The breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo has declared independence, ending nine years in limbo.

Kosovo has been run by the United Nations since 1999 when NATO bombed Serbia to halt the killing and ethnic cleansing of the province's Albanian population by Serb forces.

Some 10,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands fled their homes during a two-year Serb counter-insurgency war.

Kosovo's independence move is backed by the West but bitterly opposed by Serbia and its ally Russia.

The European Union is preparing to take over supervision and policing of the new state, which is 90 percent ethnic Albanian.

Many of Kosovo's Serbs fled the province after the war. Of the 120,000 Serbs who remain, around half live in the north around the city of Mitrovica. The rest are scattered in enclaves protected by NATO's 16,000-strong peace force, KFOR.

Almost two years of Serb-Albanian negotiations on the future status of Kosovo ended in deadlock in December 2007.

Analysts say if Serbia can't keep Kosovo, it wants to partition the territory, keeping control of the north, where it already provides health, education and administrative services for Serbs.

KFOR is braced for unrest and U.N. agencies have contingency plans for thousands of refugees.

People displaced within Serbia, not including Kosovo (2007)	206,000 (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.)
People displaced within Kosovo (2007)	21,000 (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.)