Shopping for Sniper Rifles

hen a sniper began shooting down people in suburban Maryland and Virginia earlier this month, followed by possible copycat shootings on Long Island last weekend, I wondered why it hadn't happened sooner.

For the past three years, I have been doing research for a book on how a group of Kosovar Albanian émigrés in New York City helped build a guerrilla army by raising money and buying and shipping high-powered rifles from the United States to the Balkans. In March 2001, I accompanied one of the key fund-raisers for the Kosovo Liberation Army to a gun show in suburban Pennsylvania. Sports utility vehicles with "Sportsmen for Bush" bumper stickers lined the parking lot. Inside, a throng of people — mostly young men, but also a surprising number of families with children — strolled past tables laden with AK-47's, M-16 assault rifles, sniper rifles, handguns, flat and round bullets, brochures for the National Rifle Association, silencers, night scopes, knives, Japanese swords, muskets, daggers, even a couple of anti-aircraft guns, as well as paraphernalia from the Civil War, World War I and World War II.

One gun dealer showed me a .32-caliber Thompson automatic weapon that shoots 32 rounds in less than 2.5 seconds. Another showed me a .22-caliber Bushmaster gun with a silencer that was described as "deadly quiet." The most impressive gun, however, was the .50-caliber high-powered Barrett sniper rifle. With the .50-caliber rifle, the dealer told me, a good marksman can kill a large animal from two miles away and an amateur could probably shoot a person from a mile away. He said he had armor-piercing, tracer and incendiary .50-caliber bullets available that could bring down a helicopter. The rifle was going for about $5,000.

As I looked at the gun, my K.L.A. companion beckoned me over to another stand where a woman was selling a Barrett knock-off, a .50-caliber sniper rifle made by Armalite that was selling for just $2,495. The dealer told me all I had to do was hand over my driver's license for an "Insta-Check." "They call this an Insta-Check, but really it takes about 15 minutes," she said, referring to the background check she would have to do. As long as I didn't have a criminal record or live in the "People's Republic of New York City," so called among gun dealers because it's one of the few cities where it is illegal to possess any kind of firearm without a permit, the gun would be mine. I told her I did live in New York City, but that my driver's license was issued in California. In that case, she said, I'd probably be fine.

The K.L.A. member bought a sniper rifle that day, along with a few other guns. Those weapons were promptly shipped overseas to Kosovo and Macedonia, another example of American gun laws inadvertently fueling foreign conflicts.

Ever since that day at the Pennsylvania gun show, I've wondered how hard it would be to use one of those high-powered sniper-rifles. Last week, in a Times report, a retired New York City police detective and security executive, Richard Dietl, cleared that up a little. He said it took him one afternoon to teach his 12-year-old son how to hit a target in the torso from 200 yards away.

The ease with which one can buy weapons at gun shows has not gone unnoticed by groups like Al Qaeda, which pointed this out in one of its training manuals. According to the Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group, Osama bin Laden's agents in the United States purchased 25 high-powered sniper rifles to use in their war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the late 1980's. What would stop them from using the guns against us at home?

We have no idea whether the suburban sniper on the loose inside the Beltway is a foreign terrorist. It is clear, however, that our gun laws not only inadvertently fuel foreign conflicts but also enable terrorists to purchase guns to launch attacks against people on American soil.

Gun control advocates have called for the creation of a ballistic imaging system to help law enforcement officers trace ammunition to the guns used to fire them. However, such a high-tech system would be of little use to law enforcement if the gunman bought his weapon more than three months before using it. Federal law mandates that background checks on gun buyers be kept on record for only 90 days, and Attorney General John Ashcroft has proposed shortening that time to 24 hours. The ability to trace the sniper's .223-caliber rifle and examine background-check records on the person who purchased it would be invaluable to the police investigation. Without it, I can't help wondering how many more victims there will be.

Stacy Sullivan is the author of the forthcoming "From Brooklyn to Kosovo with Love and Guns

This is how the book opens, it's left intentionally vague as to who and why at this point.

