27 years since the liberation of Kosovo
Twenty-seven years ago, 50,000 NATO troops were deployed to Kosovo, accompanied by a United Nations interim administration.
On 12 June 1999, after 78 days of bombing by the US-led Western military alliance against Serbian and Montenegrin military targets in Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro, NATO forces entered Kosovo on a peacekeeping mission that would become known as KFOR, bringing an end to nearly two years of conflict between the insurgent Albanian population — organised within the Kosovo Liberation Army — and the Serbian-Montenegrin military and police forces of occupation.
Remembered by those who lived through it as a day of liberation and one of the greatest days in Kosovo's history, 12 June — though not recognised as an official public holiday — is a date that military figures and diplomats around the world recall as a moment that nearly brought the West and Russia into direct confrontation; a day that, as it was said at the time, "could have started the Third World War."
The first NATO troops to enter Kosovo on 12 June were Norwegian special forces and Britain's Special Air Service, who found themselves face to face with Russian troops that had "unexpectedly" seized Pristina Airport the previous day with the aim of partitioning Kosovo.
Following an American and British blockade of the airport runway, the Russian Foreign Ministry described its soldiers' intervention as "a mistake." Everything else, as they say, is history. NATO's entry into Kosovo enabled the return of more than one million Albanians.
The arrival of NATO troops opened the way home — to their houses, land and country — for more than one million Kosovo Albanians who had been displaced as refugees across dozens of countries on three or four continents.
To date, nearly 500,000 members of peacekeeping forces from numerous countries, predominantly Western ones, have served in Kosovo — spending time away from their families and loved ones and sacrificing a portion of their lives for freedom, security and peace in Kosovo.
