Intro:
The rumbles of yet another nationalist earthquake are shaking the former Yugoslavia. Rising from the fetid hovels of Pristina and the concrete-block family farms of rural Kosovo is the newest political and military force to beset the Balkans -- the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), known to Albanians as the Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves.
Foreign Affairs May/Junel 1999 (volume 78, number 3)
Kosovo's Next Masters
By Chris Hedges
INSIDE THE KOSOVO LIBERATION ARMY
The rumbles of yet another nationalist earthquake are shaking the former
Yugoslavia. Rising from the fetid hovels of Pristina and the concrete-block family
farms of rural Kosovo is the newest political and military force to beset the Balkans
-- the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), known to Albanians as the Ushtria Clirimtare
e Kosoves.
The emergence of this militant armed group, now numbering several thousand
fighters, has dimmed hopes that even a compromise agreement with Belgrade could
be successfully implemented. Emboldened by NATO's March bombing of the Serbian
military, the KLA will wage a protracted guerrilla war in the Serbian province that
could ignite a wider war in neighboring Macedonia and Albania, potentially even
dragging in Greece and Bulgaria. The KLA is uncompromising in its quest for an
independent Kosovo now and a Greater Albania later. And it has, to the
consternation of Washington's would-be peacemakers, supplanted the ineffectual
leadership of the moderate voice of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority, Ibrahim
Rugova.
The KLA is important out of all proportion to its size -- not merely because it will
probably eventually get Kosovo to secede from Serbia, but because it now
represents the aspirations of most Kosovar Albanians. To understand the current
conflict in Kosovo and America's stakes in its resolution, one must understand the
KLA, how it came into being, who leads it, what drives it, and why it now speaks
for a majority of Kosovars. Even a truly vicious, Bosnia-like wave of atrocities by
the Serbs in reprisal for NATO's attacks will only pour fuel on the separatist fire. The
grim reality is that we had better get to know the KLA -- because it is not going to
go away.
THE NEW RADICALS
Kosovo's Albanians have grown increasingly embittered. By attempting to include the
KLA in the peace process that began in February at the French chateau of
Rambouillet, the Western alliance is working feverishly -- even as it bombs the Serbs
-- to blunt the momentum toward a war of independence. The allies want NATO
troops to separate the province's warring factions, although Belgrade is wary. The
underlying idea behind creating a theoretically temporary, NATO-enforced military
protectorate in Kosovo is to buy time for a three-year transition period in which
ethnic Albanians will be allowed to elect a parliament and other governing bodies --
meeting enough of their aspirations, it is hoped, to keep Kosovo from seceding.
The good news is that the Western alliance's response to the Kosovo crisis, however
ragged, shows that some lessons have been learned from the bumbling in Bosnia.
The Europeans no longer talk about handling matters alone but demand the
presence of the United States. Threats have been backed up by force. There is also
a consensus that if some kind of a solution is not found soon, the fighting inside
Kosovo -- an area the size of Connecticut -- will accelerate and make future
intervention difficult, if not impossible. Even the Pentagon officials who fought like
wildcats to keep U.S. forces out of Bosnia accept that some 4,000 U.S. troops will
have to be deployed in Kosovo to make any peacekeeping force credible.
But, as in Bosnia, the West is wedded to a solution that might have worked earlier
in the conflict but is now untenable. Serbian ethnic cleansing has taken on a
somewhat different character in Kosovo than in Bosnia. In Kosovo, Serbian ethnic
cleansing is to a large degree tactical, designed to deny the rebels succor from
civilians and therefore aimed primarily at the inhabitants of KLA strongholds. But
the Serb campaign has been more than brutal enough to make autonomy for Kosovo
a nonstarter. The ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, who make up 90 percent of its 2
million inhabitants, cannot remain in Serbia after the horrific recent bloodshed, the
displacement of a quarter of a million people, and the razing of scores of villages.
They do not trust Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic or the Serbs -- and given
Belgrade's bloody campaigns against ethnic minorities over the past decade and its
habit of breaking agreements, who can blame them?
The Albanians have been radicalized, and their new voice is the KLA. Rugova, the
old pacifist, is more a symbol of outmoded moderation than a leader. By ignoring
the plight of the Kosovar Albanians for nearly a decade, the West lost much of its
credibility before NATO began bombing. Many Albanians feel let down by the world
and their own meek leaders. What is most striking, then, about the KLA
insurrection is not that it occurred but that it took so long to occur.
