US Media: 10 Things you didn’t know about Kosovo

Kosovo is celebrating the 10th anniversary of independence on February 17th. The newest state in Europe is recognized actually by 116 countries, where 112 are part of UN. Still the Government of Serbia does not accept the fact the Kosovo is now an independent state, but for the sake of its integration in EU, Serbia started to normalize the relations with the Government of Kosovo, in accordance with Brussels Agreement.
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.

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.

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