The US is currently training the KLA/KPC, according to the diplomat. Why is it the US is the only country their willing to train the KPC by flying them to US installations? The head of the Kosovo Mission is denying exit visas to any KPC personel due to their terrorist affilation.
July 30, 2001
MACEDONIA: THE DOUBLE GAME OF THE AMERICANS
by Renate Flottau, Olaf Ihlau, Susanne Koelbl and Alexander Szandar
There is growing irritation among the Europeans over Washington's dubious actions in the Balkans: As godfather of the UCK it shares responsibility for the worsening conflict between Albanians and Macedonian Slavs. [3 paragraphs omitted in translation]
Europe looks at its southeastern back yard with dismay. Once again the fuse of an ethnic explosion is smoldering. After the decade of the Yugoslav succession wars that cost the lives of almost 300,000 people, another bloodbath in the Balkans looms with the open civil war between two ethnic groups that could plunge the entire region into chaos. [3 paragraphs omitted in translation]
So as not to appear as the clear villain, before the new round of talks began the UCK cleared its forward positions at Tetovo and withdrew to mountain posts, from which it can easily strike again. But the separatist Albanians will do the same if they do not obtain by the political route what they are actually striving for: First certified equality as an ethnic group through a constitutional amendment, then the de facto division of Macedonia, and finally a greater Albanian fatherland.
There are reasons behind the outcry of Skopje's head of government Ljubco Georgievski, himself a dedicated Slav nationalist, over the West's alleged partisanship. In this sad spectacle over Macedonia's future the UCK is the main villain and the Americans play the shady part.
The UCK fighters were once schooled by American and British trainers in Albanian camps for use against Milosevic's soldiers in Kosovo. No one knows the main actors, the UCK's commando structure and its financiers and arms suppliers as well as the CIA, which keeps the Albanian secret service close to its side as a subsidiary.
When in February UCK irregulars from Kosovo instigated skirmishes in the West Macedonian border region, initially the KFOR peacekeeping troops idly observed. At that time Prime Minister Georgievski accused Washington, but also Berlin, of having withheld key information on planned terrorist actions. The US government knew of at least 300 rebels, he said.
To confidants German defense minister Rudolf Scharping complained that the "international community," meaning first of all the Americans, had "not acted consistently" and thus "shared responsibility" for the current crisis.
In fact, German soldiers in Macedonia are already standing between the fronts. Last week they hastily evacuated a depot in Tetovo when the barracks was caught in a cross-fire between UCK marksmen and the Macedonian army.
The great oversight of the Alliance is that, under Washington's influence, after the air war against the Serbs it treated the UCK independence fighters as allies. Top Bundeswehr soldiers internally complain of the constant camaraderie since 1999.
The Kosovo example: It should not have happened that after the KFOR troops marched in the UCK made thousands of guns, pistols and mortars disappear. German soldiers who acted firmly against UCK members who were carrying weapons despite the ban were reined in by their superiors. 'That is not in compliance with the NATO policy' was their commanders' implicit message.
The earlier UCK supreme commander Hashim Thaci, a protege of then-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, put a few thousand of his fighters in the so-called Kosovo Defense Corps (KPC for short), a sort of technical relief organization officially intended to help in repairing destroyed houses.
German KFOR commander Klaus Reinhardt warned in vain of new activities by the underground UCK; the Americans kept flirting with it. Reinhardt later complained that politicians, diplomats and the NATO supreme commander for Europe, Wesley Clark, regularly brushed aside warning cries from the KFOR headquarters in Pristina.
As early as the start of December 1999, when the NATO peacekeeping force had not yet been in the country for half a year, KFOR reconnaissance patrols in the Presovo valley noticed suspicious young Kosovars. The area belongs to the so-called Ground Safety Zone (GSZ), a demilitarized buffer zone between the Serbian heartland and Kosovo.
The Americans monitored the main traffic arteries so loosely that the area quickly became a trading center for arms runners, drug dealers and traffickers in young women, controlled by the UCK and mafia. A "Presovo, Medvedja and Bujanovac Liberation Army" (UCPMB) quickly occupied villages, drove out Serb residents and called for annexation to Kosovo.
KFOR leader Reinhardt called in vain on US officers to act vigorously against illegal border crossers. NATO supreme commander Clark always merely answered the warnings about the firebrands in the Presovo valley with questions about the old enemy: "And where do the Serbs stand?"
