The Kosovo problem From the Standpoints of Military Policy and International Law

The escalation in the Serb-populated northern part of Kosovo, paralleled by the deepening of the EU crisis, underscored the inefficiency of the efforts and approached supposed to help resolve the bitter dispute over Serbia's breakaway province. It became abundantly clear that the attempts made since late 2010 to reach compromise via technical talks between Belgrade and Pristina radicalized both parties to the conflict and put in jeopardy the fragile political balance across the Balkans rather than produced appreciable results. The cause of the problem is that since the late 1990ies the US and the EU have been engaging in geopolitical games around Kosovo, regarding the province as a proving ground for strategies waiting to be applied on a much wider scale and aimed at putting greater territories with their natural resources and infrastructures under Western control. Due to the complexity of the legacy with which the region is burdened and to the interplay of divergent present-day influences, the West's Kosovo project failed to reach completion, tensions in and over the province became chronic, and the EU saw its already questionable unity in foreign policy and military affairs seriously eroded.

The conflict over Kosovo grew out of concurrent Serbian and Albanian statehood aspirations and can be traced back to the Great Eastern Crisis, which erupted in 1875-1878, the epoch when the Balkan borders were subject to a major overhaul, new statehoods were coming into being, and Albanian radicalism factored for the first time into the Balkan agenda. The June-July, 1978 resolutions of the League for the Defense of the Rights of the Albanian Nation commonly known as the League of Prizren were the first documents to reflect the Albanian leaders' push for the creation of an Albanian state spanning all Albanian-populated regions of the Ottoman Empire. The program laid out in one of the documents included such goals as all-out struggle against any perceived annexations of Albanian territories and for their unification within a single province¹. The resolutions passed by the League of Prizren expressed the Albanians' opposition to what they saw as potential territorial gains at their expense and carried the pledge to never admit “occupants” to the lands Albanians regarded as their own². Part of the League of Prizren's program was that representatives of territories not listed in the original resolutions were welcome to join the League as friends of the planned Albanian state and its administration¹. Ohrid, a currently Macedonian city central to the region, was supposed to become the capital of the united Albanian vilayat⁴.

There is a general expert consensus that the resolutions were the first message about the Albanians' longing for territorial unification⁵. Their key concepts were given a far more assertive form when, in September, 1978, the League's radical wing unveiled an updated programme⁶ which demanded that no part of Albanian districts, however small, be passed to other nations and that all Albanian-populated regions, the Shkodër and Ioannina vilayats in particular, unite within what was called the Albanian vilayat⁷.

The League's delegates occasionally went as far as to call for the incorporation into Albania of Greece's whole Epirus including the strategic cities of Preveza, Arta, and Ioannina. A memorandum submitted in March, 1879 to the great powers drew arguments in favor of the Albanian radicals' position from loosely interpreted history, stating that the Albanian nation was older than the Greek one and that in the old days Epirus belonged to Albania and was not owned by the Greeks⁸.

In 1908-1910, the Albanian-populated regions of the Ottoman Empire became the scene of increasingly powerful rebellions which in 1911 evolved into a powerful anti-Turkish uprising. On June 23, a local Albanian committee in Podgorica put together a memorandum known as the Red Book which featured the first comprehensive program of the Albanians' struggle for the administrative and economic autonomy of Albanian-populated territories. The Red Book was supplied to both the Turkish administration and the governments of top European powers. A memorandum endorsed by the leaders of the Vlorë revolutionary committee and submitted to the British, French, and Russian diplomatic services along with European newspapers, called the Turkish authorities to immediately comply with the Albanians' demands⁹.

In July, 1912, V. Viktorov, a correspondent from  Rech', a St. Petersburg newspaper, interviewed Riza Bey, the leader of one of the numerous Albanian uprisings. Riza Bey bluntly declared that, according to the Albanians' view, the Albanians and the Russians were the world's only two great nations and explained that the goal of his movement was to help the great Albanian nation to reclaim the rights it was entitled to. He stressed that what was happening at the moment was only the first phase of the process, with special rights being requested for the Shkodër, Ioannina, Bitola, and Kosovo vilayats, with no conclusion reached so far concerning the Thessaloniki vilayat where a part of the population was also ethnically Albanian. Riza Bey said the cause was uniformly upheld by all Albanians¹⁰.