*********************************************

Death fell quietly from the blue September sky. A middle aged football fan who had driven up to Landover from the Maryland Eastern Shore with an old college friend was struck on the left temple and collapsed forward onto the fans standing in front of the seats below him, fountaining blood over several other fans as he twisted down. Death struck at the moment 80,000 cheering fans were already on their feet for the second half kickoff, so the extra screaming of the fans surrounding the dying man went unnoticed by the larger crowd in the rest of the stadium.

Every two seconds the scene was repeated with horrifying variations across the western end-zone upper deck stands as death and injury dropped among the massed bodies unseen and unheard. Every two seconds another bloody scene was created and the waves of horror spread and merged and multiplied until the entire upper deck section became engulfed in a roiling wave of sheer animal panic.

After another minute the unusual crowd activity in the western upper deck stands was noticed by cameramen in a dozen locations around the stadium. A baffled video director put a scene of some of the over excited fans onto the stadium’s two jumbotron screens just in time to show a house sized close up view of a wife cradling the bloody wreckage of her husband’s face, vainly trying to stop his massive fatal hemorrhaging against her white blouse.

Police radios crackled, police marksmen scanned the stadium and light towers through binoculars and rifle scopes. The black clad police marksmen and their shouldered rifles were seen by confused fans throughout the stadium, adding depth to the rippling fear.

Panic erupted through the western upper deck as the realization spread like an electric current that an unseen sniper had them in his crosshair gaze. Six thousand adrenal glands pumped out a last ditch fight-or-flight response, unthinking mob psychology took over, and six thousand fans stampeded downward for the exits to put them beyond the sniper’s reach. It had taken over an hour before the game to fill the steeply sloping western upper deck, now the same number of fans attempted to escape the unrelenting rain of bullets in a single minute.

******************************************

He was jolted back from a peaceful place by blows to his head. He heard a gruff voice say “wake up asshole,” but when he finally forced his eyelids open there was no one to be seen, so he wasn’t sure if the kicks and curses had been the bitter end of a dream, a hallucination, or reality. A bare cement ceiling came into focus above him, he could feel that he was lying on a cold cement floor, the familiar smells of concrete dust and something else filled his nose. He rolled his head to the side and saw that an entire wall was missing, wide open to a sunny blue sky not a yard from him. A breeze stirred white papers around the room and out to the sky, one page dipped as it fluttered past his face, and he thought for a moment that he saw those crazy Arab worm letters on it. He vaguely remembered the worm letters from his time in Kuwait.

After years spent in and out of veterans’ hospitals, Jimmy Shifflet was no stranger to waking up in strange places. Aside from the starched sheets and side rails of hospital beds he had come-to along the sides of highways, half in rivers, once even across the tracks on a railroad bridge. He raised his right arm to block the sun from his eyes, and saw a desert camouflage sleeve, something he did not remember wearing since his discharge from the Marines a decade earlier.

The problem was that the damned nurses at the VA hospital put new drugs in your juice and never told you what to expect. They fed you new “study” pills by the handful like they were jellybeans; some made you shake, some made you sweat, some brought nightmares and some brought peace. That’s what happened to a sick vet who was broke: they used you for a damned guinea pig. Some of the nurses were nice though…

There was a weight across his chest. His hands fell across something hard and hot and heavy, his fingers traced old half remembered shapes and contours: even for a hospital dream, this was a real doozy. “Any time now,” he thought, “I am going to wake up in the VA hospital.”

In the meantime he used his elbows to push himself up into a sitting position, and looked down upon a strange rifle laying across his lap: black steel and brown wood, with a gray metal tube the size of several beer cans fixed to the end of the barrel, and a short black scope attached to a home made mount not on top of the rifle, but offset high on the left side. The scope was not only mounted off to the side, but seemed to be pointing downward, hopelessly misaligned. A fat pad or pillow bulged out from the stock where a shooter’s face might rest; it was attached with gray duct tape. A pair of bipod legs was attached to the barrel just behind the long gray can.

