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Template:Cleanup taskforce notice

i wrote up a section on the pristina airport incident, i used a BBC article to source the data

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/671495.stm

but didn't include it in the references as i'm a lousy editor, feel free to include that

gosh i'm not trying to start a fight here, i just thought i should add that part.

Those are all fucking lies , Albanians started pushing Serbs north and getting themselves teritory , Serbs couldnt take that anymore becouse Albanians got aggresive and starter killing Serbs , so Serbs yelled PAYBACK TIME and fucking killed every Albanian whore that came in theyre way . —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.101.20.1 (talk • contribs) 09:08, 30 July 2010 -- stop ranting and add ref-tags to reliable sources instead. --Sigmundur (talk) 06:54, 26 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It was ruled out false, I did not say it was too high. I said that it was ruled out false and the real number of troops killed was 1,031. 142.197.18.67 (talk) 14:34, 15 June 2012 (UTC) 1,031 figure are serb figures so they are probs more unreliable and regardless of whether there is doubt that 5,000 died, this figure is a NATO estimate and should remain regardless of wether Serbia disagrees. On wikepedia conflict pages you are allowed to add casualty figure claims made by either participating belligerent even if it seems too low or too high. I know some people disagree with this figure that why it is clearly stated that they are NATO estimates. Stop deleting these figures and edit warring. They should remain. Stumink[reply]

Any new reports of the casualties of Yugoslav soldiers lately? The 5,000 dead figure seems indeed overblown.--Justice and Arbitration (talk) 16:04, 20 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Will people stop getting rid of NATO estimate. These figures were allowed to stay a while back after much discussion. The current figures are Serbian figures and both sides claims should be mentioned. There may be doubt in the NATO estimates but there is also doubt in Serbia's figures. Those figures are probably more biased. Who has proven these figures wrong. Lancet remains on Iraq war page and that has been virtually proven wrong. On virtually every Korean war or Vietnam war battle page there are casualty claims from the communist side which more often than not provably wrong but remain as there claim. Regardless of whether there is doubt that 5,000 died, this figure is a NATO estimate and should remain regardless of whether people disagree. Claims by either side should remain. On wikepedia when one belligerent has casualty claims, no matter how disputed, you can add them as long as you state they are claims of that side. Let people decide what figure to believe. What is wrong with having official NATO estimates. They are one side in the conflict and there claim is just a valid as Serbia's. Don't start edit warring. Consensus was to have them. No harm in having them. How is adding NATO estimates biased? Are having Serbian figures not biased then? Stumink (talk)

They have been proven false. There is a documentary, but I can't put it as a source since I can only find it on Youtube and no where else. It's called Lessons of Kosovo and it shows that NATO did not inflict many casualties as it said it did. The Yugoslav troops suffered around 1,000 instead of 5,000 or more. I see no use of putting NATO estimates in when they were proven false. What you put in was the estimate of civilian casualties and not military I believe.70.118.102.247 (talk) 14:02, 7 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed footnote #89 leads to a page not found. I believe this is the correct document: http://balkania.tripod.com/resources/history/migrations/index.html Biccat (talk) 15:59, 19 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I cannot believe my eyes. Serbia said it was a victory? They were militarily defeated by the KLA, forced out of the republic and Kosovo has gone independent. But why is it said that NATO was on the Albanian side? Just who says? NATO consisted of 19 countries in 1999 and apart from Greece who has anti-Albanian sentiments, the rest acted 1000000% neutrally. They went in to stop the annihalation of the entire Kosovar Albanian race. were the international community supposed to sit back and twiddle their thums like they did in Bosnia? The aggresor was the Serb police and army and the victims were the Albanian people who made up close to 100% of the republic. In Libiya recently, NATO didn't take another person's side, it was on the side of the Libiyan people who were sick after 42 years of the totalitarian rule of Colonel Gaddafi. And now they are watching closely at Syria, they are with the innocent people, not any army. If it had been the other way round, if Kosovars were ethnicly cleansing and inflicting genoide among the Kosovar Serb population, then NATO would have stepped in against the Albanians to defend innocent Serbs. In World War II, the Allied forces fought on the side of Serbs against Albanians and Croats because everyone knows what the Fascist collaborators did and their wholesale destruction of millions of Jews. After the Balkan Wars 1912-13, the west favoured the Serbs then too when they placed Kosovo in Serbia despite it being part of Albania's territory since 1912. But after almost a century of tormenting the local majority, trying to wipe them out and annex them into an artificial "Serb" state, the west had finally had enough and realised that a country needs to be with it's majority if the will of the people is to be secured. Kthimi në Shqipëri (talk) 10:02, 7 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Many articles concerning Kosovo and the Yugoslav Wars in English-language Wikipedia are tainted with Serb propaganda of (self)victimization and negationism (“Srebrenica Massacre never happened”, “Arkan and Mladic are heroes not criminals”, etc.), that's a fact. But the other fact is that Milosevic LOST the Kosovo War, despite internal propaganda claims of “victory” — as the same way that happened with Saddam Hussein claiming victory on Iraqi state media after effectivelly LOSING the Gulf War.