In the epoch, Russia's Balkan envoys reported the rise of Albanian nationalism and wared about the related threats. In 1912, Russian consul in Vlorë A.M. Petryaev wrote to St. Petersburg that Albanians who used to play no role in politics were, under the Turkish domination, accumulating such power that enabled the ethnic group to start overstepping its initial borders and absorbing another nation, notably a one with a glorious history¹¹.

In 1912-1923, on the eve of World War I, two key conflicting tendencies which even these days continue to define the Kosovo dynamics were already visible across the Balkans. On the one hand, taking into account an array of ethnic, religious, and cultural factors, Serbia's leadership was trying to regain and strengthen control over extensive territories with mixed Serbian-Albanian populations. Belgrade hoped to use the Albanian quest for statehood in its own interests so as to secure the Albanians' neutrality if not direct support in the course of the Balkan Union's struggle against Turkey and to reach out to the Adriatic Sea via the lands inhabited by Albanians. The academically credible argument that a large part of the Albanian population had Serbian roots was invoked to this end for the first time by Serbian premier Nikola P. Pašić at the peak of the first Balkan War on November, 1912. Receiving Austrian envoy Ugron in Belgrade, Pašić said that Serbia was interested in the Adriatic Sea the lands near which were not foreign to it, historically belonged to Serbia, and were inhabited by Albanians who were also Serbs by origin and could always count on Serbia's protection¹². On the other hand, the Albanian leaders sought to maximally expand their own space and to tailor the internationally recognized Balkan borders accordingly. A report prepared in 1912 by Russian diplomat A.M. Petryaev, Russia's top expert in Albanian affairs and delegate to the International Commission of Control for Albania, said that the Albanian cause was supported by the Ottoman Empire to which they formally belonged. It was stressed in the report that since the XVII-XVIII centuries, under the Turkish domination, the territories forcedly abandoned by Slavs used to be immediately taken over by Muslims, mostly Albanians. Thus Turkey was getting rid of the alien Slavic elements and Albanians were acquiring additional territories. As a result, Serbs were exposed to doubled pressure  exerted by the Turkish rulers and the Albanian settlers, and in many cases had no option but to flee. Three biggest Serbian clans – the Bjelopavlići, Kuči, and Vanevici - hail from  the Prizren and Pécs area. Related Serbian clans that stayed in the area morphed into the Albanian clans of Krasniqi and Berishi, which still recognize common ancestry with the above Montenegrin clans. Many other important Serbian clans converted to Islam and merged with Albanians¹³.

The Albanian National Assembly which gathered in Vlorë on November 28, 1912 passed the Albanian Declaration of Independence, which a number of great powers helped to draft. In particular, head of Albania's first government Ismail Qemal Bej visited Vienna to discuss the plan for the Albanian statehood and supplied to the media information about the borders of the emerging country which, in addition to Albania proper, was supposed to include Bitola, Ioannina, Skopje, Pristina, and Prizren. The December, 1914 London Conference of the great powers' ambassadors did not accept the Vlorë declaration and ruled that several territories claimed by Albanians were to be allocated to other Balkan countries. After heated debates, which Austrian diplomat M. Mensdorff who attended the conference likened to shopping for a carpet at the Istanbul bazaar, most of today's Kosovo was incorporated into Serbia and Montenegro¹⁴.

Speaking at the House of Commons on August 12, 1913, British diplomacy chief Edward Grey and formerly the chair of the London Conference expressed a somewhat cynical but otherwise exact view that – though the agreement on Albania's borders would inevitably draw criticism from those who were familiar with the local conditions and regarded the issue exclusively in this light - the actual priority behind the agreement was to preserve accord among the great powers¹⁵. A century later, the great powers' approach to the Balkans remains similarly cynical.

Absent any kind of international support, the pan-Albanian ideology seemed unrealistic and was fairly unpopular in the interregnum between the two world wars. The committee for the protection of Kosovo, established in November 1918 by a group of Albanian immigrants, called the great powers to revise the borders set by the London Conference of ambassadors and to sanction the unification of all Albanian-populated territories within a common statehood. The great powers, however, generally continued to adhere to the old principles of delimitation between Albania and its Balkan neighbors. Around 500,000 Albanians thus found themselves residing in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes which later became known as Yugoslavia, and some 70,000 – in Greece. As a result, radical Albanian leaders were able to criticize the arrangement on the grounds that thus almost a half of the people with Albanian identities were left outside of the Albanian state¹⁶.