It was without a doubt the ugliest and oddest rifle he’d ever seen, as befitted a hospital dream, and after he finished looking at it he tried to set it aside but found it was attached to him by a length of green cord behind his neck. To get the cord over his head he needed to lift the heavy rifle up off his lap. If he wasn’t careful he could fall right out through the missing wall, but in a dream such as this he sometimes could fly. The dreams where he could fly usually started out scary but ended up happy, soaring like an angel over green fields. Out of the missing wall past woods and fields and roads in the distance stood some kind of huge brightly colored thing, looking for all the world like the mothership landed on earth to take him home, or maybe to just do more experiments on him.

Suddenly dropping in front of the missing wall there appeared an insect like blue and black and white helicopter, which slowly turned until its side was to him, its rotors invisible and unheard. “It’s not right they put the damned drugs in your juice and don’t tell you,” he thought, still trying to lift the rifle’s string over his neck.

**************************************

“Roger that base, I have the shooter in sight, confirmed shooter in sight, he has a rifle, he’s moving, take him Billy, take him out!”

SWAT sniper Sgt. Bill Paxton found the subject by his movement; he was hard to spot in clothes which matched the bare concrete of the half finished office building which hid his sniper’s lair. A telephone tip from a civilian had alerted the police to the suspected sniper’s location, the tip was passed to the Maryland State Police helicopter, and they found him in under a minute after leaving their tight orbit around the stadium.

The sniper had found an A1 position, Paxton had to give him professional credit, he was hundreds of yards beyond the stadium’s outermost security perimeter. No one had ever considered the stadium to be in danger from such a distance, well over a thousand yards, because it was believed that any shots fired at the stadium would either hit its outer walls or sail safely over it. This sniper had somehow figured out a way to precisely drop his shots just over the stadium and down into the opposite upper deck. Nobody had ever thought of it before, it was one for the books.

So Sgt. Paxton didn’t underestimate the sniper and quickly settled his scope’s reticle on the sniper’s head: at 150 yards it was not a challenging shot, even restrained by a harness sitting half out of the vibrating helicopter. The pilot held steady as Paxton squeezed his rifle’s trigger and fired a single 168 grain Black Hills .308 caliber hollow point, then flicked the bolt and reacquired his sight picture. There was no need for a follow up: the evidence of his accurately delivered head shot was all over the wall behind the dead sniper.

I sense an agenda here from an ex-war-reporter (i.e. someone who made their living on the deaths of others)...

STACY SULLIVAN and ED VULLIAMY
NEW YORK

There are few, if any, journalists whose work commands the respect - and whose death impacts the profession - like that of Kurt Schork, shot this week by young soldier in Sierra Leone with no idea of the magnitude of what he has done.

Schork was, on the surface of things, an intelligent, modest and moral man and a seeker of truth who, like all the bravest people, said little and wrote nothing about his bravery. He was a man whose cool, clear thinking made him credible and authoritative.

But Schork was much more than that. Like an allegorical figure, he typified something about journalism and the way it should be done at it best. He kept his feelings and his morals out of his copy, but because he pursued facts so relentlessly, his dispatches became the voice of conscience.

Likewise, his death means even more than the loss of a good man: it says something terrifying about modern warfare and the way in which war in our time can - and cannot - be covered by reporters whose quest is to bear witness to it.

Schork's death has had an unexpected and astonishing effect on his friends and colleagues, leaving the hardest of them wounded and speechless, many wondering hard about their own past, their own luck, and their own future.

There was a time, in such places as Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf, when reporters were 'attached' to military units. The tradition carries on - as in the platoons of scribes who accompanied NATO's divisions into Kosovo last year, after the fighting was over.

But by then, warfare had changed, and so had war reporting. The carnage in Bosnia and Rwanda required journalists to pick and navigate their own perilous way across front lines that were blurred and moved from day to day, or through the streets of battered Sarajevo.

