Kosovo

The most disputed territory in Europe, claimed as a birthplace by one nation and inhabited overwhelmingly by another. Kosovo holds the medieval Serbian patriarchate at Pec and the monasteries of Decani and Gracanica, and the 1389 battle fought on its field is the founding event of Serbian national memory - while its population has been mostly Albanian for at least two centuries. It was an autonomous province within Serbia under the 1974 Yugoslav constitution with powers close to a republic's, which Milosevic stripped away in 1989, the move that began his rise and the federation's end. Albanians responded with a decade of parallel institutions - unofficial schools, clinics and taxes - under Ibrahim Rugova, before the Kosovo Liberation Army turned to arms. Serbian operations in 1998 and 1999 drove around eight hundred thousand people out and prompted NATO to bomb Serbia for eleven weeks without Security Council authorisation, an intervention still argued about in international law. The territory was administered by the UN until it declared independence in February 2008. Around half the world's states recognise it and Serbia, Russia and China do not. The International Court of Justice found the declaration did not violate international law. Pristina is the capital. The territory covers about eleven thousand square kilometres. Its population is around ninety per cent Albanian. It uses the euro without being in the eurozone. The Trepca mining complex was among Yugoslavia's most valuable assets. Its population is the youngest in Europe. The Decani monastery has been guarded by international peacekeepers for over two decades.

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