Responding to the Refugee Crisis in Kosovo (1999)

In 1998 and 1999, as a result of wide-scale human rights abuses in which thousands of Albanian Kosovars were killed in the course of ethnic cleansing by Serb forces and tens of thousands more were subjected to arbitrary arrest, torture, rape, and other human rights crimes more than 800,000 Kosovars fled as fled to neighboring countries, and perhaps 500,000 more people were displaced within Kosovo.

Following the end of the NATO bombardment, the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces, and the installation of the United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo (UNMIK), there was a mass return of refugees and at a scale and speed which was historically unprecedented. Between mid-June and the beginning on August 1999, almost 90% of the Kosovar Albanians who had fled the province since March 1998 returned. Careful plans for gradual returns were overtaken by events. In this context, serious gaps in the regime to protect refugees and internally-displaced persons were becoming evident. Human Rights First sought to identify protection problems for refugees, returnees, internally displaced persons and minorities as well as mechanisms for strengthening the protection of those who had not yet returned.

Our research highlighted the urgent need to protect the physical safety of returning minority refugees in Kosovo. This led us to examine how to fill the vacuum resulting from the absence of a functioning police force and justice system. Our efforts to identify practical measures to improve the justice system culminated in the publication of A Fragile Peace and the widespread consideration of its recommendations by the U.N. and U.S. government agencies to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

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