From the Ashes of Yugoslavia to the Independence of Kosovo

From Milosevic’s rise to the 2008 declaration, Kosovo’s path to statehood was forged through systemic repression, NATO intervention, and a desperate struggle to escape genocide.

On a cold afternoon in February 2008, a small parliament in Pristina rose to its feet and declared that Kosovo was an independent and democratic state. Outside, crowds pressed into the boulevards, waving red and black flags and the new blue banner marked by six white stars. Fireworks cracked above apartment blocks still pocked by the memory of war. For many in the capital, this was the end of a long road. For others, it was the beginning of a more complicated journey.

To understand why that declaration mattered, one must go back nearly two decades earlier, to the final years of socialist Yugoslavia. Kosovo, a landlocked territory in the Balkans with a majority ethnic Albanian population and a Serb minority, had enjoyed a degree of autonomy within the Yugoslav federation. That autonomy was revoked in 1989 by the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. What followed was not a sudden war, but a slow unravelling.

Throughout the 1990s, Kosovo Albanians were removed from public institutions, schoo…