Kosovo was granted full sovereignty by the West yesterday, over four years since its hotly contested declaration of independence, in a celebration marred by new Serbian allegations of organ trafficking.

We expect this act to strengthen our international position and help a lot in gaining new recognitions and becoming a full-fledged member of all international mechanisms

Western powers in the International Steering Group – which has overseen Kosovo since its 2008 unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia and which consists of 23 European countries, the US and Turkey – announced the end of supervision over the territory.

Kosovo and its two million majority ethnic-Albanian population has been under some form of international administration since a Nato bombing campaign forced then Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic’s troops out of the Serbian province in 1999.

Kosovo’s President, Atifete Jahjaga, said yesterday that Kosovo deserved to become equal with others.

“Kosovo today is a country that fulfils all the conditions to become a state with a clear Euro-Atlantic integration perspective,” she said in an address to the nation just hours before the ISG meeting.

But Serbia – which has never accepted Kosovo’s declaration of independence on February 17, 2008 – dismissed the sovereignty announcement as meaningless.

Kosovo’s independence has been recognised by some 90 countries, including most EU nations, but is rejected by Serbia, Russia and Kosovo’s own ethnic Serbs, who make up about six per cent of the population, living mainly in the north on the border with Serbia.

Serbia’s top official for Kosovo, Aleksandar Vulin, said the decision to end ISG supervision was a “historic and tragic mistake”.

Serbian Prime Minister Ivica Dacic stressed Belgrade would never recognise Kosovo’s independence “supervised or unsupervised”, dismissing the ISG decision as meaningless.

The granting of full sovereignty was further marred by a Serbian prosecutor’s revelation on the eve of the ISG’s meeting that Belgrade has a former Kosovo rebel witness who allegedly took part in removing the heart of a Serb prisoner for the international black market in organs during the 1998-1999 Kosovo conflict.

Kosovo’s Foreign Minister, Enver Hoxhaj, dismissed the revelation as “propaganda” and an attempt to “blacken a very big day for Kosovo”.

Claims of organ harvesting from Serb prisoners by the KLA during and after the war are being investigated by the EU.

In 2010, a hard-hitting Council of Europe report found that a group of Kosovo-Albanian rebels closely linked to Kosovo’s Prime Minister, Hashim Thaci, carried out organ trafficking during and after the conflict with Serbian forces.

Thaci and the Kosovo authorities have denied the claims.

Yesterday, Kosovo tried to look to the future, with Foreign Minister Hoxhaj describing full sovereignty as “a new chapter”.

“We expect this act to strengthen our international position and help a lot in gaining new recognitions and becoming a full-fledged member of all international mechanisms,” Hoxhaj said.

Prime Minister Thaci, Dutch diplomat Pieter Feith – who chairs the International Civilian Office (ICO), which will also be closed down – and a host of other international and Kosovo officials, were present for the event.

Top US diplomat Philip Reeker, who met with Thaci in Pristina yesterday, said the end of supervision would not mean the end of the international community’s support for Kosovo. “It is not an end to strong international engagement and assistance, including that of the US,” he said.

The end of supervision will not affect the presence of the Nato-led KFOR peacekeeping force in charge of security or European rule-of-law mission EULEX, which was created to boost the justice system.

Kosovo is among the poorest regions in Europe, with almost half of the population jobless and poor, according to international surveys. The Zeri newspaper warned of “many challenges ahead” as “expectations of the citizens were not fulfilled”.

Factbox

Geography: Kosovo is a land-locked territory in the southwestern Balkans with borders Serbia, Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro.

Covering 10,877 square kilometres, it is slightly smaller than the US state of Connecticut and a little bigger than Lebanon.

Population: Around 1.8 million, down from around two million before the conflict of 1999.

About 90 per cent of the population is ethnic Albanian, most of whom are Muslims. The small Serb population of about 100,000, concentrated mostly in enclaves in the north, has been steadily decreasing since the 1998-1999 war.

History: Serbs believe Kosovo to be the birthplace of their state, for it was where the Serbian Orthodox Church had its seat, and also where the Serb army was defeated by the Turks in 1389.

The province was granted considerable autonomy in the federal Yugoslavia that emerged after World War II, but in 1989 Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic removed most of its privileges, leading to a rise in nationalistic tensions.

After the wars which tore apart the rest of Yugoslavia between 1990 and 1995, Milosevic moved to crush an independence movement in Kosovo, leading the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to intervene militarily in 1999.

Since then Kosovo has been effectively out of the control of the Serbian government in Belgrade, which still claims sovereignty over it.

The UN and Nato have security forces in Kosovo, which declared itself an independent nation in February 2008. Serbia still considers Kosovo a break-away province.

Institutions: Kosovo has the institutions of a parliamentary democracy. Elections in 2011 were won by the Democratic Party of Kosovo, led by Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, the controversial former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army that helped win the 1999 war against Belgrade.

Economy: The economy is mostly based on farming, but suffered great damage during the war. Kosovo remains one of the poorest regions in Europe, although it has rich deposits of coal, lead, zinc, chromium and silver.

Kosovo’s economy is still largely dependent on money from expatriates and donor aid.

According to the World Bank, Kosovo’s per capita gross national product stood at $3,250 in 2011.