Kosovo hit the international headlines in the late 1990s, when forces under Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic attempted to suppress the ethnic Albanian majority's independence campaign.
Serbs and ethnic Albanians had vied for control in the region throughout the 20th Century.
Milosevic was the first acting head of state to be indicted on war crimes
While Serbs latterly only made up about 10% of the population, the historic and emotional importance of the province for them was enormous.
Serbs consider Kosovo the cradle of their culture, religion and national identity.
The 1974 Yugoslav constitution laid down Kosovo's status as an autonomous province of Serbia. Pressure for independence mounted in the 1980s after the death of Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito.
In the latter part of the decade, when Milosevic was number two in the Serbian Communist Party, he harnessed resentment over Kosovan influence within the Yugoslav federation.
At the same time, Serbs were complaining about persecution by the majority Albanians.
Milosevic, motivated by political opportunism, became a champion of Serbian nationalism.
In 1987, he was sent to Kosovo and, spotting an opportunity, seized it.
1989: Milosevic begins to remove Kosovo's rights of autonomy
July 1990: Ethnic Albanian legislators in the province declare Kosovo independent from Serbia
1991: Albania recognises Kosovo as independent
Sept 24 1998: Nato issues ultimatum to Milosevic to stop crackdown on Kosovo Albanians or face air strikes
March 1999: Peace talks end in failure
June 1999: Nato suspends air operations
In an impromptu televised address that made his reputation overnight, Milosevic promised Serbian demonstrators in Kosovo that "no one will dare to beat you again".
Two years later, when he became Yugoslav president, he set about stripping Kosovo of its autonomy. Serbian nationalism was on the march.
A passive resistance movement in the 1990s failed to secure independence or restore autonomy, although ethnic Albanian leaders declared unilateral independence in 1991.
In the mid-1990s the ethnic Albanian rebel movement, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), stepped up its attacks on Serb targets.
By the summer of 1998, Albanians were mounting mass protests against Serbian rule and police and army reinforcements were sent in to crush the KLA.
A deal to end the crisis was brokered by the international community in early 1999. The autonomy plan was reluctantly accepted by the ethnic Albanians but rejected by Milosevic.
Graves in the town of Velika Krusa of ethnic Albanian killed in March 1999
The continued persecution of Kosovo Albanians led to the start of Nato air strikes against targets in Kosovo and Serbia in March 1999.
Meanwhile, a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Kosovo Albanians was initiated by Serbian forces. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro. The international tribunal in The Hague said its investigators had found at least 2,000 bodies.
After 11 weeks of Nato bombing, Milosevic was forced to withdraw his troops and police, some 750,000 Albanian refugees came home and about 100,000 Serbs - roughly half the province's Serb population - fled. The UN was put in charge, pending agreement on whether Kosovo should become independent or revert to Serbian rule.
In May of that year, as the bombing was still going on, Milosevic became the first serving head of state to be indicted for crimes against humanity, by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
According to the indictment, Milosevic and a number of his colleagues bore direct responsibility for crimes that are alleged to have included the deportation of almost 750,000 Kosovo Albanians and the murders of about 600 individually identified ethnic Albanians.
The indictment listed six specific charges of crimes against humanity. It detailed massacres of ethnic Albanians in the towns of Srbica, Dakova and Velika Krusa, where men were separated from women and machine-gunned.
Later in 1999, investigations by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, including the interview of some 3,000 witnesses or survivors, uncovered a grim catalogue of murder, mutilation and rape.
It found that Serbs had carried out human rights abuses on a massive scale - but had also suffered appalling revenge attacks following the war.
Milosevic's trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity got under way in earnest in early 2002 at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. By the time of his death in March 2006, the prosecution had completed its case but the defence was continuing.
The court was unable to establish legally what had actually happened in Kosovo.
Ethnic Albanians were angry that Milosevic's death robbed them of a verdict.
As a result, the trial of senior Serbian officials on similar charges, that began on 10 July, took on a new importance.