When Serbian security forces moved into the Presovo valley last March with NATO's consent, many UCK members went over the land border to Macedonia or back to Kosovo. Scharping suspiciously asked NATO colleagues how UCK members were being prevented at checkpoints in the American Kosovo sector from giving up their weapons but "two kilometers further are taking up new weapons and continuing on to Macedonia?" The news tickers gave the answer: Freshly armed UCK members were again proclaiming "liberated zones" in Macedonia.
While NATO had long been making plans for the intervention, including disarming the UCK rebels, in late June US special units evacuated 400 UCK fighters from the guerilla stronghold of Aracinovo surrounded by Macedonian troops, right in front of the gates to Skopje. Not only UCK fighters found refuge in armored personnel carriers and buses with KFOR markings, but also 17 American civilians. They were declared to be "observers" but instead of dissuading the UCK members from playing with fire they served them as trainers.
Moreover, thanks to US assistance the UCK's command center was set up in Aracinovo, with direct satellite phone connection to the Pentagon. "We have confiscated weapons," a police representative said with annoyance in Skopje, "whose serial numbers clearly indicate NATO resources." Also videocassettes of Macedonian military positions that in his opinion had been filmed from KFOR helicopters and made available to the UCK by the Americans.
A questionable maneuver: In NATO the USA urges the allies to intervene in Macedonia while at the same time the Americans are training the UCK, and the Macedonian army also receives help from Washington as well.
Once again the Germans and the other allies are irritated at the dual strategy of NATO supremacy. Reports "of American ex-officers as trainers with the Macedonian UCK," notes Green Bundestag deputy Winfried Nachtwei, "once again raise doubts about US policy in the region." And CDU deputy Willy Wimmer speculates that the USA is supporting a "greater Albania well-disposed toward it" in the Balkans, obviously for strategic reasons.
The suspicion is well-founded. The Berlin government knows from secret service reports that in Macedonia the same court clique being pampered by the USA is stoking the fires of war: Since May the head of the purportedly civilian Kosovo defense force, Agim Ceku, has been assembling UCK reservists to prepare them in Albanian training camps for the new war. The military supreme command of the Macedonian UCK is under former Ceku deputy Ramush Haradinaj.
The person procuring the money is a man who already enjoyed the Americans' trust at the talks in Rambouillet as a negotiator next to Thaci: Xhavit Haliti was already collecting donations for the UCK before the Kosovo war; in recent weeks, the secret services report, he has collected another 43 million marks from Albanians in Germany and Switzerland.
The trio of Haliti, Thaci and Haradinaj has not by any means funded their Kalashnikov policy from donations alone: "The unrest in Macedonia and the related instability in the region," a secret service file states, are "the absolute precondition for their criminal business" -- meaning illicit dealings in drugs, weapons and young women.
Fed by such facts, the Europeans' pressure on the USA is clearly beginning to show an impact. In late June President George W. Bush prohibited 21 UCK leaders from traveling to the USA and barred US citizens from money transactions with the extremists. Top people of the Kosovo Defense Corps were also on the Bush list; only later were they fired.
Meanwhile, the pathetic praise expressed by Bush for the American border patrols in a drop-by visit last week in Kosovo struck Scharping and his military people as scornful. As Bush said in all seriousness in his appearance in the fortress-like Camp Bondsteel, they prevented "weapons from falling into rebel hands," which is why there is now "hope for peace" in Macedonia. But Bush also warned the UCK to keep quiet in neighboring Macedonia: "The Kosovars should concentrate on Kosovo."
Now the Berlin government is wondering: Is Bush doing an about-face, or is he once again just lulling the suspicious NATO partners? After all, at the end of the day they are the ones to pick up the pieces of the questionable US policy in Macedonia.
The Americans themselves do not want to send any combat troops to Macedonia to disarm the UCK. They feel troops of the European NATO allies should be the only ones doing the risky dirty work.
But no one knows better than the Americans what the UCK irregulars are up to. The US force in the Balkans has low-flying satellites and its own mobile communication system that enables encrypted telephone calls. Obviously thus far neither the West European secret services nor the Russian spy service has technically succeeded in penetrating and listening in on this "low-flying satellite-based system."
The UCK, however, can use the Americans' exclusive communication network with a radio circuit of its own. As a result, Washington's professional eavesdroppers are always perfectly well informed when the Albanian irregulars plan to attack and where they plan to withdraw.