The KLA fighters are the province's new power brokers. Whatever political
leadership emerges in Kosovo will come from the rebel ranks, and it will be militant,
nationalist, uncompromising, and deeply suspicious of all outsiders. U.S. intelligence
agencies, preoccupied with tracking militant Islamist groups and Iranian agents in
Bosnia, were caught off guard by the Kosovo rebel force's emergence, strength, and
popularity. Indeed, some diplomats argued as late as last year about whether the
shadowy group really existed -- even as small armed bands roamed Drenica in
central Kosovo.
The first KLA armed attack took place in May 1993 in Glogova'c, killing two Serb
police officers and wounding five more. But the rebel group -- its membership
largely drawn from a few clans in Kosovo and radicals in the Albanian diaspora --
was founded eight years ago. Most of its leadership has spent years in prison for
separatist activity, many having been jailed earlier by Tito's communist
government. Like all revolutionaries who have spent years underground or in jail,
the KLA leaders are wary of the outside world and given to secrecy, paranoia, and
appalling mendacity when they feel it serves their interests, which is most of the
time.
The KLA splits down a bizarre ideological divide, with hints of fascism on one side
and whiffs of communism on the other. The former faction is led by the sons and
grandsons of rightist Albanian fighters -- either the heirs of those who fought in the
World War II fascist militias and the Skanderbeg volunteer SS division raised by the
Nazis, or the descendants of the rightist Albanian kacak rebels who rose up against
the Serbs 80 years ago. Although never much of a fighting force, the Skanderbeg
division took part in the shameful roundup and deportation of the province's few
hundred Jews during the Holocaust. The division's remnants fought Tito's Partisans
at the end of the war, leaving thousands of ethnic Albanians dead. The decision by
KLA commanders to dress their police in black fatigues and order their fighters to
salute with a clenched fist to the forehead has led many to worry about these
fascist antecedents. Following such criticism, the salute has been changed to the
traditional open-palm salute common in the U.S. Army.
The second KLA faction, comprising most of the KLA leaders in exile, are old
Stalinists who were once bankrolled by the xenophobic Enver Hoxha, the dictator of
Albania who died in 1985. This group led a militant separatist movement that was
really about integration with Hoxha's Albania. Most of these leaders were students
at Pristina University after 1974, when Belgrade granted the province autonomy.
Freed from Yugoslav oversight, the university imported thousands of textbooks
from Albania, all carefully edited by Hoxha's Stalinist regime, along with at least a
dozen militant Albanian professors. Along with its degree programs, Pristina
University began to quietly school young Kosovar leaders in the art of revolution.
Not only did a huge percentage of the KLA leadership come out of the university,
but so, ominously, did the ethnic Albanian leadership in neighboring Macedonia.
The two KLA factions have little sympathy with or understanding of democratic
institutions. Split bitterly between radical left and radical right, they are now
arguing over whether to carry the fighting to the pockets of ethnic Albanians who
live in western Macedonia and neighboring Montenegro. The only thing they agree
on is the need to liberate Kosovo from Serbian rule. All else, menacingly, will be
decided later. It is not said how.
Given these deep divisions, it is no accident that the KLA has failed to create a
political organization or even a vague platform. "I do not think we have an
ideology," Jakup Krasniqi, the KLA's mercurial spokesman, told the
Albanian-language daily Koha Ditore on July 12, 1998. "And in fact we do not have
time for such things even if we were interested in them, because we have our main
job to do, which is the task of liberation."
TAKING UP ARMS
I first stumbled into the KLA in February 1997, shortly after a police car was
ambushed by armed "terrorists," as the Serbs called them. Three uniformed ethnic
Albanians equipped with automatic weapons were killed in the firefight. I took a
taxi that had seen better days to attend the wake for one of them. As I approached
the village of Orlane, a few lean men in track suits were standing about 20 feet
apart on either side of the dirt road. Several of the mourners proved hostile, lashing
out at my translator as a "spy" for Rugova.
That day in Orlane, with its crude outhouses, simple wooden structures, and
roaming flocks of goats and noisy chickens, offered a glimpse into an armed
rebellion that was still a year away. The slain man, Zahir Pajaziti, 34, had studied
English at Pristina University before dropping out. He had never held a steady job
and had been on the run for several months, appearing unannounced at night,
armed and in uniform, to visit his family and then disappearing before dawn. He
and his two companions had been stopped by police, who apparently were looking
for them, and were killed inside their car. Mourners told of other small bands
setting up roadblocks to collect "war taxes" and holding political meetings.
