Armed Forces of the Republic of Kosovo

The Armed Forces of the Republic of Kosovo (Forcat e Armatosura të Republikës së Kosovës; FARK or AFRK) was a guerilla group in Kosovo created by Bujar Bukoshi in August 1998. Their number was largely unknown, estimated to be anywhere between 120 and 3,000 fighters in 1999.

Bujar Bukoshi, the Prime Minister in exile of the Republic of Kosovo, had created the FARK in Albania with a few dozen former Albanian officers of the Yugoslav army gathered by Sali Cekaj. He then put it under the command of former Colonel Ahmet Krasniqi, his "Minister of Defence". The Serbian police and army had started massacring Albanians in the Drenica region of Kosovo in late January and February 1998 and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which had been militarily active since 1996, had suffered a series of setbacks in July and August.

Most of the FARK were then loyal to the President of Kosovo, Ibrahim Rugova, who had followed a policy of peaceful resistance to the Serbs until the Drenica massacres of 1998, while the KLA was led by Hashim Thaçi, whom the apparent failure of that policy had made a credible alternative political leader.

Bujar Bukoshi, while spending most of his time in Germany, had been a representative for the Kosovar Albanians from 1991, the year when they proclaimed their independence while under Serbian military and police rule, to 1998.

Then , on April 2, 1999, as Rugova had then been sidelined by recent developments, Hashim Thaçi proclaimed himself Prime Minister in...
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