The area of the present-day Autonomous Province of Kosovo consists of two separate geographic entities. The first is Kosovo, a valley between Pristina and Drenica, 84 km long and about 14 km wide, densely populated, with significant agricultural and mineral resources and a network of important regional transport connections. The other is the territory known as Metohia (in medieval times metoh was the term for the holdings of the monasteries), which the Albanians include in a broader area called Dukagyin. It is about 80 km in length and over 40 km in width, and, compared with Kosovo, is primarily agricultural. The area of the Autonomous Province is 10,887 sq. km., which is 12.3 percent of the area of Serbia and 10.6 percent of the total area of FR Yugoslavia. Its population is 1,954,747 or 20.5 percent of the total population of Serbia, that is 19 percent of that of FR Yugoslavia. According to the last reliable census in 1981, ethnic Albanians (an important frontier minority - a frequent phenomenon in Europe) made up 77.4 percent of the population, while Montenegrins and Serbs accounted for 14.9 percent.
Kosovo and Metohia were at the heart of the medieval Serbian Kingdom which, after the 1389 battle at Kosovo Polje (the "Field of Blackbirds"), was conquered in the mid fifteenth century by the Ottoman Empire. Five hundred years of Ottoman rule, based on sharp social, economic and legal distinctions between Muslims and non-Muslims, created deep cleavages between the ethnic and religious communities inhabiting the same territories. Upon final liberation from Ottoman rule in the First Balkan War of 1912, the Kosovo region became part of Serbia, whereas Metohia became part of Montenegro. As such, both areas became part of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (the first Yugoslavia) at the end of the first World War. During the Axis occupation during World War II, when Yugoslavia was dismembered, most of Kosovo and Metohia was attached to Albania, then an Italian fascist protectorate. In 1944 Kosovo and Metohia were returned to Serbia and constituted for the first time as a separate administrative district. Subsequent constitutional (1968, 1971, 1974) and demographic changes under communist rule (due to the extremely high natality rate but also due to important immigration from neighbouring "ultra communist" Albania) tended to strengthen ethnic Albanian irredentist tendencies. The extremely high degree of autonomy granted Kosovo within the Republic of Serbia by the 1974 Constitution encouraged ethnic Albanian nationalist leaders to consider the territory as essentially an ethnic entity, one which could be detached from Yugoslavia. These aspirations culminated in the secessionist demonstrations of 1981, which led to violent clashes with the police. In the late sixties and throughout the decades that followed, the ethnic Serb inhabitants of Kosovo increasingly complained to Belgrade that they were being pushed out of the province.
Long concealed by Titoist rule, the situation of the Serbian minority in Kosovo became a key political issue only when the post-communist power struggle started in the late 1980s, when Slobodan Milosevic ostensibly came to their defence. This emotional issue facilitated the parliamentary revocation in 1989 of the extremely high degree of provincial autonomy accorded by the 1974 Constitution - a measure also considered necessary for post-communist liberalization reforms. Ethnic Albanian leaders rejected this change and began a boycott of official Serbian institutions, along with the establishment of their own parallel institutions. Followed by a majority of the ethnic Albanian population, this boycott widened the gap between the ethnic communities in Kosovo.