Introduction
Twenty-two years ago, the first bombs fell on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the night of March 24, 1999. Over the next seventy-eight days, NATO aircraft flew over 10,000 strike sorties and dropped some 23,000 bombs.[1] This was a significant effort; by comparison, during the First Gulf War, coalition forces flew almost 12,000 strategic sorties over six weeks.[2]
NATO hoped to stop a campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by Serbian military and paramilitary forces against Albanian Kosovars. As NATO Secretary General Javier Solana stated, Operation Allied Force sought “to halt the violence and to stop further humanitarian catastrophe.”[3] Over the course of the crisis, approximately 950,000 Kosovars fled into Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro. Almost 600,000 became displaced within Kosovo. In total, some 90 percent of the Kosovar population fled their homes in the war.[4]
Kosovar Albanians cross the border into Albania in early 1999. (Joel Robine/AFP)
Operation Allied Force is often assumed to be a shining example of the possibilities of airpower and humanitarian intervention. On June 10, 1999, Secretary of Defense William Cohen boasted, “We achieved our goals with the most precise application of airpower in history.”[5] Even a leading skeptic of the U.S. intervention, Democratic Senator Max Cleland from Georgia, came to praise Allied Force, writing President Clinton:
“I want to take this opportunity to thank you personally...for proving me wrong in my worst fears about Kosovo becoming another Vietnam, and for succeeding, via the air war alone, in putting an end to Milosevic's brutalization of Kosovar Albanians, facilitating the safe return of Kosovar Albanian refugees, demonstrating the cohesion and willpower of NATO and conducting military operations in such a way as to minimize casualties among both our own service personnel and innocent civilians.”[6]
The lessons learned from Allied Force instilled what Robert H. Gregory describes as “an overly optimistic outlook on the effectiveness of solely employing air power for limited military intervention” among Americans.[7] Although that optimism has been tarnished by more recent experience, the Biden administration shows signs that it may return America to a more interventionist footing—not least of which is President Biden’s choice of Samantha Power to lead the United States Agency for International Development and his own globalist foreign policy record.[8]
…the outcome of an intervention does not just depend on what the intervening power wants or does. A huge amount depends on the local crisis, who the local factions are, and how they relate to the intervener.
While Allied Force was a resounding success, many studies of Kosovo assume that the key to that success lay with the actions of the U.S. and NATO.[9] This trend is present in much of the broader literature on interventions, which often focus on the intervening power—whether that is the U.S., NATO, or a coalition of states. But the outcome of an intervention does not just depend on what the intervening power wants or does. A huge amount depends on the local crisis, who the local factions are, and how they relate to the intervener.
Background
The violence that ripped apart Kosovo in 1999 has its roots in the First and Second Balkan Wars in 1912-1913. These two wars set off a cycle of violence. During the First Balkan War, Serbia used a scorched earth policy to seize land from the Ottoman Empire, land today divided between North Macedonia, Kosovo, and parts of Albania. While the boundaries kept shifting—and shifted again during the First World War—the violence against civilians was brutal. Serbian violence in particular sparked Albanian and Macedonian backlash. After World War I, the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia pursued Serbian colonization of Kosovo and participated in population exchanges with Turkey, forcing ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo and beginning a cycle of repression and retaliation. Often it simmered at relatively low levels, with World War II being a key exception in which a major conflict was superimposed over a five-way civil war that included competing ethnic cleansing campaigns. By the 1990s several generations of ethnic Albanians and Serbs had grievances against each other. That type of resentment is dangerous, to say the least.
The 1999 Kosovo war belongs to the larger story of the death throes of the former Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. While the world focused on Bosnia, life in Kosovo kept getting worse. Ethnic Albanians were forced out of local government and education and lost their jobs in state-owned industry. In response, they created the Democratic League of Kosovo led by Ibrahim Rugova. The Democratic League of Kosovo established parallel government and education structures and even held its own elections, all with the goal of proving to the international community that Kosovars deserved to be independent.