But it was hard to penetrate the group from the inside. Only in Switzerland, where
there was less danger in speaking with a foreign reporter, did it prove possible to
establish links with the organization. This proved easier than I expected, in large
part because the KLA had then built close ties or melded with much of Rugova's
League of Democratic Kosovo (LDK). It was no coincidence that once the rebellion
erupted a year ago, local LDK leaders immediately picked up weapons and became
commanders of village units. By the time of the uprising, Rugova had lost control of
his own party.
Through the LDK, I arranged a meeting with a rebel commander in Geneva -- the
first such meeting with the press. My interlocutor was nearly killed some months
later when two men with ski masks arrived at his unmarked office in Geneva and
pulled out pistols with silencers. The assistant who answered the bell, although shot
in the stomach, managed to slam shut the security door, no doubt saving the
official's life. The would-be assassins were never apprehended. The office has since
been closed.
"We all feel a deep, deep sense of betrayal," the KLA man told me, echoing a
sentiment that seemed to speak for most ethnic Albanians. "We mounted a
peaceful, civilized protest to fight the totalitarian rule of Milosevic. We did not go
down the road of nationalist hatred, always respecting Serbian churches and
monasteries. The result is that we were ignored." The Dayton peace negotiations,
which dealt with Bosnia but not Kosovo, "taught us a painful truth, [that] those that
want freedom must fight for it. This is our sad duty."
The Albanians were spurred by the collapse of Tito's Yugoslavia. Croatia and Serbia,
whose political ideology is often overtly racist, unleashed a war in the early 1990s
largely against unarmed civilians to try to form ethnically "pure" enclaves and states.
Militias stormed through minority communities in drunken frenzies, looting,
burning, raping, and murdering. They set up detention centers, carried out mass
executions, and ignored tepid international protests. But after Milosevic revoked
Kosovo's autonomy in 1989, Rugova insisted on a very different road to
independence, a Gandhi-like plan to withdraw from all state institutions and create
a parallel government. His was to be a peaceful revolution and an example of civility
and tolerance that would earn the backing of the Western democracies.
The former literature professor, with his glasses constantly sliding down his nose
and a scarf loosely draped around his neck, has the distracted look of an aging Left
Bank poet. Rugova is the self-styled president of Kosovo, although even his
supporters in Tirana, the Albanian capital, do not recognize his "state." Remote and
out of touch, he rarely leaves his small office in Pristina, even to attend a funeral a
few blocks away.
Under Rugova's leadership, the ethnic Albanians set up their own schools, clinics,
and a shadow administration that levied taxes, drawing on the resources of a
diaspora of more than 600,000 ethnic Albanians in Europe and some 300,000 in
Canada and the United States. The civil resistance lasted nearly a decade. Streams
of delegations from Kosovo traveled to Scandinavian countries to take
expenses-paid seminars in nonviolence. But the protest, unsustainable in the long
term and a victim of international indifference, collapsed.
Its death notice came after the 1995 Dayton agreement was swiftly followed by the
European Union's recognition of Yugoslavia -- even though the EU had earlier
demanded that Yugoslavia first resolve the Kosovo issue. Kosovar Albanians, with
understandable rage, did not grasp why the Bosnian Serbs, responsible for some of
the worst acts of genocide since World War II, were handed nearly half of Bosnia at
Dayton. The recognition of Radovan Karadzic's gangster statelet, Republika Srpska,
was the final insult. It shattered all hopes for peaceful change in Kosovo.
The situation in Kosovo, a mountain-ringed bowl long at the heart of the struggle
for a Greater Albania, swiftly began to unravel. Money, especially the three percent
levy on all earnings abroad, was diverted to the KLA's Homeland Calling fund.
Albanian newspapers outside the province, such as the Zurich-based Voice of
Kosovo, started to print communiques from the rebel group and run ads calling for
donations.
The young men who had sent home remittances from menial jobs in Europe to
support their families began to be deported under a series of agreements signed
between Belgrade and countries such as Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden.
Burdened by close to a million refugees from Bosnia, these governments were
unwilling to see the numbers swelled by a new influx from the Balkans. The fighting
in Kosovo has ended the repatriations. A huge number of disenchanted and angry
youth who saw no benefits from Rugova's rule and who, unlike their parents, did not
speak Serbo-Croatian, began giving up on multiethnicity. The unemployment rate
among ethnic Albanians is 70 percent, and this pressure, coupled with the highest
birthrate in Europe (23.1 births per 1,000), has created a deep recruiting pool for
the KLA. Seventy percent of the population is now under 30.
