“I Could Always Tell When the Marines Were on Duty”: American Military Humanitarianism and Albanian Reactions during the 1999 Kosovo Refugee Crisis

Hundreds of large, drab, army-green tents stretched across Albanian fields in meticulously spaced rows. These tents reflected one of the U.S. military’s first forays into military humanitarianism during the 1999 Kosovo Refugee Crisis, during which over 800,000 Kosovar Albanians fled Serbian ethnic cleansing. This military humanitarianism was part of a broader trend during the 1990s of Western militaries practicing aggressive peacekeeping to protect human rights. During the Cold War peacekeeping operations typically deployed with United Nations authorization along the border of two warring states. In the 1990s, peacekeeping broadened to include intrastate conflicts and the prevention of ethnic cleansing. These more complex missions required increasingly frequent, and significantly more important interactions with civilians.

During the 1999 Kosovo Refugee Crisis, civil-military relations functioned at multiple levels of the American military and Albanian and Kosovar society. At its most basic level, the daily interactions between a single Marine and a Kosovar refugee merged with the interactions of other individuals to create a feeling of security at the main American refugee camp in Fier, Albania. At the opposite end of the spectrum, intense political negotiations were ongoing throughout the crisis between American military elites and Albanian political and military leaders to maintain open access for the American military to Albania’s airspace, ports, airport, and roads. Between these two extremes, American officers worked with Albanian mayors, local businessmen, and nongovernmental organizations to provide humanitarian assistance to Kosovar refugees. Using oral history with Kosovar refugees and Albanians involved with the crisis at federal, military, local, and personal levels illuminate the lasting impact of these civil-military relationships 15 years later. While scholars have traditionally focused on civil-military relations within one country, the experiences of the American military during the Kosovo Refugee Crisis reveals the importance of relations between militaries and foreign civilian populations.