The Kosovo Liberation Army

Abstract

The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) more properly the UCK (Ushtria Çlirimitare e Kosovës) came to international prominence in the late 1990s, as a product of the crisis in the province of Kosovo-Metohija in Serbia. (For its Albanian population the land is known as Kosova; for cartographers; simply Kosovo.) Although some claim a history for the organization stretching back over two decades, it does not seem to have existed as a functioning institution until 1996 or 1997.2 There was no coincidence in the sudden rise of an active, military response to Slobodan Milosevic's Serbian government's repressive policies in the region, at that time. The attempted resolution of the Balkan wars that were a result of the break-up of Yugoslavia had been reached via the Dayton Accords of November 1995. While this agreement went a long way to resolving the conflict between the major successor states of the Yugoslav federation established as result of the Second World War, it actually left the ethnically Albanian majority population of Kosovo in a worse position than ever before.3