In those wars, they traveled alone or in small groups, driving 'soft-skin' cars which were rented from Trieste or Budapest after telling a pack of lies to Avis about where they were going - and which were invariably returned with shattered windscreens and riddled with bullets.

Only slowly did such basics as flak jackets and armoured vehicles come into use, and then only among the few - most especially among the wire services like Reuters for whom Schork worked. They were the reporters who had an infrastructure behind them, brave but cautious, the ones who could be relied on not to get killed.

Kurt Schork arrived in the profession too late for the era of 'accompanied' war reporting, and anyway it would not have suited him. He had been a manager with the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority and first came across the havoc guns can wreak during his handling of the vigilante crisis, when a man named Bernie Goetz opened fire on a team of muggers riding the subway one night in the 1980s.

Suddenly, after his 40th birthday, Schork decided he wanted to be a war correspondent. He quit his job and bought a plane ticket to Asia. He 'rolled out of bed one day and into Kurdistan,' says his friend Roy Gutman of Newsday. 'But despite coming to the profession late, he was the most experienced of all of us by the time he got to Bosnia. Which makes you realize: there but for the grace of God. We've all be there, we've all been so lucky'.

Many of Schork's friends are angered as well as saddened by his death. Gutman, a Pulitzer Prize winner, 'dealt with' his post-Bosnian life by editing a compendium book called 'Crimes of War'. 'But Kurt had to stay with it' said Gutman this week, uncharacteristically speechless with sorrow and rage. 'And there is an element of the moth to the flame in this tragedy. I last saw Kurt in Kosovo - he was bored and wanted to get to East Timor'.

'Then he moved to Washington, with his wife. But I never had the balls to say to Kurt: "hang up those spurs. You've done it all. You have nothing to prove. You're married now". I think he was considering it. He asked for introductions on the New York Times, where there was an editing job that suited him. If only .. .. That's why this hits you so hard in the stomach'.

When Schork arrived in Bosnia, his partner with Reuters was another expert in bravery and recklessness, Andrej Gustincic - half-Slovene, half-Serb. They divvied up the duties: Gustincic covered the ethnic cleansing and the countryside, Schork took the siege of Sarajevo.

One of Gustincic's many awful evenings was that on which he organized the retrieval of the corpse, by Croatian troops, of a BBC cameraman called Tuna whose clearly marked 'Press' land rover was hit by a Serbian tank round. 'We had just been up that very same road an hour before,' he recalls, 'It's horrendous; it could have been us, and that's what happened to Kurt this week'.

In October 1992, Gustincic escaped an ambush almost identical to that in which Schork was killed this week. He was accompanying a small exploratory convoy of British troops which breezed up a road towards the Serbian guns without thinking to ask the Bosnian sentry if the route was safe. Gustincic, of course, understood the warning the man was shrieking, and raced to catch up with the British convoy to warn them.

Too late; the fusillade came thick and fast. Gustincic, in a red Citroen car - the boot loaded with petrol - was obliged, along with the better armoured military vehicles, to run a gauntlet of ten minutes' terrifying fire. After that, he recalled this week: 'I hung up my spurs. Too heartbroken and too scared'. He asked Reuters to move him to New York.

Schork, however, 'felt the moral obligation to stay. That's what we mean when we say he was a moral man. But - there's no point in denying that there was something in all this he needed to do'.

'Kurt Schork is the man who, during a quiet period in Sarajevo headed off to Grozny,' recalls the other Doyen of the Sarajevo press corps - Roger Cohen, author of the Bosnian Odyssey 'Hearts Grown Brutal' and now senior Europe Correspondent for the New York Times.

'But this term "war junkie" has a pejorative tone,' says Cohen. 'Kurt liked covering wars, because he felt that feelings were laid bare in war. But he did so because he felt that these conflicts needed and had to be covered. These were a new kind of war, and Kurt insisted they were important; the fact that more people had died in conflict in the world since 1989 than between 1945 and 1989.

'To Kurt, this was a critical issue. Kurt's work wasn't an addiction to war, it was an intellectual commitment, it was an unusual idealism - and if that involved taking risks, so be it'.

