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Kosova Situation
Historical Perspective
Albanians in the former Yugoslavia are an indigenous population living in their historical homeland. They inhabited these territories since the times of the ancient Illyrians, from whom they descended. Today, they make up about 50 percent of the Albanian people in the Balkans (50 percent living in the mother country, Albania). Kosova, as well as the other territories inhabited by Albanians in Yugoslavia, was occupied by Serbia in 1913, and the Europe of those days approved the borders we have today. The new arrangement dismembered the Albanian territories leaving the predominantly Albanian lands of Eastern Albanian to Serbia, and later to Yugoslavia. Similarly, after World War II, Serbia succeeded in reannexing Kosova again by force.
Immediately following World War II and for a short period thereafter, Albanians in Kosova, who make up over 90 percent of the local population, enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy. This brief period was fully destroyed by Serbia after 1981. Today Kosova is an occupied territory with a heavy concentration of Police forces and military units from Serbia .
The present confrontation in Kosova dates back six hundreds years. In June 13, 1399, in the battle of Kosovopolja the allied Christian armies of Serbia, Bulgaria and Albania, under the command of the Serbian King Lazar, fought a gallant but losing battle against the advancing Ottoman Turks. From that year until 1913, nearly the entire Balkan area came under Ottoman rule, which ended only with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire on the eve of World War I.
With the creation of modern Yugoslavia in 1945, six federal "republics" emerged: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia. Serbia included two autonomous provinces: Voivodina, with a large Hungarian population, and the predominantly Albanian Kosova. The latter is a province with a 2 million population (1990) bordering on Albania and occupying an area about the size of the state of Connecticut. Large numbers of Albanians (approx. 1 million) were left to the Republics of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia proper.
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