American Military History, Volume 2 by Richard W. Stewart

Bosnia was not the last casualty of Miloševic's fervent Serbian na- tionalism. The southern province of Kosovo held an especially revered place in Serbian folklore. Here, much of the nation's earliest history had transpired. Here, the semimythical Prince Lazar had died at the hands of the Turks in an epic battle that came to epitomize martyr- dom in the defense of Serbian national identity. For all of Kosovo's Serbian roots, however, by the 1990s, 90 percent of its population was Albanian. Miloševic ruthlessly suppressed the local autonomy these Albanian Kosovars had previously enjoyed.

Excesses on the part of Yugoslav police and armed forces fueled Kosovar agitation for inde- pendence or unification with Albania, which in turn fueled further repression. A shadowy guerrilla force known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) emerged occasionally to attack Yugoslav officials and policemen. The cycle of violence and revenge threatened to escalate into another Bosnia, and the NATO nations determined not to let it do so.