The architectural heritage of the Kosovo Albanians during Yugoslav rule was shown institutionalised disregard for decades prior to outright conflict at the end of the 20th century. Numerous Albanian cultural sites in Kosovo were destroyed during the period of Yugoslav rule and especially the Kosovo conflict (1998-1999) which constituted a war crime violating the Hague and Geneva Conventions. In all, 225 out of 600 mosques in Kosovo were damaged, vandalised, or destroyed alongside other Islamic architecture during the conflict. Additionally 500 Albanian owned kulla dwellings (traditional stone tower houses) and three out of four well-preserved Ottoman period urban centres located in Kosovo cities were badly damaged resulting in great loss of traditional architecture. Kosovo's public libraries, of which 65 out of 183 were completely destroyed, amounted to a loss of 900,588 volumes, while Islamic libraries sustained damage or destruction resulting in the loss of rare books, manuscripts and other collections of literature. Archives belonging to the Islamic Community of Kosovo, records spanning 500 years, were also destroyed. During the war, Islamic architectural heritage posed for Yugoslav Serb paramilitary and military forces as Albanian patrimony with destruction of non-Serbian architectural heritage being a methodical and planned component of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
History
Yugoslav Period
For around five centuries being a province of the Ottoman Empire, numerous examples of Ottoman architecture existed in Kosovo. In the aftermath of World War Two, Yugoslavia was governed by communist authorities who implemented various modernisation drives toward changing the architectural landscape and design of urban settlements. These measures were aimed at altering the panorama of a settlement that was deemed to have elements associated with an unwanted Ottoman past and features deemed as "backward". Starting from the late 1940s, architectural heritage in main urban centres of Kosovo began to be destroyed, mainly conducted by the local government as part of urban modernisation schemes. During the 1950s this process was undertaken by the Urban Planning Institute (Urbanistički zavod) of Yugoslavia with the most prominent example in Kosovo of the socialist modernisation drive being in Prishtinë. The Ottoman Prishtina bazaar contained 200 shops set in blocks devoted to a craft or guild owned by Albanians grouped around a mosque, located in the centre of Prishtinë. These buildings were expropriated in 1947 and demolished by labour brigades known as Popular Fronts (Albanian: , Serbian: ).
In 1952, the Yugoslav government founded the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of Kosovo tasked with dealing with issues relating to cultural heritage in Kosovo. During post-war communist Yugoslavia, only one Ottoman era monument the Tomb of Sultan Murad I was listed as a cultural monument, while state protection status was given mainly to Serbian Orthodox Church architecture in Kosovo. The criteria for listing mosques as historic monuments was much more restrictive than for Serbian Orthodox architecture. Buildings who had protection status received funding for historical preservation, while unlisted mosques, many from the Ottoman period that were renovated during this time was done without the Institute’s supervision often resulting in damage or original architectural elements being destroyed. On the eve of the Kosovo conflict, only 15 mosques out of the 600 or more mosques had been awarded the status of historic monument, unlike 210 Orthodox Serbian churches, gravesites and monasteries that had been awarded the status of protected historic monument.
Kosovo Conflict (1998-1999)
The Kosovo conflict triggered a counter-insurgency campaign in 1998-1999 by Yugoslav Serb armed forces (VJ) fighting against Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) fighters that escalated into the Kosovo war (1999) and military intervention from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). During the counter-insurgency campaign Yugoslav Serb forces targeted collections of various state archives and buildings, museums and libraries; Islamic libraries, Muslim theological schools and Sufi lodges (tekkes).