In contrast, World War II brought a renaissance of the Greater Albania ideology as Italy passed to Albania which it occupied in 1939 the territories carved out of adjacent Balkan countries: the the districts of Pristina, Pécs, and Prizren (today's Kosovo), Tetovo, Debar, Kičevo, and Struga (today's Macedonia), and Ulqini, Tuzi, and Plav (today's Montenegro). In the meantime, the Kosovo prefectures of Mitrovica, Vučitrn, Gjilani, and Podujevo remained within the German-occupied Serbia.

The developments made it possible for the Albanian ruling fascist party to declare in May, 1941 that almost all Albanian-populated Balkan territories had been incorporated into Albania¹⁷. Epirus, a Greek province referred to as Chameria in Albanian and to which the Italian occupational administration appointed Xhemil Dino as supreme commissar, was an exception from the rule. The province was left under the control of the Athens-based Italian military command. Besides, Macedonia's Skopje, Kumanovo, and Prespa, Kačanik in Kosovo, and Preševo in South Serbia were annexed by Bulgaria. The Balli Kombëtar national front came into being in Albania in 1942, its agenda combining anti-communism and the unification of all Albanian-populated territories. Its 1943 declaration unequivocally called for struggle for a «free, democratic, and ethnic Albania»¹⁸.

In 1943, the German occupational administration in Prizren helped to establish the so-called Second League of Prizren charged with coordinating with an eye to ethnic unification the Albanian movements across the Balkans and among Albanian groups based outside of the region. According to Albanian researchers such as Zamir Shtylla, by the time some 200,000-300,000 Albanians left Kosovo and Yugoslavia as a whole, mostly moving to the US and Turkey¹⁹. Independent scholars do offer lower figures of the Albanian emigration from Kosovo in the period between the two world wars. British author N. Malcolm, for example, estimates it a 90,000-150,000.

The four years of the fascist occupation were the only epoch during which «the Greater Albania» was a political reality. The formation existed till the expulsion of the Italian and German occupants from the Balkans. As a part of the post-war settlement, the anti-Hitler coalition decided to reinstate Albania's original borders  which generally coincided with those defined at the 1912—1913 London Conference of the great powers' ambassadors.

Estimatedly, some 100,000-200,000 Serbs and Montenegrins fled Kosovo in the wartime years, while thousands of Albanians from Albania moved in and, welcomed in Yugoslavia in 1944-1948, stayed on a permanent basis after the war²⁰.

Under Enver Hoxha, Albania's claims to Kosovo, albeit unannounced, were backed by the Albanian propaganda targeting the population of the province. Albania's publishing houses and, curiously, the Pristina university were similarly instrumental in the process. For example, a two-volume treatise titled The History of Albania, which originally saw the light of day in Tirana, was reprinted in Pristina in 1979 as The History of the Albanian Nation. It alleged that Albania in its current shape did not include territories with compact Albanian populations, which had been unjustly taken from the country and remained occupied. Books carrying such statements were published with full support from the Yugoslavian administration which feared Serbian nationalism and therefore readily poured money into the  Albanian propaganda²¹. Executive Secretary of the Communist Party of Kosovo Becir Hoti admitted in 1982 that the Albanian nationalists' platform essentially amounted to two points: the creation of an ethnically uniform Albanian republic and the unification with Albania aimed at establishing what they described as the Greater Albania²². A national ethnographic conference gathered in 1976 in Tirana to discuss the then-present day state of «the Albanian national problem» and, again, talks revolved around the fact that some five million Albanians at the time lived outside of Albania proper²³.

Albanian radicals in Kosovo were nevertheless outraged over the lack of practical efforts that could bring about the creation of the Great Albania. In the early 1980ies, they used to complain that Hoxha, the party and government leader, still did not deserve to be called the leader of the Albanian nation²⁴.

The Great Albania plan started to look more practical with the collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 1990ies. Showered with geopolitical initiatives and facing a tide of national self-awareness among their various nations, the Balkans saw an unprecedented rise of separatism²⁵. It is a general tendency that ethnic identity issues come into spotlight and feature prominently on political agendas during crises, which was exactly the case in Europe in the late 1980ies²⁶. The trend manifested itself in numerous quests for «greater statehood» across the Balkans. Under the circumstances, nationalist ideologists typically draw from their predecessors' traditional concepts which, in the Balkans, were born along with the very national statehoods²⁷.

