The most serious threat to both the internal stability and the international rehabilitation of Serbia during the late 1990s was the deteriorating situation in the province of Kosovo. In 1989 Ibrahim Rugova, leader of the Kosovar Albanians, had initiated a policy of nonviolent protest against the loss of provincial autonomy. The refusal of the international community to address the situation in Kosovo in Dayton lent support to the arguments of Rugova’s more radical opponents; the changes they demanded could not be secured by peaceful means. A new organization, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), emerged during 1996, and its sporadic attacks on Serbian police and officials steadily escalated, leading by 1998 to a substantial armed uprising in the Drenica region. The Serbian military effort to reassert control over the region was accompanied by atrocities such as the destruction of over 500 villages and the killing of an estimated 10,000 civilians, and some 200,000 refugees fled the area. Concern grew in the international community, but this did not deter the Yugoslav army and Serbian forces from launching a major offensive against the KLA in February 1999. Negotiations that had quickly been convened in Rambouillet, France, to resolve the crisis broke down and were followed in March by NATO air strikes against Serbian military targets and infrastructure. The Serbian response to the NATO action, however, was to drive out all of the Kosovar Albanians, pushing nearly 900,000 refugees into neighbouring Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro.

In June 1999, after weeks of air strikes, the Yugoslav government accepted a proposal for peace that had been mediated by representatives from Russia and Finland. Federal troops quickly evacuated the region, along with most of Kosovo’s Serb civilians, while nearly all of the displaced Kosovar Albanians returned. UN peacekeeping forces were deployed to the region, which then came under UN administration.

The federation of Serbia and Montenegro

In the late 1990s secessionists gained ground in Montenegro and called for independence from the Yugoslav federation and their much-larger Serbian neighbour. Despite the popularity of independence within Montenegro, international authorities, particularly those in the European Union (EU), believed that further political instability in Yugoslavia might unleash violence once again, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. In 2001 Montenegro’s pro-independence governing coalition announced that it would hold a referendum on independence, but in 2002 Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign minister, was able to forestall the plebiscite, brokering an agreement between Yugoslav Pres. Vojislav Koštunica, Montenegrin Pres. Milo Djukanović, and Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjić that would maintain the federation. The accord, which renamed the country Serbia and Montenegro, called for a loose federation between the two republics. The federal government would have jurisdiction over foreign and defense policy and coordinate international economic relations, but the republics would retain autonomy in other spheres. It also allowed each republic to hold a referendum on independence after the agreement had been in effect for three years. The historic pact was ratified in early 2003 by the Serbian, Montenegrin, and Yugoslav parliaments, and in February the name Yugoslavia was once again relegated to the annals of history. In turn, the federation of Serbia and Montenegro ceased to exist in 2006. Montenegro held a referendum in the spring of that year that resulted in its formal declaration of independence and its separation from Serbia on June 3.