As negotiations to end the war in Bosnia began in Dayton, Ohio, Rugova went to the U.S. and asked for a seat at the table. He wanted the negotiations to include a settlement of the Kosovo issue. But the Americans viewed the stakes in Bosnia too high to risk derailing the talks by including Kosovo.[10] This decision undercut the legitimacy of the Democratic League of Kosovo and Rugova. Their non-violent strategy was about getting a seat at that table. And it did not work.
Young Kosovars learned from this event. Former Kosovo Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Muhamet Hamiti, reflected that Dayton led to a “realization by youth that the international community would only take notice if there was blood.”[11] The next year, a group of Kosovar emigres in Switzerland founded the Kosovo Liberation Army.[12]
Slobodan Milošević and Serbia also learned from Dayton. The Dayton agreement provided de facto legitimization of ethnic cleansing. It divided Bosnia and Herzegovina into two parts—the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska. The Republika Srpska was allowed to keep the territory that it had cleansed. Milošević realized that if he launched a rapid campaign of ethnic cleansing and presented the international community with a done deal, he would likely be allowed to keep that land.[13]
In 1998, both Milošević and the Kosovo Liberation Army implemented these lessons. The Kosovo Liberation Army launched a series of targeted strikes against Serbian officials, police officers, and other key figures in Kosovo. They sought to trigger the Serbian forces to respond with an indiscriminate attack against Kosovar civilians that would cause international outrage. That is exactly what Milošević did in a campaign targeting areas with the highest levels of Kosovo Liberation Army support, displacing about 300,000 Kosovars.[14]
As the violence in Kosovo worsened in 1998, U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright warned, “History is watching us. In this very room our predecessors delayed as Bosnia burned, and history will not be kind to us if we do the same.”[15] Instead of waiting for the situation in Kosovo to become a catastrophe, NATO member states agreed on the importance of acting early.
Over the course of 1998, NATO sought a diplomatic solution. A temporary agreement was reached in the fall with Milošević that allowed displaced Kosovars to go home.[16] Serbia, however, launched a new offensive in late December 1998 to re-occupy supply routes held by the Kosovo Liberation Army, sparking a widespread cycle of Kosovo Liberation Army and Serbian retaliatory attacks and kidnappings. In particular, reporters covered an incident where Serbian forces massacred forty-five Kosovar civilians at Račak on January 15, 1999.[17] In this context and backed by a NATO ultimatum, the U.S. and other members of the Contact Group sought a final diplomatic solution in Rambouillet, France. The Rambouillet Agreement would have allowed Kosovo to govern its own internal affairs, while Yugoslavia maintained “competence” over the territorial integrity of Kosovo, monetary policy, defense, foreign policy, customs, federal taxation, and federal elections.[18] On March 18, the Kosovar delegation signed the agreement under pressure from the United States. The Yugoslav delegation, however, refused.[19]
A line of coffins draped in the Albanian flag streams through a crowd of more than 10,000 mourners in Račak. (Yannis Behrakis/Reuters)
Operation Allied Force and Operation Horseshoe
With the collapse of the peace talks, NATO launched Operation Allied Force on March 24.[20] By the time the first bombs fell, many Kosovars had already fled their homes in the face of Serbian ethnic cleansing. Kosovars sought temporary refuge in forests or mountainous areas; others were already escaping to Albania and Macedonia.
Milošević, meanwhile, accelerated the pace of Operation Horseshoe, “a controlled near-encirclement, designed to force Kosovars inside the ‘horseshoe’ to” either Albania or Macedonia.[21] This was Milošević implementing his lessons learned from Dayton—if he could move fast and cleanse Kosovo, he could present NATO with a fait accompli. And if NATO stuck to pattern, it would let him keep that territory, just as it had with Republika Srpska in 1995.
