US news published an article about “10 things you didn’t know about Kosovo” as listed below:
1. Kosovo is the second-youngest country in the world,
declaring its independence from Serbia on Feb. 17, 2008. The only country to
declare its independence recently is the island country of Barbados officially recognized the Republic of Kosovo on February 15th 2018, becoming the 116 country to do so.
2. While Serbia and a handful of other countries – including
Russia and China – do not recognize Kosovo's independence, the International
Court of Justice ruled that Kosovo is a sovereign nation in 2010.
3. Kosovo, a landlocked country slightly larger than
Delaware, is the smallest Balkan nation. About 40 percent of its land is
covered by forest, and slightly more than half of its land is agricultural.
4. With a median age of 29.1 years, Kosovo has among the
youngest populations in Europe. More than 40 percent of the population is under
25.
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| Visar Kryeziu/AP |
5. Kosovo is one of the poorest European nation, with a per capita gross domestic product of about $10,400 in 2017.
6. The majority of Kosovo's population of nearly 1.9 million
is Muslim, with Albanian and Serbian serving as the country's official
languages. Kosovo means "field of blackbirds" in Serbian.
7. The Ottoman Empire ruled Kosovo from the mid-15th century
to the early 20th century, during which Islam grew in prominence and the number
of Albanian speakers significantly increased, leading to tensions between the
new Muslim ethnic Albanian majority and Eastern Orthodox Serb minority.
8. Tensions boiled over into conflict in the 1990s, when
Albanians opposed both Serbs and the government of Yugoslavia – then a recently
dissolved federal state – in Kosovo. Hundreds of civilians were killed and
hundreds of thousands were displaced before NATO intervened to resolve the
conflict, though several thousand peacekeepers remain in the country today.
9. A statue of former U.S. President Bill Clinton stands on
a street that also bears his name in Pristina, the capital. Clinton helped end
the conflict in the late 1990s, and former President George W. Bush, who also
has a street named for him in the capital, recognized Kosovo's independence in
2008.
10. Pristina is also home to a Roman Catholic cathedral
named for Mother Teresa, who was Albanian and lived in a small village in
Kosovo as a teenager.
See here the original article!
