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| - Special prosecutors investigating war crimes committed by Kosovo separatists during their conflict with Serbia announced charges Wednesday against Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and former parliamentary speaker Kadri Veseli. Here are key points about the 1998-99 conflict that put western-backed Kosovo on a path to independence, a move never accepted by Serbia or its allies Russia and China. In former Yugoslavia, Kosovo was a southern Serbian province. It nonetheless enjoyed a special autonomous status that gave Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority power to form a government and assembly, and send representatives to the federal government and eight-member presidency. The province also had control over its education and judical systems and police forces. In March 1989, on the eve of Yugoslavia's bloody break up, then Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic revoked Kosovo's autonomy and concentrated all authority in Belgrade. That led to huge protests by ethnic Albanians in Kosovo's main city Pristina and clashes with police that claimed 24 lives, including two officers. After Kosovo's autonomy was revoked, ethnic Albanians who refused to show loyalty to Milosevic's regime were fired from jobs in schools, hospitals, media outlets and police and security forces. The head of the Kosovo writers' union, Ibrahim Rugova, launched a peaceful resistance movement that involved creating parallel state structures for ethnic Albanians in the province. The shadow government provided basic services like education and healthcare in private homes through most of the 1990s, with funding coming mostly from the diaspora. In 1997, a separatist guerrilla movement emerged, recruiting ethnic Albanians who believed that Rugova's non-violent movement would not be effective against Milosevic's repressive regime. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began its fight for independence from Serbia in 1998. In early March of that year, Belgrade launched its first offensive against the KLA in the central Drenica region, a main rebel stronghold. Over the next 15 months, fighting claimed 13,000 lives, overwhelmingly ethnic Albanians. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were also displaced. Serbia sought to cover up war crimes by piling thousands of victims' remains into mass graves, including several throughout Serbia. After Milosevic was deposed in 2000, the remains of several hundred ethnic Albanians were uncovered in mass graves near Belgrade, and dozens of bodies were found at a special police base in eastern Serbia and near a lake in the west. The Hague-based International Criminal Court for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) sentenced a former deputy prime minister and five top former Serbian military and police officials for war crimes during the Kosovo conflict. No KLA leaders were sentenced by the court. Yet the rebels were accused of the kidnapping and disappearance of at least 500 civilians, mostly ethnic Serbs and Roma, along with ethnic Albanian political opponents, according to a 2011 Council of Europe report. The EU-funded Kosovo Specialist Chambers (KSC) was created in 2015 to investigate these and other crimes allegedly committed by the guerillas, many of whom went on to hold senior political posts in Kosovo. Milosevic's refusal to halt his crackdown on ethnic Albanian civilians triggered a NATO intervention in 1999 that forced Serb troops out of the former province and brought Kosovo under UN administration. In 2008, Kosovo unilaterally declared independence, with backing from the US and most of the West. Serbia has never accepted the move, and relations between the two states remain strained. ks/ssm/wai
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