NATO envisioned Operation Allied Force as a three-day bombing campaign to quickly cause Milošević to acquiesce to NATO’s demands. NATO planners based the campaign on Operation Deliberate Force, a two-week operation in Bosnia that rapidly brought Serbian forces to the negotiating table at Dayton. Allied Force was supposed to be a similarly swift jolt of reality to bring Milošević to his senses. The bombing campaign had a strong start, with aircraft attacking from bases in Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. On the first day, NATO even shot down three MiG-29s, Serbia’s most advanced fighter. But Milošević did not give in. Soon NATO leaders agreed to allow intensified bombing and approved a larger target list. By May 1, NATO was flying about 200 combat sorties a day. They bombed petroleum refineries, lines of communication, power grids, dual-use communications structures, bridges, and roads. But NATO forces were destroying targets faster than they could be approved. By the end of the campaign, NATO had the resources to conduct 1,000 combat sorties a day but lacked sufficient targets.[22]
As the conflict dragged on and Serbian ethnic cleansing continued, the strategic rationale behind Allied Force crumbled. A coercive bombing campaign is ill-suited to stopping ethnic cleansing. Rather than seeking complete military victory, Robert Pape explains, “The key to success in conventional coercion is...the ability to thwart the target state’s military strategy for controlling the objectives in dispute. To succeed the coercer must undermine the target state’s confidence in its own military strategy.”[23] In this case, Operation Allied Force aimed to change Milošević’s strategic calculus by increasing the cost of his ethnic cleansing campaign. Just two days into Operation Allied Force, General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), warned CNN, “It was always understood from the outset that there was no way we were going to stop these paramilitary forces who were going in there and murdering civilians.”[24] Bombing campaigns—even with the best precision weapons—are best at hitting hard targets or large-scale units–like tank formations, heavy artillery, or massed infantry. Small units armed with AK-47s or just machetes are sufficient to carry out ethnic cleansing. Those are hard to spot and bomb. Milošević dispersed his troops into the general population, making it impossible for NATO to bomb them without unacceptable civilian casualties while still maintaining full operational capacity.[25] Serbian forces also used urban areas and Kosovo’s rugged terrain to their advantage.
The aftermath of a missile strike on the government-run studios of Radio Television Serbia (RTS) in Belgrade. (Emil Vas/Reuters)
After 78 days of bombing, NATO and Serbia signed the Military Technical Agreement on June 9. The agreement ordered the cessation of hostilities by Yugoslav and Serb forces, laid out the phased withdrawal of those forces from Kosovo, and established NATO’s peacekeeping force, Kosovo Force.[26] After confirming that “the full withdrawal of the Yugoslav security forces from Kosovo has begun,” on June 10, NATO Secretary General Javier Solana ordered a suspension of NATO bombing operations.[27]
On June 12, NATO forces entered Kosovo and with them came the first of the returning Kosovar refugees. By the end of August, almost all of the refugees had returned to Kosovo. NATO’s job was not done though. The political reasons for the war were still there, which is why Kosovo Force was so necessary to prevent a return of violence. At full strength, Kosovo Force consisted of about 50,000 personnel from both NATO member states and more than 12 other nations, including Russia. Kosovo Force had a three-fold job: first, enforce the terms of the Military Technical Agreement, especially the phased withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo and the demobilization of the Kosovo Liberation Army; second, keep the peace between ethnic Serbian and Albanian populations; and third, provide security and logistical support to returning refugees.[28]
Lessons Learned
What does all of this reveal about our assumptions of the possibilities—and the limits—of military interventions?
Years later, Kosovo Force remains in Kosovo. 3,342 troops from 27 countries still work towards providing a “safe and secure environment” in Kosovo.[29] Clearly, there are limits to what bombing can achieve even when it does coerce. Bombing cannot provide population security. This is further illustrated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, American strikes in Syria, coalition strikes in Libya, and the war in Yemen today. Airpower has its place, but protecting civilians requires boots on the ground.[30]
And, in the grand scheme of things, Kosovo is tiny. It is the size of Connecticut and has a smaller population. Yet, the combined cost of the U.S. contribution to Operation Allied Force, DoD provided refugee assistance, and the first seven months of Kosovo Force was $5.05 billion. Calculating the full cost of Allied Force is difficult since individual member-states, not NATO, funded the operation. One report found that other member-states spent at least $1.3 billion, although these costs included only expenses above normal operating costs and excluded logistics-related expenses.[31] These figures do not include the costs of reconstruction, development, and humanitarian programs, nor the ongoing cost of Kosovo Force. The bottom line is that even a small intervention is expensive, and there is no such thing as a military intervention on the cheap.