Kosovo has undergone a generational shift much like that in the Israeli-occupied
West Bank and Gaza Strip at the start of the intifada in 1987. The war of the
Palestinian youth was as much directed against their parents' generation, which had
been cowed by the Israeli military, as against the occupiers themselves. In Kosovo,
young Albanians have bitterly repudiated not only Serb rule but also Rugova's older,
urbane, and educated leadership. Pristina's elites, they say, have betrayed the
Albanian cause.
On April 6, 1998, in the town of Jablanica, 30 miles north of Dakovica, I bumped
into a group of surly KLA fighters, dressed in a motley collection of uniforms and
equipped with an odd assortment of hunting rifles, pistols, automatic weapons, and
hunting knives. The killings by Belgrade, along with the humiliation of ten years of
abuse, had left them seething with resentment.
"This is our territory," said a gaunt, nervous rebel with a scraggly black beard and a
chrome-plated pistol protruding from his belt. "We are through with these Albanian
intellectuals in Pristina, with journalists, diplomats, and everyone else. No one saved
our women and children from slaughter. Now it is up to us."
THE SERBS' RAJ
Belgrade, blind to the looming rebellion, blithely continued to rule Kosovo like a
colonial backwater. On several occasions, I saw two or three beefy Serb police
officers, who I suspect are often recruited by the pound, walloping young ethnic
Albanians with their clubs in the center of Pristina. I once watched a cop shove a
young boy of about ten, who held a small wooden tray of individual cigarettes for
sale, onto the sidewalk. The cop laughed as the frightened child scrambled to rescue
the cigarettes from the mud puddles. Many of the Serb police were sent to Kosovo
as a demotion or a punishment for misbehavior. One of their favorite pastimes was
to set up roadblocks and collect money from a long line of cars for invented traffic
violations. Drivers that did not have money or did not pay had their documents
seized.
All this, however, paled in comparison with the brutal treatment in Serb jails.
People were beaten, tortured (usually while chained to radiators), and held
incommunicado for days and weeks. Some simply vanished.
Bejram Shehi, 39, a laborer in Switzerland, came home last year to visit his family
and was arrested by Serb police. They accused him of carrying in money for the
KLA. He had a black hood pulled over his head, was handcuffed, and was then
pushed through the back door of the police car onto the car floor.
"They joked that they were taking me to see the Kosovo Liberation Army," he said.
"We drove for about an hour. I was taken out and brought to a basement, where I
was stripped and handcuffed to a radiator. I stayed like this for five days. They
beat me until I fainted, all the time asking about the Kosovo Liberation Army, who
belonged to it, how it raised money abroad, and where it got its weapons."
On the fifth day he was forced to sign a confession. "I promised to collaborate with
them, and they gave me the name of a police contact," he said, unfolding a small
slip of white paper from his wallet with a Serbian name and phone number written
in pencil.
The Serbs, meanwhile, lived as if Kosovo were the raj, with all civil and state jobs
and a private police force to ensure their privileged status in the birthplace of
modern Serb nationalism. Milo'sevi'c, presiding over a decaying economy, clung to
the millions of dollars a year in hard cash brought in by Kosovo's massive Trepca
mine complex, valued at $5 billion. The mine alone made him loath to give up the
province to the ethnic Albanians; the ultranationalist bigotry he had ridden to power
reinforced his obstinacy. Kosovo came to have the elements of a political time
bomb, ticking louder and louder while the world looked the other way.
DEAD MEN WALKING
On a rainy afternoon in April 1997, I stood with one of Rugova's top officials in front
of the McDonald's in downtown Geneva. He told me that at six o'clock that evening,
in the Buffet des Premieres Classes at the Geneva train station, I would find a man
seated in a front booth with a copy of the Journal de Geneve. The paper, I was
told, would be completely unfolded. I was to come alone. The conversation would
take place in French.
This was my first encounter -- indeed the first interview by any reporter -- with a
rebel commander. Although a few ethnic Albanian reporters had spoken to the
Jasharis, the clan that made up much of the KLA at the start of the rebellion, none
dared write about them or the KLA. This deeply angered the Jasharis and aided my
efforts to reach them. I walked into the station and saw a lean man in his late
thirties dressed in black jeans, a gray jacket, and a purple T-shirt. He looked up
and motioned for me to follow him out the door. We weaved quickly through the
crowds outside the station until we came to another cafe, where he took a seat
along the back wall facing the door. The rebel, who gave his nom de guerre as
Alban, would within a year lead a group of a few hundred fighters over the border
from northern Albania into Kosovo. The last I heard, he was commanding a large
unit in the province.
