Unrest in Kosovo

2004 unrest in Kosovo
Ruins of Serbian houses and Serbian Orthodox monasteries
Date	17–18 March 2004
Target	Kosovo Serbs, Serb houses and Serbian Orthodox churches
Attack type	Ethnic cleansing, rioting, arson, pogrom
Deaths	28
Non-fatal injuries	600+
Perpetrators	Kosovo Albanians
Number of participants	50,000+

Violent unrest in Kosovo broke out on 17 March 2004. Kosovo Albanians, numbering over 50,000, took part in wide-ranging attacks on the Kosovo Serb minority, compared by the then Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica to ethnic cleansing. It was the largest violent incident in the region since the Kosovo War of 1998-99. According to reports by news sources in Serbia, during the unrest, civilians were killed, thousands of Serbs were forced to leave their homes, 935 Serb houses, 10 public facilities (schools, health care centers and post offices) and 35 Serbian Orthodox church buildings were desecrated, damaged or destroyed, and six towns and nine villages were ethnically cleansed.

The events were also called the "Kristallnacht of Kosovo" and in Serbia, the "March Pogrom".

More than 164,000 members of Kosovo's minorities had fled the province in the immediate aftermath of the war. This is especially true in the case of Serbs and Romani. Ethnic tensions and territorial dispute have been a major problem in Kosovo for many years that sparked the Kosovo War of 1998–99 in which an estimated 10,000 people died, the majority being Albanian civilians, which is also the reason cited by the U.S. State Department for the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia. After the end of the war, the province was administered by the UN under the auspices of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), with security provided by the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR). In 2000, there were riots and unrest in Kosovo.