Kumanovo Agreement
Kumanovo Military Technical Agreement is signed
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The listing calls it a peace treaty between Yugoslavia and NATO. It was a military technical agreement signed at an airfield — and the bombing did not stop when the pens came up.
Signed at Kumanovo while aircraft were still flying
At Kumanovo in Macedonia on 9 June 1999, KFOR commander Lieutenant General Mike Jackson and representatives of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Serbia signed the Military Technical Agreement.
Colonel General Svetozar Marjanović of the VJ General Staff signed for the Yugoslav government and Obrad Stevanović for the Serbian Interior Ministry. The document's named parties were KFOR and the governments of FR Yugoslavia and the Republic of Serbia.
The signing took place at a military airfield while NATO aircraft were still conducting operations.
Eleven days to leave, and two buffer zones
The agreement entered into force upon signature. It required Yugoslav army, Serbian police and associated forces to stop hostile acts and begin a phased, verifiable withdrawal from Kosovo, to be complete 11 days after entry into force.
It established a Ground Safety Zone 5 kilometres deep and an Air Safety Zone 25 kilometres deep beyond Kosovo's boundary into the rest of FRY territory.
It authorized KFOR to deploy after the anticipated Security Council resolution, and made the KFOR commander the final authority on what the agreement meant.
Why the air campaign kept running
Signature did not switch off the bombing. The agreement tied suspension of air strikes to verification that withdrawal had begun; NATO suspended the campaign on 10 June after verifying movement by Yugoslav forces, and formally terminated it on 20 June after confirming the withdrawal.
Security Council Resolution 1244, which authorized the international civil and security presences, was adopted on 10 June by 14 votes to none with one abstention. KFOR began entering Kosovo on 12 June.
The executed agreement and its UN-filed signature page are dated 9 June; some NATO archival timelines place the announcement under 10 June, which is where the one-day discrepancy in secondary accounts comes from.
Sources
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What the sources leave uncertain
- The executed agreement and its UN-filed signature page are dated June 9. Some NATO archival timeline pages place the announcement under June 10, which can produce a one-day discrepancy in secondary accounts.