflict triggered a counter-insurgency campaign in 1998-1999 by Yugoslav Serb armed forces (VJ) fighting against Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) fighters that escalated into the Kosovo war (1999) and military intervention from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).. During the counter-insurgency campaign Yugoslav Serb forces targeted collections of various state archives and buildings, museums and libraries; Islamic libraries, Muslim theological schools and Sufi lodges (tekkes).