Kurt Schork's copy - and the fact that it will be written no more - is also a symbol of something beyond itself, it was a way of writing. There was something old fashioned about Schork's work - something of the old school, the James Cameron school - that was a welcome relief in days of rococo journalism and inflated egos. The first person singular - 'I'- appears nowhere in his output. Just as those who have had the good fortune to be photographed by Cartier Bresson always say they forgot he was in the room, Kurt Schork was invisible to those who read his facts on the wire.

But on the ground, he was a presence everyone noticed. In Sarajevo, United Nations officials frequently wound up denouncing their own organisation at press briefings because they could not stand up to Schork's line of questioning. UN spokesmen often spoke of being relieved when Schork left the city for a few days to cover a story outside the capital. Other journalists routinely checked their stories with Schork's to make sure they had it right. And people around the world often relied on his stories to tell them what was happening in their own backyards.

'He was the quintessential wire journalist,' says Cohen. 'The first account of the news from the person who has to see things for himself, on which we all depend. But he was more than that: he was a perfect wire journalist to the point that he re-invented wire journalism. Because he had this remarkable intellect, he could grapple with the issues and understand them. He had a probing mind and didn't like wasting time. He had a keen sense of what was right and what was wrong when confronted by the Serbian barbarism. That was always very clear in his copy, but it was never splurged. It was there in the clarity of his intellect and the clarity of the facts. That was what people most admired and envied in his work'.

In his factual asceticism, Schork was like Gutman, who writes about war with a sparseness that is almost puritanical. Both men kept their credibility by keeping a low profile. Gutman of course refuses the comparison, insisting that 'in days of baroque journalism and self-assertion, and of film-driven journalism, Kurt was the man who keeps the story going by establishing the facts, the essential and irrefutable facts - and with those bare facts, he registered so much more anger than all the angry people'.

Schork's death will remove some of the best war correspondents from the field, in a way that the death of no other reporter could do.

Unlike photographers or cameramen whose lust for testimony often overrides their good sense and who feature most on the casualty lists, Schork took calculated risks. He was calm and sensible, the journalist you most wanted to be with if you came under fire.

Among Schork's opposite numbers behind the lens is the similarly seasoned Ron Haviv, a Newsweek photographer whom Schork met on his first self-assignment in 1991, in Kurdistan, and who shared Schork's trail across Bosnia, Chechnya and Africa.

Haviv usually has the sharp glint of a rodent in his brown eyes, but this week they lost focus, staring into mid distance. He was due to go to Sierra Leone last week, but was unable because he fell ill. He said that if the Sierra Leonese army was offering press access on a convoy to newly-won territory, he would almost certainly have gone along with Schork and Associated Press cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora, the other veteran journalist killed in the ambush.

'You could die in Bosnia, you could die in Kosovo, you could die in the Gulf,' he says, slightly dazed, 'It could be you or one of your friends. Kurt's death is a reminder of how dangerous this job is, even for people who know what they are doing. There's only a small group of us who cover war, and if you lose two members of such a close-knit family, of course it makes you think about what you do'.

Joel Brand was one of those whom Schork took under his wing in Sarajevo, for whom Schork's way of working was something of a model. Brand, then a freelance correspondent for the London Times and Newsweek, now lives in Los Angeles, and upon hearing of his mentor's death, went for a long, solitary evening surf.

'It's a very small community that covers war,' he said next day, 'and those who do it only do so with the protection of the brotherhood, whether they're men or women. Kurt was big brother and if Kurt gets killed, what does that mean for everybody else? When the best gets killed what are the rest of us supposed to think? Kurt wouldn't condone this kind of thinking, but I wonder if I could go out again now'.

The business of journalism is a cruel fool sometimes, and Andrej Gustincic - Schork's twin and equal at Reuters in the early days of Bosnia - has not enjoyed much glory after he made his decision to live; he's in New York writing a novel and looking for a decent job. 'But I don't want to go back into a war zone,' he says, 'I don't want to die on some fucking road in Africa'.