It should be noted that radicalization among Albanians was not limited to Kosovo or the wider Serbia. In 1992, Albanian radicals proclaimed a so-called Macedonia-Ilirida republic in Macedonia's city of Struga²⁸. At present radical Albanian leaders in Macedonia openly call for the conversion of the country into a Slavic-Albanian confederation, threatening that the alternative may be their Kosovo-style unilateral independence. Albanian parties within Macedonia's ruling coalition, at the same time, do adhere officially to the position that the country should preserve its current configuration²⁹.

The deepening of the conflict between the Serb and the Albanian communities in Kosovo and the lack of attention to the problem from the international community, which seemed preoccupied with Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina or even Macedonia, both led to the progressing radicalization among the Albanian population of the province. As a result, in 1997-1998 I. Rugova's Democratic League of Kosovo with its traditional opposition to violence was sidelined by the Kosovo Liberation Army which espoused the Greater Albania ideology and maintained a network of military bases in north-east Albania. As for Albania proper, it entered a period of unrest and anarchy in the early 1997, the side-effects being mass looting of army arsenals and the proliferation of weapons to Kosovo and other Balkan regions³⁰.

In July, 1998 Kosovo Liberation Army spokesman and would-be Kosovo assembly chairman Jakup Krasniqi issued a statement that the group's objective was the unification of all Albanian-populated territories³¹. Kosovo Liberation Army chief of staff said more or less the same on New Year's eve in 1997 and called for making 1998 and 1999 the years of the Albanian unification and Kosovo's independence³². In 1998 the Albanian academy of science rolled out a «platform for resolving the Albanian national problem» in which the problem itself was defined as the «liberation of Albanian territories from occupation and their unification within a separate national statehood»³³.

It is explainable in the context that in 1999 then-US ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill projected that similarly to the  Greater Serbia which used to be a cause of concern throughout the 1990ies, the headache in the coming century would be the Greater Albania³⁴. Albanian intellectual Fatos Lubonja admitted that “the Albanians’ dream of being united one day has been a part of their collective consciousness without becoming a political program because Albanians have always been very weak”³⁵.

Albanian nationalism in Kosovo grew at a breakneck pace. An October-November, 2006 UN poll whose results were released in 2007 showed that at the time only 2.5% of Albanians believed in  the unification with Albania as an optimal solution to the Kosovo problem, while 96% backed the independence of Kosovo in its current borders³⁶. In contrast, the January, 2010 Gallup Balkan Monitor survey revealed that the majority (74.2%) of Albanians in Kosovo, which had proclaimed independence unilaterally in February, 2008 and in Albania (70.5%) favored the Greater Albania design, with 47.3% in Kosovo and 39.5% in Albania believing that the project could materialize in maximally broad ethnic borders in the nearest future. The support for the Greater Albania in Kosovo further rose to 81% over 2010. Some 53% of Albanians in Macedonia also expressed support for all-inclusive Albanian statehood³⁷.

The data highlighted the perilous drift within the Albanians' value system induced by both the success of the independent Kosovo project and the provocative position of the international community which tended to be pro-Albanian regardless of the clear evidence that the Kosovo Liberation Army and its leaders (who currently hold key posts in the Kosovo administration) were linked to international terrorist groups and to organized crime. According to a CIA report submitted to the US Congress, since the second half of the 1990ies Kosovo and Sandžak (a predominantly Muslim-populated area at the interface between Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro) were a zone where heightened influence was exercised by Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Moreover, Kosovo hosts an important route of drug supply to Europe and the US, and Camilla, a local drug-dealing clan, is known to be among the world's five top-powerful³⁸. It is noteworthy that the Albanian immigrant community is extremely active in advancing its Balkan agenda in the US and even has its lobbyists in the US Congress, the White House, and the US intelligence community. For example, George Tenet, who served as the CIA director in 1997-2004, at the peak of the Kosovo crisis, was an ethnic Albanian. Leading Albanian intellectual Recep Çosya wrote - in the Illyria Albanian-American Newspaper, importantly - that Albania never recognized its existing borders and always kept the international community aware that the borders were unfair and cut across the Albanian-populated territory - “across the heart of the Albanian nation”, as he chose to describe the situation³⁹.