He spoke quietly and without rancor. He said that, like most of the leadership, he
had spent years in prison for separatist activity. "We have no Tito," he said. The
KLA leadership, he told me, was divided between about 30 people, with no
paramount leader. These men were drawn primarily from the 5,000 or so ethnic
Albanians who had fought for the Muslim-Croat Federation in Bosnia against the
Serbs.
Until the uprising in Kosovo last spring, the KLA had only a couple hundred
members. The most prominent inside Kosovo was Adem Jashari, a gruff, taciturn
peasant who, with his brother Hamza, had been on the run from Serb authorities
for months. They were among the handful of militants who founded the KLA in
1991 before it mushroomed into a popular army, much like the Islamist resistance
in Algeria. In the early days, they came closest to running the organization, and
many of their lieutenants and relatives -- at least the ones that have survived --
now run the KLA.
I tried fruitlessly over three days to speak to the Jasharis, spending an afternoon
pleading with Shaban, their 70-year-old father, to pass on a message. He refused.
His sons were increasingly wanted men. Just a few weeks before, on November 28,
1997, uniformed KLA fighters had, for the first time, appeared before a large
crowd. Before some 20,000 mourners at the funeral of a schoolteacher slain by the
Serbs, two KLA leaders delivered a rousing call for liberation that was greeted with
a roar of approval and thunderous chants of "KLA! KLA! KLA!"
The only way to arrange a trip to the Jasharis ran through Switzerland, something I
did with some trepidation, since I was afraid that Serb security agents might
intercept my communications. I made the request, however, and a few days after
Ramadan ended I was called to Geneva and told that on February 17 I should be
waiting outside the old religious school in Pristina at eight o'clock in the morning. I
would be allowed to bring a photographer.
At the assigned hour, Wade Goddard, our photographer, and I stood in the cold as
two young men, both in jeans and wearing combat boots, walked swiftly towards
us. "Be here at three o'clock tomorrow, and make sure you are not followed," said
one in broken English. In less than a minute, they had vanished.
We spent the next morning darting in and out of taxis and walking through back
alleys to make sure we were not being tailed. A KLA official in Switzerland, in an
insight into what has become a respectable intelligence network, had thoughtfully
provided me with the name of the undercover cop who hung out in my small hotel
in Pristina to report on my activities.
As we traveled the next day to Prekaz, the small town in central Kosovo that was
the Jasharis' headquarters, the group's well-oiled underground network was evident.
Men along the road signaled with their hands that the way was clear of Serb
checkpoints. When we entered Prekaz, the driver honked the horn three times, and
a group of about a dozen men emerged from a shed to watch us. We turned up
into a field covered with a thin layer of snow and were stopped by a half-dozen
heavily armed men in camouflage uniforms. All wore on their shoulders the
red-and-black KLA patch with the double-headed Albanian eagle.
We were escorted through the fields and along dirt roads. As our patrol walked over
the thin layer of snow, I noticed that no one seemed to find the presence of the
rebels unusual; even the children hardly gave us a glance. We reached a small stone
farmhouse surrounded by a wooden fence. Inside, on cushions set on the floor along
the wall, were Adem and Hamza Jashari. The room, filled with acrid cigarette
smoke, was lit by a single kerosene lamp. Two burly bodyguards, clutching
automatic weapons, stood by the door. The two dirt roads leading into the village
had also been closed after we passed by bands of armed fighters.
This would be the first and last interview the Jasharis would give to a reporter. In
three weeks, I would be standing over their bodies in a warehouse. Adem's neck had
been slit, probably after he had died of multiple bullet wounds. Shaban, his elderly
father with whom I had spent an afternoon, lay not far away. There were 51
corpses, 20 of them members of the Jashari clan, many of them shot in the head
at close range. About two dozen of the victims were women and children, and some
of the bodies were blackened by the flames that had engulfed their homes.
But that day, the encounter with the Jasharis offered a revealing look at the
contrasts within the KLA. Adem, with his drooping bandito mustache and hostility,
had none of Alban's polished charm. The fighters around him were suspicious
peasants, prone to lash out at everyone, including Rugova, who was not part of
their inner circle. They insisted that they would never flee from the village if it
came under attack. Most, in fact, died in their homes, as have scores of other
Kosovar Albanians who have yet to master the basic tenets of guerrilla warfare.