Gee, Stacy loves the UN, too. Who woulda thunk it...

The invasion of NGOs, by Stacy Sullivan

governments as well as donors are coming to recognize NGOs as major development partners

on September 15, representatives from 2,800 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) gathered for a three-day annual meeting at United Nations Headquarters in New York. Secretary-General Kofi Annan described the meeting as a way to prepare a "political and economic blueprint for the 21st century." Annan talked about the need for the United Nations, NGOs, governments, and private corporations to cooperate in building that blueprint. The keynote speaker, Queen Noor of Jordan, pointed out that NGOs, private corporations, and governments have long been suspicious of each other. "Fortunately, this is changing," she said. "Governments as well as donors are coming to recognize NGOs as major development partners."

The same principle of cooperation, one that moves away from the traditional donor-recipient relationship, has been adopted by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which has long contracted out to NGOs. As Donald Pressley, the assistant administrator of USAID, put it recently during a Congressional hearing: "My overarching goal for our bureau," he said, "will be to establish sustainable partnerships, both between the people and organizations in the United States and the countries of the region as well as among these countries themselves."

The international testing ground for this new cooperation of NGO partnerships is the reconstruction of Kosovo.

The UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) has created an international civil administration that is unprecedented in its complexity and scope for any international institution. It is a conglomeration of multilateral organizations that view themselves as full partners to the UN, but are also under UN leadership. The partners, aside from the UN, are: the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which is in charge of humanitarian assistance; the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which is in charge of democratization and institution-building; and the European Union (EU), which is in charge of reconstruction. But although these four international organizations are in charge of administering Kosovo, almost all of their efforts and projects are carried out by NGOs, which increasingly are working together with governments and private businesses.

When Serbian forces pulled out of Kosovo after nearly three months of NATO bombing, they left behind a charred landscape of destruction: neighborhoods of charred houses, fields of animal and human corpses, and hundreds of thousands of shattered lives. In all, an estimated 10,000 people were killed and 85,000 houses destroyed.

Already there is an enormous amount of reconstruction visible in Kosovo—the vast majority of which has been undertaken by local initiatives in conjunction with NGOs. Ironically, because Albanians were excluded for so long from Kosovo's civil administration, they formed a vibrant and industrious commercial class of shopkeepers, retail distributors, and builders who are well suited to the reconstruction undertaking. Most are concentrating on making at least one room in their house suitable to survive the approaching winter. But, as the UN's Annan puts it, "When we speak of reconstructing Kosovo, we know that bricks and mortar are not enough."

Indeed, the reconstruction of Kosovo entails not only the rebuilding of houses, but the remaking of institutions. This means educating local civil administrators, creating and training a local police force, and building a civil society. It also means establishing a new penal system, a legitimate judicial system, and a free press. The vast majority of this work will be carried out by NGOs and their governmental and private business partners.

There are some 90 NGOs, in Kosovo and even though there is no financial system—no rules, no commercial law, not even any banks—NGOs have already begun short-term reconstruction projects in cooperation with the United Nations, governments, other NGOs, local charities, local businesses, and private companies. As long-term reconstruction projects get underway, NGO involvement and collaboration with other groups is likely to increase substantially, not least because the head of the UN Mission in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, comes from the world of NGOs. He was the founder of Doctors Without Borders and knows how effective NGOs can be.

One of the first things the UNHCR did in Kosovo to ensure that it fully utilized the capacity of NGOs was to give each NGO an Area of Responsibility (AOR). The NGOs then made assessments of the needs of each area and began cooperating with indigenous organizations, commercial enterprises, other NGOS, and governments to begin fulfilling those needs.

Below is a sampling of the kind of collaborative projects that have already been undertaken.

Examples of NGOs working with international organizations:

1.) All NGOs working on health-related projects, including Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frantieres—MSF) and International Medical Corps (IMC), are working with The World Health Organization, which has organized an NGO/UN drugs coordination group that meets the first Monday of every month to discuss the needs and distribution of drugs and pharmaceuticals throughout Kosovo.