An intervention also requires significant local support. In Kosovo, ethnic Albanians viewed NATO as saviors.[32] NATO intervened explicitly to protect Kosovars from Serbian violence. This created a permissive environment for the Kosovo Force.[33] Without that type of support, the intervening military might find itself fighting all the factions involved in the conflict.
Once a country, alliance, or coalition intervenes, it owns the problem. An intervention on its own does not remove the conflict’s political cause. In Kosovo, Serbia still wanted to cleanse Kosovo, and Kosovars were even more determined to get their independence. If NATO had simply withdrawn after Allied Force, Kosovo most likely would have descended back into violence. Creating stability is a long term and expensive challenge. It involves physical security, governance, economic development, creating and strengthening civil society, and much more. Twenty-two years later, NATO and the UN are still in Kosovo. That type of long-term commitment is rare. Without that level of commitment, an intervention is likely to do more harm than good.
Many factors make military intervention hard to get right. There might not be enough domestic political support to maintain the intervention in the long run. The crisis might be too large and the resources and manpower needed to address it simply out of reach. Or, as with the ongoing Chinese genocide of the Uyghurs, the perpetrator might be too powerful. No matter how horrifying the concentration camps in Xinjiang are, no one is going to risk a potential nuclear war with China to stop the genocide. Or the local context might be such that an intervention would only make it worse.
U.S. troops receive a rapturous welcome as they roll into the Kosovar town of Gjilan. (Ami Vitale/Getty)
Kosovo is a tantalizing case of success. Even today Kosovar Albanians speak favorably of America and NATO. After NATO forces reached Gjakova, Agim Byçi recalled that “then began joy, merriment and bliss, life, freedom, and gratitude for the European Union and especially for America.”[34] Under certain circumstances, and with enough commitment, military intervention can work and save lives. But we need to look beyond the assumption that our decisions and actions determine success or failure, and instead make sure the dynamics of the local conflict are conducive to an intervention. Ultimately, not all problems can be solved with military force.
Mary Elizabeth Walters is an assistant professor in the Department of Airpower at the Air Command and Staff College. She holds a PhD in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and specializes in peacekeeping operations, small wars, and the Balkans. This essay reflects her own views and not necessarily those of the U.S. government or Department of Defense.
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Header Image: Danish F-16 at the Grazzanise-base in Italy, during the Operation Allied Force. (Den Store Danske Gyldendals Åbne Encyclopœdi)
Notes:
[1] Secretary General Javier Solana and General Wesley Clark, “Press Conference,” NATO, March 25, 1999, https://www.nato.int/kosovo/press/p990325a.htm; Captain Gregory Ball, “1999 – Operation Allied Force,” Air Force Historical Support Division, https://www.afhistory.af.mil/FAQs/Fact-Sheets/Article/458957/operation-allied-force/; Earl H. Tilford, Jr., “Operation Allied Force and the Role of Air Power,” Parameters (Winter 1999-2000), 24-38, https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/articles/99winter/tilford.htm.
[2] James A. Winnefeld, Preston Niblack, and Dana J. Johnson, A League of Airmen: U.S. Air Power in the Gulf War (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1994), 157. The overall air effort was much larger, however. The U.S. and Coalition air forces flew another 35,000 theater sorties linked to the ground campaign.
[3] Solana and Clark, “Press Conference,” March 25, 1999.
[4] The standard number of refugees for the crisis is often reported as 860,000. However, the Albanian Prefecture of Kukës records indicate that the UNHCR never registered at least 71,000 Kosovar refugees who stayed with Kukës families. For a representative UNHCR account, see Astri Suhrke, Michael Barutciski, Peta Sandison, Rick Garloxk, The Kosovo refugee crisis: An independent evaluation of UNHCR’s emergency preparedness and response, Pre-Publication Edition, (Geneva, Switzerland: Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit, UNHCR, 2000), 6. The relevant Kukës Prefecture records are in three boxes in the Arkiva e Prefekturës së Kuksit: Dosje Nr.1.1999: Prefekti, Dosje nr.1-7. Sek. Pergjithshem nga 1-12, and Dosje nr.17, 1999. Per te ardhurit nga Kosova.