As we spoke, we heard the low drone of a single-engine plane circling lazily
overhead, no doubt taking infrared photographs of heat sources for the coming
Serb assault. Nervous fighters in the courtyard peered up at the craft in the
moonlight.
In another era the Jashari clan, which oversaw a large black-market smuggling
network, would have faded away into local folklore. The Balkans are filled with
small-time renegades who combine criminal activity with thin, separatist ideologies.
Instead, by leveling Prekaz with 20 mm antiaircraft cannons and killing more than
50 people, including many old people, women, and children, the Serbs made the
Jasharis into martyrs. U.S. Special Envoy to the Balkans Robert Gelbard gave what
many have interpreted as a green light to Belgrade to go after the rebel bands by
announcing in Pri'stina on February 23, 1998, that the KLA "is without any question
a terrorist group." He went on to add that the United States "condemns very
strongly terrorist activities in Kosovo." Within two weeks Serb forces had turned
Prekaz into a smoldering ruin, killed close to a hundred people, and ignited the
uprising.
A few days after the Jashari compound was flattened with mortar and cannon
shells, I wandered among the piles of brick and cement. In the ruins of one room lay
a blackened book with a map that showed a Greater Albania that included Kosovo,
parts of Serbia, much of Macedonia, and parts of present-day Greece and
Montenegro. The map was drawn up on July 1, 1878, when the bajraktars, or clan
chieftains, from the Turkish realms of the southwest Balkans founded the League
for the Defense of the Albanian Nation. The book was a potent reminder of what
the war was about -- especially since, with most ethnic Albanians concentrated in
homogeneous areas bordering Albania, the drive to extend Albania's borders remains
feasible.
That drive is not only a wider threat to European stability but also to Albanian
moderation. Kosovar Albanians in exile -- and even some who have gone back to
fight -- express deep frustration at the provincialism of the leadership within
Kosovo, but to little avail. Leaders of the KLA, especially those who have not lived
abroad, are convinced that they have embarked on the century-long dream of a
Greater Albania. Many KLA commanders tout themselves as "a liberation army for
all Albanians" -- precisely what frightens the NATO alliance most.
THE NEXT BALKAN COUNTRY
Both the Serbs and the ethnic Albanians are now confident that force of arms can
solve the impasse. The Serbs have huge stockpiles of heavy weapons they have yet
to unleash, and the KLA has a large reserve of volunteers and a porous border with
Albania to smuggle in supplies and newly trained recruits. Neither side has much
incentive to lay down its weapons, despite NATO's air strikes.
Settling in for a long fight, the KLA probably has 30,000 automatic weapons, made
available at bargain prices after Albanian military arsenals were looted in the chaos
after the spring 1997 economic meltdown. The rebels have made a concerted effort
to acquire German antitank weapons, heavy machine guns, sniper rifles, and
rocket-propelled grenades. Most important, by launching the current rebellion,
taking on the Serbs, and drawing international attention to the conflict, the rebel
group has done more in a year to further the cause of independence for Kosovo
than Rugova was able to do over the preceding decade.
As long as Washington insists on adhering to the principle that all states in the
former Yugoslavia be multiethnic, there is little hope of a resolution. And as long as
Belgrade is permitted to station troops in Kosovo, which is part of the current
agreement, neither NATO soldiers nor Kosovar Albanians will be safe. Building any
kind of lasting peace or democratic institutions will be impossible.
The holes in a policy of advocating multiethnicity gape most glaringly in Croatia and
Bosnia. Croatia has expelled most of the ethnic Serbs who once made up 12 percent
of its population, and post-Dayton Bosnia is rigidly partitioned into little Croat, Serb,
and Muslim parastates. Yet the diplomatic community insists on the fiction that the
pieces can somehow be glued back together and periodically scolds Zagreb and
Sarajevo for failing to comply.
Western diplomatic efforts designed to keep the Serbs and the ethnic Albanians in
the same country mirror the fruitless peace efforts carried out during the first
three years of the Bosnian war. The refusal to accept the creation of ethnically
"pure" enclaves -- a decision that is strategically and morally understandable --
leaves diplomats paying homage to multiethnic institutions, however hollow, and
lofty democratic ideals that nearly all Balkan leaders detest. Kosovo can remain a
Serbian province and the two groups can live together, this reasoning goes, if only
the ethnic Albanians are given a little more freedom. Given that between 1966 and
1989 an estimated 130,000 Serbs left the province because of frequent harassment
and discrimination by the Kosovar Albanian majority, this is at best naive.
