War in the Balkans: The Balkan Question

KEY ISSUES BEHIND THE WAR EXPLAINED

Who has launched a land invasion of Kosovo before?

The Ottoman Turks launched a land invasion from the south with spectacular success in the 14th century, crushing the Serbian army led by Prince Lazar at Kosovo Polje (Kosovo Field), near present-day Pristina, on St Vitus Day in June 1389.

From there they fanned up through the Balkan semi-peninsula, although it took the Turks the best part of a century to stamp out the last embers of the independent Serbian kingdom.

In this century, the newly independent Serbian state and its Montenegrin allies invaded the Ottoman province of Kosovo from the north with little difficulty in the First Balkan War in 1912, the Serbs taking Pristina and the north-east while the Montenegrins took Pec and the western slice of the province.

The next invasion of Kosovo took place during the Second World War when the Italians moved in from the west, from the direction of Albania, which they had annexed and united to the Italian crown in the 1930s. Again, there was little resistance as the Albanian population supported the invasion and the Germans were sweeping into Belgrade.

The Italians then attached Kosovo to Albania to form a greater Albanian state under Mussolini's protection which lasted until the Allied victory of 1945.

The last invasion of Kosovo took place at the end of the war when the victorious Yugoslav Partisan army under Josip Broz Tito stormed back into Kosovo and re-attached the province to Serbia and to Yugoslavia.

None of these invasions has proved too difficult from a military point of view because although Kosovo is partially ringed by mountains, the centre is an undulating plain - a very different terrain from rugged mountainous Bosnia, for example.