[5] Secretary William Cohen, General Hugh Shelton, and Major General Chuck Wald, “DoD News Briefing,” (Washington DC: Pentagon, June 10, 1999), quoted in Robert H. Gregory, Clean Bombs and Dirty Wars: Air Power in Kosovo and Libya (Lincoln: Potomac Books, 2015), 102-103. Secretary Cohen repeated this claim almost verbatim in the Annual Report to the President and Congress (Washington, D.C., Department of Defense, 2000), 193.
[6] Max Cleland, letter to William Clinton, July 2, 1999, National Security Council and NSC Records Management System, “9906024,” Clinton Digital Library (https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/79176).
[7] Gregory, Clean Bombs and Dirty Wars, 102. See also, Daniel L. Byman and Matthew C. Waxman, “Kosovo and the Great Air Power Debate,” International Security 24, no.4 (Spring 2000), 5-38; Eliot A. Cohen and Andrew J. Bacevich, eds., War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000); Dag Hendriksen, NATO’s Gamble: Combining Diplomacy and Airpower in the Kosovo Crisis, 1998-1999 (New York: Naval Institute Press, 2013); Stephen T. Hosmer, The Conflict Over Kosovo: Why Milosevic Decided to Settle When He Did (Santa Monica: RAND, 2001); Benjamin S. Lambeth, NATO’s Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment (Santa Monica: RAND, 2001); Tony Mason, “Operation Allied Force, 1999,” in A History of Air Warfare, ed. John Andreas Olsen (Washington, D.C.: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 225-252; William A. Sayers, “Operation ALLIED FORCE: How Airpower Won the War for Kosovo,” Air Force Magazine 102, no. 4 (2019), 56-59.
[8] See: “Joseph R. Biden Jr.,” Congress.gov, accessed June 22, 2021, (https://www.congress.gov/member/joseph-biden/B000444); “Examining Biden’s Foreign Policy Plans,” NPR, April 18, 2021, (https://www.npr.org/2021/04/18/988483535/examining-bidens-foreign-policy-plans).
[9] Examples of this trend include several of the previously referenced works on Operation Allied Force.
[10] For example see, Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Random House, 1998).
[11] Muhamet Hamiti, interview with Mary Elizabeth Walters, July 7, 2011, London, United Kingdom.
[12] For expanded discussions on the influence of Dayton on the LDK and UÇK see: Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 120-126; David Phillips, Liberating Kosovo: Coercive Diplomacy and U.S. Intervention (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), 60-64.
[13] Dana H. Allin, NATO’s Balkan Interventions, 1st ed., Adelphi Paper 347 (Oxford University Press for The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2002); Filippo Andreatta, The Bosnian War and the New World Order: Failure and Success of International Intervention, (Brussels: Institute for Security Studies, 1997).
[14] OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission, Kosovo/ Kosova As Seen As Told: An Analysis of the Human Rights Findings of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission, October 1998 to June 1999, vol. I (Warsaw: Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, 1999); Sadako Ogata, “The Limits of UNHCR’s Intervention in Post-Cold War Conflicts: An Analysis of the Kosovo Crisis,” The Brown Journal of World Affairs, VI, no.1 (Winter/Spring 1999), 201-213.
[15] Quoted in Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 24.
[16] Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 23.
[17] OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission, Kosovo/ Kosova As Seen As Told: An Analysis of the Human Rights Findings of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission, October 1998 to June 1999, vol. I (Warsaw: Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, 1999), 55, 58.
[18] “Rambouillet Agreement; Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo,” February 1999, http://www.state.gov/www/regions/eur/ksvo_rambouillet_text.html.