The peace agreement for which NATO went to war proposes to deploy some 30,000
NATO troops and allow ethnic Albanian police to take over security functions in
Albanian-majority areas. The plan would gradually cede local police control to the
KLA, which would probably comprise most of the force. But Serbia would keep
troops in the province and handle security along the borders -- especially the border
with Albania, where the KLA has set up logistics bases and smuggling routes for
weapons and fighters. The plan also calls for a phased disarming of the KLA.
Such a deal would be hard enough to implement under Rugova, but it would be
harder still to implement under a rebel command that has spent the last three years
preparing for war. The KLA is wildly unlikely to hand over its guns, especially given
Milosevic's pattern of ignoring formal agreements. The latent nationalism among
most Serbs, coupled with the disturbing belief that they were the real victims in
Yugoslavia's wars, is aroused by each Western attack. Belgrade knows that NATO
has no desire to become the air wing of the KLA. Anything much short of all-out
war on Yugoslavia only consolidates Milosevic's grip on power and allows him to
unleash his forces in Kosovo.
The West's blundering peace initiative has reminded the KLA not to rely too much
on NATO. The alliance was palpably reluctant to move against the Serbs, although
they have flagrantly violated the agreement made last October to cease hostilities in
Kosovo. Ignoring the October pact, NATO bombed to get Belgrade to sign on to the
Rambouillet deal -- a shift not lost on the Kosovar Albanians. Milosevic, for his part,
has driven NATO crazy since the Kosovo crisis began. Chris Hill, the current U.S.
Kosovo mediator, has carried out fruitless shuttle diplomacy since last spring; on his
latest trip to Belgrade, Milosevic did not even meet with him. Put bluntly, the Serb
leaders stiffed the United States. The KLA is correctly distrustful of Western
intentions and resolve.
That distrust led to the decision by the KLA not to sign the Rambouillet agreement
in the first round of talks last February -- which, in turn, let the alliance off the
moral hook. Kosovar intransigence gave the West the excuse it was looking for not
to implement the October agreement and deepened the already wide rifts within
the alliance.
If the West's peace push eventually dies, as now appears likely, the KLA leaders will
swiftly become utterly disenchanted with the West and -- as if they were not
already implacable enough -- turn to Islamic radicals ready to back another battle by
Muslims against Orthodox Christians. There are already signs that contacts have
been established. The Serbs, whose information is admittedly often unreliable, say
that Islamic charities in the Persian Gulf are giving millions to the KLA. U.S. officials
say they have detected ties to Islamist organizations and suspect that some money
has been forwarded to the KLA. I saw bearded mujahideen, who did not look
Albanian, wandering around the staging areas in northern Albania, a hint that there
may be some truth to these assertions.
The Serbs also contend that the KLA has about 1,000 foreign mercenaries from
Albania, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Croatia, as well as British
and German instructors. Most of the mercenaries are probably Albanian nationals,
especially former Albanian army officers, police officers, and members of the state
security services.
The KLA is clearly preparing for a long slog. It has tried to recruit ethnic Albanian
veterans in Croatia, who formed two battalions in Croatia's war against the Serbs.
In early February, Yugoslav officials said that they had seized $500,000 worth of
weapons, ammunition, and uniforms for the KLA that were smuggled in from
Croatia in a truck. Zagreb has been warned by senior NATO officials to stay out of
the conflict, but Croatian President Franjo Tudjman's government can hardly be
displeased to see Belgrade mired in another disaster. There are rebel training camps
now in Albania -- apparently in Ljabinot, near Tirana -- as well as ones I saw in
Tropoja (near the Yugoslav border), Kuks, and Bajram Curi.
Were the conflagration to result in the deployment of peacekeeping NATO ground
forces -- a proposition that should not be taken lightly -- it would have risks that
were not faced in Bosnia. Kosovo, unlike Cyprus and Bosnia, has no fixed lines
dividing the antagonists. The province's battle lines resemble the constantly shifting
sands of Central America's 1980s guerrilla wars: a stretch of road that is safe in the
morning can be deadly in the afternoon. Because this is an insurrection rather than
a war between armies, rebels can be farmers one day and combatants the next.
