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Kosovo Liberation Army

Main articles: Kosovo Liberation Army and Kosovo War

Monument to Serbs killed by Kosovo Liberation Army in Mitrovica

Staro Gracko massacre memorial

The FR Yugoslav authorities regarded the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) as a terrorist group,[137] although many European governments did not. In February 1998, U.S. President Bill Clinton's special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, condemned both the actions of the Yugoslav government and of the KLA, and described the KLA as "without any questions, a terrorist group".[138][139][140] UN resolution 1160 took a similar stance.[141][142] At first, NATO had stressed that KLA was "the main initiator of the violence" and that it had "launched what appears to be a deliberate campaign of provocation".[143]

The United States (and NATO) directly supported the KLA.[144] The CIA funded, trained and supplied the KLA (as they had earlier trained and supplied the Bosnian Army).[145] As disclosed to The Sunday Times by CIA sources, "American intelligence agents have admitted they helped to train the Kosovo Liberation Army before NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia".[146][147][148] In 1999, a retired colonel said that KLA forces had been trained in Albania by former US military working for MPRI.[146]

James Bissett, Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania, wrote in 2001 that media reports indicated that "as early as 1998, the Central Intelligence Agency assisted by the British Special Air Service were arming and training Kosovo Liberation Army members in Albania to foment armed rebellion in Kosovo. ... The hope was that with Kosovo in flames NATO could intervene ...".[149] According to Tim Judah, KLA representatives had already met with American, British, and Swiss intelligence agencies in 1996, and possibly "several years earlier".[150]

After the war, the KLA was transformed into the Kosovo Protection Corps, which worked alongside NATO forces patrolling the province.[151] In the following years, however, an ethnic Albanian insurgency emerged in southern Serbia (1999–2001) and in Macedonia (2001). The EU condemned what it described as the "extremism" and use of "illegal terrorist actions" by the group active in southern Serbia.[152] Since the war, many of the KLA leaders have been active in the political leadership of the Republic of Kosovo.