The above should explain why Washington's perception of the Albanian theme evolved fundamentally in the late 1990ies. In the early 1998, before the conflict in Kosovo spun completely out of international control, Clinton administration's Balkan envoy Robert Gelbard said there was no doubt that the Kosovo Liberation Army was a terrorist group. Nevertheless, in no time the White House took to engaging with it with the aims of implementing the US scenario for the Balkans and strengthening the US and NATO positions in Kosovo. The US Senate's Republican Policy Committee scrutinized the transformation in a March, 1999 report revealingly titled “The Kosovo Liberation Army: Does Clinton Policy Support Group with Terror, Drug Ties?”, which stressed that somehow the White House started to regard the Kosovo Liberation Army, formerly believed to be a terrorist formation, as partners⁴⁰. Jerry Seper wrote in The Washington Times on May 3, 1999 in a paper titled  "KLA Finances War with Heroin Sales": "They were terrorists in 1998 and now, because of politics, they're freedom fighters"⁴¹. Addressing the US Congress Foreign Policy Committee in 1999, just days before NATO launched air raids against Yugoslavia, Robert Gelbard had to explain whether he continued to see the Kosovo Liberation Army as a terrorist group. His response was that even though it did commit terrorist acts it was not listed as such by the US government⁴².

At the time, the US Administration actually built serious personal relationships with some of the Kosovo Liberation Army leaders like Ramush Haradinaj who would later become Kosovo's premier and face a Hague Tribunal probe. According to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Haradinaj counted among the White House's valuable military and intelligence assets⁴³. 

It is not surprising therefore that, while the June 10, 1999 UN Security Council Resolution 1244 urged the international community to find a solution to the Kosovo problem based on respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia and the Balkan region's other countries and on previous resolutions calling for greater autonomy and self-government of the province, Washington emerged as a pushy architect of the Kosovo independence⁴⁴.

These days, the military political and occasionally ethnic ties between the US and other Western establishments on the one side and the Kosovo separatists on the other continue to contribute to the impunity of the latter, no matter what crimes – like illicit human organs trafficking in the case that drew much publicity recently – they commit. As described by chief prosecutor from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia Carla del Ponte, in 1999 at least 300 Serbs were taken to camps in the northern part of Albania, where they were killed and their organs were extracted for sale on the Western market. Some of the prisoners, according to del Ponte, were women from Kosovo, Albania, Russia, and other Slavic countries, and the activity was sanctioned and supervised by top and mid-ranking Kosovo Liberation Army officers⁴⁵. In particular, the evidence collected by investigators implicated Kosovo Liberation Army political leader and today's Kosovo premier Hashim Thaci, Ramush Haradinaj who currently leads the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo at the Kosovo Assembly, and former Kosovo Liberation Army commander and government head Agim Çeku. Carla del Ponte wrote that an investigation into the crimes never opened as the UN mission and NATO peacekeepers believed that charging Thaci and  Çeku would endanger both their personnel and the whole Balkan peace process⁴⁶. The West continues to block any attempts to probe into the horrific crimes committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army leaders, even though in January, 2011 the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed a resolution on the subject.

There is every reason to believe that, while the emergence of the Greater Serbia has been prevented by military and other means by the international community which acted in line with the West's blueprints for Kosovo and the whole Balkan region, from the outset the Greater Albania was not regarded by the key players as a possibility to worry about. At the moment, though, the situation appears to be getting out of hand. “Only perhaps some Albanian nationalists have yet to abandon the dreams given up by their neighbors ”, writes British expert Mark Mazover⁴⁷. This, however, is evidently not what the Greater Albania ideologists are planning. The main demands pressed by Albin Kurti, leader of the Kosovo Assembly's third-largest and increasingly popular and markedly radical Self-Determination group, are the Albania-Kosovo merger and subsequent unification of all Balkan Albanian-populated regions in line with the League of Prizren 1878-1881 program. The People's Movement of Kosovo renown for its contacts with US and European Albanian-immigrant communities shares the views and tends to be even more radical in what concerns the Greater Albania than the Pristina and Tirana administrations⁴⁸. Overall, the eventual creation of the Greater Albania, a state to be built in the interests of Albanian militarized clans, international terrorist groups, organized crime, and the US circles thus seeking to keep Europe on a short leash, is becoming an increasingly likely scenario against the backdrop of the Kosovo self-proclaimed independence. 

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Косово: исторические, военно-политические и международно-правовые аспекты проблемы (RUS)

Косово: историјски, војно-политички и Међународно-правни аспекти проблема (SRB)

Keywords: Kosovo, Serbia, Russia, the Balkans, international relations, geopolitics, Eurasia, the Greater Albania, the Hague Tribunal

 Reuter J. Die Albaner in Jugoslawien. München, 1982. S.18.Albanian Factor in the Evolution of the Yugoslavian Crisis. Documents. Vol. 3 (1878-1997). Moscow, 2006. P.40.

