Kosovo Liberation Army – Transformation from a Terrorist Organisation to Regular Armed Forces

Abstract

Deprived in 1989 of the autonomous provincial status of the former Yugoslavia, which it had acquired in 1974, the population of Kosovo, which is demographically predominantly of Albanian ethnicity, had two options to assert its interests against the repressive policies of Milosevic. First, they sought to regain their rights through a peaceful, negotiated settlement, the so-called passive resistance, and then, because of the failure of this approach – and the example of the bloody Bosnian war on ethnic grounds – they engaged in an armed (independence) struggle, initially by terrorist means and later organised as a guerrilla army. Their success, however, was not achieved militarily, but by winning international public opinion and, through it, forcing NATO to intervene. After the end of the conflict, the freedom fighter guerrillas – in Kosovo, which is still (de jure) part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under UN Security Council Resolution 1244, but is in fact (de facto) an international protectorate – first became paramilitary, after the unilateral declaration of independence in 2008, the creation of a national military force to guarantee statehood, sovereignty and territorial integrity became an increasingly important objective. This paper aims to briefly describe this transformation process.