On February 17, 2008, 15 years ago, the parliament in Pristina proclaimed the independence of Kosovo. At the time, no one suspected that a decade and a half later the country would again be on the brink of a military conflict. Without the NATO-led peacekeeping force KFOR, which comprises almost 4,000 soldiers, including members of the Bundeswehr, this frozen conflict would certainly have turned hot again long ago.
D.he Serbian government in Belgrade is still unwilling to recognize the statehood of the former autonomous province. The first combat operations in what was then Yugoslavia took place in Croatia in the summer of 1990 and in Slovenia a year later. But the decision of Ljubljana and Zagreb to leave the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1991 is inseparable from the fact that Belgrade revoked the autonomous status of Kosovo in 1989, which was already largely inhabited by ethnic Albanians at the time.
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