As the same way that Iraqi troops were evacuated from Kuwait territory with the help of American and Western European armed forces, Serbian troops had to evacuate Kosovo with American and West European armed forces occupying their place in Kosovo. NATO official basic objectives of the 1999 intervention in Yugoslavia relating to Kosovo were fully achieved, as the same way that the objectives of the American-led coalition in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991.

To say that Serbia WON the Kosovo War is *a little bit too much* of Serbian propaganda in this article!--201.81.239.44 (talk) 17:44, 19 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ignoring the classical Serbo-Albanian victimization complex and mythomania and getting straight to the point: Maybe victory a bit of an exaggerated term but given that during the Rambouillet NATO actually wanted to have military access in all of FRY and a referendum in Kosovo after three years, plus the light military damage the VJ and its associated forces suffered the outcome of the Kumanovo Treaty was far more favourable than what was demanded on Rambouillet. Personally I'd call it a de jure draw and de facto long term NATO victory. And sorry, but the KLA didn't militarily defeat anyone just as the Iraqi insurgents lost almost every fight against the Coalition forces. Magnojević (talk)

The structure of this article is very odd, although there is much useful information in it (as well, of course, as some bits which I would consider not NPOV). But surely most of this information belongs in other articles and not here.

To most people outside Kosovo or Serbia "the Kosovo War" means, in effect, the period of the NATO bombing campaign, although I think that few would argue that the period of internal conflict immediately preceding this should not also be included. But this internal conflict only became at all intense following the attack on the Jashari family compound in 1998; prior to this, KLA actions were at a low level of intensity compared (for example) with IRA activity in the 1970s-1980s or ETA activities in Spain in the 1980s-1990s, neither of which are generally regarded as a war.

But in this article, after the lead, we get 250 lines of Kosovo's history from 1945 to 1996, when the first KLA attack took place. There are many fewer lines detailing the actual (international) war. Nowhere else, I think, in Wikipedia is a war given more lines than its origins. I concede, of course, that one should not have an article on a war without some treatment of its origins. I also concede that much of the detailed information is worth keeping in Wikipedia, and putting it in the "History of Kosovo" article would make that unwieldy and unbalanced in chronological terms. The answer seems to me to be to give a fairly drastically shortened summary of the 1945-1998 events, and put the current material in a separate article on the "Origins of the Kosovo War".

This would allow an expansion of the events of the (international) conflict, which seem to me much more interesting than they appear in this article (and Wesley Clarke's book "Making Modern War" alone gives enough references to justify this thinking). It does not seem to me at all obvious that a NATO victory was pre-ordained, although of course in military terms it should have been given the overwhelming preponderance of force which NATO had over Serbia. The public (let alone private) doubts of important NATO countries as the bombing campaign continued, and their pressures for a "compromise" are not, I think, mentioned. If renewal of the NATO ACTORD had required unanimity, as it usually does (see Libya) it is doubtful whether it would have got it. What is more, I don't think that Milosevic's tactics of how to win an asymmetric victory over a vastly superior military force were badly thought out, even though they were inconsistently applied.

If Mike Jackson ever writes his memoirs, we may have a source for the projected date of the(British) victory parade in Pristina, and the projected date of what he thought might have to be the (British) victory parade in Belgrade. But that he had to think like this is enough to show that the war did not go according to the NATO plan ("we will pretend to bomb them for 48 hours, and they will pretend to resist, and then give in to superior force"). --79.126.144.75 (talk) 21:00, 12 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

This retelling of history is an unfortunate feature of our coverage on Kosovo - we have a dozen different articles which repeat approximately the same stories on what happened in Kosovo in the 20th century. I think that much of that could be trimmed, although we still need to leave a little for context. bobrayner (talk) 00:35, 13 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]