The International Olympic Committee has given official recognition to Kosovo allowing its athletes to take part in the 2016 Rio Olympics.
The IOC executive recognised the former Serbian province, which declared its independence in 2008, in October.
"This is one big day," Besim Hasani, president of the Kosovo Olympic Committee, told the IOC session on Tuesday.
"This is the beginning of a new era for the Olympic movement in Kosovo."
"Now they can start to prepare for Rio," IOC president Thomas Bach said after the decision was agreed unanimously by the full 104-member assembly.
Serbia refuses to accept the independence of Kosovo, where NATO-led airstrikes were used in 1999 to stop an offensive by Serbian forces against ethnic-Albanian separatists.
Bach said that Serbia had accepted Kosovo's membership "in the interests of the athletes."
However, in Belgrade Serbia's Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic "strongly condemned the decision" and "presents an abuse and politicisation of sport."
"We consider it unacceptable and contrary to the Olympic Charter" according to which a new member could be "an independent state recognised by the entire international community," Dacic said in a statement.
In Pristina, Memli Krasniqi, Kosovo Sport Minister said the decision "finally ends a very long period of injustice and discrimination and isolation which has plagued Kosovo's sports community for more than two decades."
Kosovo is now the 205th member of the IOC and its 50th member from Europe.
Kosovo's Olympic committee has 30 sporting federations as members and six - table tennis, archery, judo, yachting, weightlifting and modern pentathlon - are full members of international federations.
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