Kosovo and the gun : a baseline assessment of small arms and light weapons in Kosovo

Abstract

Small arms have been at the heart of the upheavals in the Balkans over the last decade and a half. One of the most forceful images of the wars in Bosnia is that of snipers killing and maiming civilians in Sarajevo. In Albania, the most dramatic event of the 1990s was the looting of more than half a million small arms from army stockpiles in 1997, in a desperate response to the failed pyramid savings scheme in which many Albanians lost their meagre assets. In FYROM, images of the NATO-led operation ‘Essential Harvest’ often illustrate how war was narrowly averted in 2001. In this weapons collection effort, ethnic Albanian nationalists handed over approximately 3,800 small arms and light weapons to international forces. In Kosovo, finally, the armed KLA fighter remains a potent image of the desperation of the Kosovo Albanians after a decade of increasing oppression by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his followers. All these images of guns in the Balkans fit only too neatly with long-standing images in other parts of Europe of the region as ‘unruly’ and strongly attached to the gun.