1. Ibid.

2.Vickers M. The Albanians. A Modern History. London - New York, 1995. P.33.

3. Pan-Albanianism: How Big a Threat to Balkan Stability? Tirana-Brussels, 2004. P.3.

4. Pollo S., Puto A. The History of Albania. London, 1981. P.125.

5. Hasani S. Kosovo. Istine i zablude. Zagreb, 1986. S.284-285.

6. Citation from: Brief History of Albania. Moscow, 1992. P. 182.

7. Russian Empire Foreign Policy Archive. Babylon Consulate. Folder 600(603). Doc. 22, p. 65

10. Rech', 1912, July 28.

11. Russian Empire Foreign Policy Archive. Babylon Consulate. Folder 482. Doc. 5296, p. 52

12. Ibid.

13. Albanian Factor in the Evolution of the Yugoslavian Crisis. Documents. Vol. 1, P. 56

14. Puto A. L’independence albanaise et la diplomatie des Grandes Puissances (1912-1914). Tirana, 1982. P.163.

15. Citation from: Albanian Conundrum, Moscow,  1925. p.63.

16. Pan-Albanianism: How Big a Threat… P.3.

17. Zolo D. Invoking Humanity: War, Law, and Global Order. London, 2002. P. 24.

18. Citation from: N.D.Smirnova. History of Albania. P. 232 

19. Kosovo Historical Review. Tirana. 1994. № 3. P.20.

20. For details, see: E.Yu. Gus'kova. Albanian Factor in the Crisis in Former Yugoslavia. International organizations and Their Double Standards // Essays and Analysis. 2006. June. # 18. С.67-90.

21. Трнавци Х. Моjа исповест о Косову. Београд, 1987. С.33-34.

22. The New York Times, 1982, July 12.

23. Castellan G. L'Albanie. Paris, 1980. P.19.

24. Pan-Albanianism: How Big a Threat… P.15.

25. Z.S. Chertina. World War I and Ethnicity: The Awakening of the Vulcan // World War I: A prologue to the XX Century. Moscow, 1998. P.367.

26. Eriksen T.H. Ethnicity and Nationalism. L., 2002. P.99.

27. P. Mille. Greater Albania: Myth or Reality // Albanian Factor in the Balkan Crisis. Moscow, 2003. P. 150

28. Ramet S.P. Whose Democracy? Nationalism, Religion, and the Doctrine of Collective rights in post-1989 Eastern Europe. Lanham, Maryland, 1997. P.80.

29. Bugajski J. Ethnic Politics in Eastern Europe: a Guide to Nationality Policies, Organizations, and Parties. New York, 1995. P.116.

30. Greater Albania - Concepts and Possible Consequences. Belgrade, 1998.

31. Der Spiegel. 1998. № 28. S.122-123.

32. Political Declaration N°22 of the Kosovo Liberation Army, TVSH Television Network (Tirana), 1998. 31 Dec.

33. Platform for the Solution of the National Albanian Question, Albanian Academy of Sciences. Tirana, 1998. Р.5.

34. For details, see: Vaknin S. The Union of Death. Terrorists and Freedom Fighters in the Balkans. Skopje, 2004.

35. Pan-Albanianism: How Big a Threat… 2004. P.2.

36. UNDP: Early Warning Report. 2007, March. P.16.

37. Insights and Perceptions: Voices of the Balkans // Gallup Balkan Monitor, 2010. P.48.

38. Kosovo a European Powder Keg? Moscow, 2006. P. 19.

39. Illyria. 1993. 3 Feb. P.5.

40. URL: http://rpc.senate.gov/releases/1999/fr033199.htm ( 16.09.2011).

41. The Washington Times, 03.05.1999

42. The New York Times, 13.03.1998

43. URL: http://www.iwpr.net/?p=tri&s=f&o=235663&apc_state=henitri2005 ( 16.09.2011).

44. URL: http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N99/172/89/PDF/N9917289.pdf?OpenElement (дата обращения: 16.09.2011).

45. Carla del Ponte. The Hunt: Me and the War Criminals

46. Ibid, p. 459-460.

47. Mazower M. The Balkans. London, 2000. P. 134-135.

48. For details, see: Hockenos P. Homeland Calling: Exile Patriotism and the Balkan Wars. Cornell, 2003.