[19] Malcolm, Kosovo, xii, xvii.
[20] Dana H. Allin, NATO’s Balkan Interventions, Adelphi Paper 347 (Oxford University Press for The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2002), 55.
[21] Malcolm, Kosovo, xii, xviii.
[22] Patrick Sheets, “Air War Over Serbia,” in Lessons from Kosovo: The KFOR Experience, ed. Larry Wentz (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense Command and Control Research Program, 2002), 97-114.
[23] Robert Anthony Paper, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1996), 10, 13.
[24] Quoted in William M. Arkin, “Operation Allied Force: The Most Precise Application of Air Power in History,” in War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, ed. A. J. Bacevich and Eliot A. Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 9.
[25] Debate continues over NATO’s bombing strategy in Operation Allied Force, its shifts over the 78 days, and its role in the ultimate concessions by Milošević. See: A. J Bacevich and Eliot A Cohen, eds., War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Daniel L. Byman and Matthew C. Waxman, “Kosovo and the great air power debate,” in Strategic Studies: A Reader, edited by Thomas G. Mahnken and Joseph A. Maiolo (London: Routledge, 2008); Stephen T. Hosmer, The Conflict Over Kosovo: Why Milosevic Decided to Settle When He Did (Arlington: RAND, 2001); Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Knopf, 2007); John Stone, “Air-power, Land-power and the Challenge of Ethnic Conflict,” Civil Wars 2: 3 (1996), 26-42; Larry K. Wentz, ed., Lessons from Kosovo: KFOR Experience (Department of Defence Command and Control Research Program, 2002). A central primary source to the debate is Department of Defense, Report to Congress: Kosovo/Operation Allied Force After-Action Report, January 31, 2000 (http://www.dod.gov/pubs/kaar02072000.pdf).
[26] “Military-technical agreement between the international security force (KFOR) and the Governments of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Republic of Serbia,” June 9, 1999, 5, United Nations Peacemaker, https://peacemaker.un.org/kosovoserbia-militarytechnicalagreement99.
[27] Javier Solana, “Statement by NATO Secretary General Dr. Javier Solana on suspension of air operations,” June 10, 1999, NATO, https://www.nato.int/docu/pr/1999/p99-093e.htm.
[28] United Nations Security Council, Resolution 1244, June 10, 1999, https://undocs.org/S/RES/1244(1999).
[29] “NATO Mission in Kosovo (KFOR),” NATO, https://shape.nato.int/ongoingoperations/nato-mission-in-kosovo-kfor-.
[30] For discussions on the use of airpower in small wars and the limits of airpower, see: James S. Corum and Wray R. Johnson, Airpower in Small Wars: Fighting Insurgents and Terrorists (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2003); Daniel R. Lake, “The Limits of Coercive Airpower: NATO’s “Victory” in Kosovo Revisited,” International Security 34, no.1 (Summer 2009): 83-112; Anthony M. Schinella, Bombs without Boots: The Limits of Airpower (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute Press, 2019).
[31] Carl Ek, NATO Burden Sharing and Kosovo: A Preliminary Report (Congressional Research Service, January 3, 2000) (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metacrs1140/m1/1/high_res_d/RL30398_2000Jan03.pdf).
[32] This view is widespread among Kosovars, representative interviews include: Agim Byçi and Neserete Nuka, interview with Mary Elizabeth Walters, Gjakova, Kosovo, 28 May 2016; Fadil Bytyçi, interview with Mary Elizabeth Walters, Suhareka, Kosovo, May 15, 2016; Gezim Berisha, interview with Mary Elizabeth Walters, Suhareka, Kosovo, May 17, 2016.
[33] For more on Kosovo Force, see, Mary Elizabeth Walters, ““Tree Hugging Work”: The Shifting Attitudes and Practices of the U.S. Marine Corps Toward Peace Operations in the 1990s,” Marine Corps History 5, no.2 (Winter 2019), 54-70.
[34] Agim Byçi and Neserete Nuka, interview with Mary Elizabeth Walters, Gjakova, Kosovo, 28 May 2016.