2.) The Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) is working with the World Food Programme (WFP) to establish a way station to feed refugees returning to Kosovo from Albania.

Examples of NGOs working with governments:

1.) Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and Caritas have shipped and distributed the almost 5,000 metric tons of food donated to Kosovo by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and USAID.

2.) The Brother's Brother Foundation (BBF) has undertaken a project in conjunction with the USIA Kosovo Library Revitalization Project in Pristina to reconstruct information resources in the province. BBF has sent its first shipment of books to Kosovo to address severely neglected libraries where books are outdated and in poor condition. The shipment is a mixture of books from pre-primary storybooks, preteen literature, and high school and college textbooks.

3.) Czech NGOs are working with the Czech government to bring in building supplies to Kosovo. All brick and tile factories, as well as wood mills, were destroyed forcing most NGOs to bring in their own building supplies.

Examples of NGOs working with private companies:

1.) In addition to working with the World Food Program and the local Mother Theresa Society (MTS), CARE is working with a private Zimbabwe-based firm, Mine-Tech, which de-mines the CARE's AOR. Mine-Tech's services were paid for by private U.S. donors. Mine-Tech, which has four teams of de-miners, is also training 15 Kosovars in de-mining.

2.) The Salvation Army is contracting with local manufacturers for 2,000 stoves that will be distributed to Kosovar families. The stoves are used not only for cooking, but also for heating rooms.

3.)According to David Aaron, an official from the U.S. Department of Commerce, American private companies may begin working with NGOs to rebuild roads and bridges, move into the cell phone market, and purify polluted water sources. American companies may also work with NGOs in agriculture and food processing and refurbishing Kosovo's zinc and lead mines.

4.)The American Refugee Committee has a staff of medical professionals in Kosovo who are working not only with local doctors and nurses, but also with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, which has sent a team of five doctors, two nurses, and one administrator to both Albania and Kosovo under ARC's coordination.

Examples of NGOs working with other NGOs, charities, and local groups:

1.) Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frantieres—MSF) is working directly with local medical staff, school teachers, and counselors throughout Kosovo. In Gjakova, MSF is training teachers to recognize and deal with children suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and other war-related mental health problems. In Prizren, MSF is running an intensive training program for local counselors in the hope of rooting mental health facilities in Kosovo. In Pec and Pristina, MSF is working with local health workers to rebuild hospitals that were damaged during the war.

2.) International Medical Corps is working to recruit local health care providers for 80 primary health care facilities across Kosovo.

3.) American Friends Service Committee has been supporting local groups in the former Yugoslavia for several years, including Motrat Qiriazi-Kosovo, Women in Black, and the Center for Nonviolent Conflict Resolution-Belgrade.

4.) Save the Children is providing material to reconstruct and renovate 30 schools in Decan municipality and is working with the International Red Cross, the Dutch medical NGO MEMISA, and the local Mother Theresa Society to distribute medical supplies to a maternity ward in Gjakova.

5.) The United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) is working in Mitrovica and Orahovac to winterize and weatherproof houses. UMCOR is also coordinating food security efforts for ACT (Action by Churches Together) through food distribution and agricultural recovery. This includes distributing family food parcels and other food items and providing seeds, agricultural equipment and training for local communities and technicians in techniques to ensure food security.

As long-term reconstruction projects in Kosovo take shape, it is NGOs that will be bear the brunt of responsibility for rebuilding, training media personnel, and guiding nascent institutions. But unlike in Bosnia, which is still wholly dependent on foreign assistance, the NGOs in Kosovo are attempting to partner with private corporations and local civic groups so their work will be more sustainable in the long run. While the results may not turn out to be as idealistic as Annan's blueprint would hope, the walls separating NGOs, governments, private enterprise, and indigenous civic groups are being broken down.

Stacy Sullivan covered the Balkans for two years for Newsweek magazine and, most recently, has written about Kosovo for The New York Times Magazine and The New Republic.

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