They will be impossible to define. To muddy the waters further, the KLA is poorly
led, with no central command and little discipline. Many villages have formed ad hoc
militias that, while they identify themselves as KLA, act independently. I found that
KLA commanders often spent as much time trying to find out what these militias
were doing -- closing down unauthorized roadblocks and curbing excesses by local
warlords -- as they did fighting the Serbs. Part of the problem facing any
peacekeeping force will be defining who belongs to the KLA and who does not. The
Serb soldiers and special police, in uniform and headquartered in barracks, will
prove far easier to monitor, if not always control. But the overall picture is one of
chaos.
In Bosnia, by contrast, the front lines had changed little by late 1992, and the war
often resembled World War I clashes on the western front, albeit on a much smaller
scale. During the war, I used to watch ferocious Muslim night assaults from the
twisting trench systems around the Jewish cemetery in Sarajevo, complete with
luminous flares and the deep-throated rattle of heavy machine guns. Hundreds of
people were wounded or killed in this trench warfare, but the trenches themselves
moved little.
Even after this spring's NATO air strikes and ruthless Serbian attacks, Kosovo's
combatants may still have vigor to spare. In Bosnia, on the other hand, conditions
were much riper for peacemaking, at least by the fall of 1995. The Bosnian Serbs,
battered by two weeks of heavy NATO bombing, were a spent and broken force.
The long arm of the United States managed to rein in the Muslims, largely by
silencing Croatian artillery units that had been instrumental in the joint
Croat-Muslim advance. The Muslims had suffered enough, the Bosnian Serbs were on
the ropes, and the Croats had gotten everything they wanted out of the war with
the exception of the Serb-held enclave of Eastern Slavonia, which was handed back
to them two years later.
Kosovo has not yet been granted the dubious blessing of such exhaustion. The Serbs
appear to believe that the problem requires not negotiation but more force. Morale
among the Serbs is low, and there are steady reports of desertions. The heavily
mechanized Serb patrols stick to the blacktop roads while the KLA controls a
network of back dirt roads that often skirt police checkpoints. Reporters that
bounce along them in armored jeeps have aptly nicknamed them the Ho Chi Minh
Trail. With their patrols and land mines, the Serbs have had no more luck sealing
the borders than the Germans had in stomping out Tito's Partisans in World War II --
or (mutatis mutandis) the Americans had with the original Ho Chi Minh Trail. Just
as in the last war, Belgrade's decision to scorch villages is only flooding the rebels
with recruits.
The animosities have been carved deep. Although this is not a war about "ancient
ethnic hatreds," there is nevertheless a long history of antagonism between the
Serbs and the Kosovar Albanians. The competing national myths -- with the Serbs
claiming Kosovo as the birthplace of medieval Serbia and the Albanians claiming they
are descended from the ancient Illyrians -- are trotted out by each group to
bludgeon the other.
Fed on nationalist mythology and emboldened by their initial successes, the KLA's
leaders are in no mood to settle. The leadership still appears to rely, at least for its
public face, on the radicals in the diaspora, including Jashar Salihu, the head of the
Homeland Calling fund, and Pleurat Sejdiu, the KLA's London representative. But the
group's chief appears to be the university-educated Hashim Thaci, the head of the
political directorate, whose nom de guerre is "Snake." Like many in the leadership,
he was a student activist in Pri'stina before leaving to study in Albania and raise
money in Europe for the independence movement. When Thaci unexpectedly snarled
the Rambouillet talks, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright learned the extent
of KLA militancy the hard way.
At this late stage in the game, a NATO deployment -- if Milosevic can somehow be
bombed into accepting it -- will over the short term save lives, just as it did in
Bosnia. But it will not bring back the autonomy that Tito, the last of the Habsburgs,
oversaw with such skill. With its citizens carrying Croatian passports and voting in
national elections, the Croat-controlled part of Bosnia is already a de facto part of
Croatia. The Bosnian Serbs are slowly grafting themselves onto Serbia. It is best to
accept the unpalatable and acknowledge that the successor states to Yugoslavia are
moral and political dwarfs.
In Kosovo, the stationing of international troops may prevent all-out fighting and
provide the breathing space to negotiate a workable solution. But given the deep
rifts between the sides, the latter is hardly likely. The international community
would then face the stark choice between remaining in Kosovo for a long time or
pulling out after the proposed three-year period, with the likelihood that those on
both sides of the divide would again pick up their guns. In the end, it will come to
this: Led by the KLA, Kosovo will separate from Serbia, whether by negotiations or
by violence.
Chris Hedges, currently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, was The New
York Times' Balkan Bureau Chief from 1995 to 1998.
Copyright 1999 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
All rights reserved.
I searched FR and found no previous posting of it, so here it is for those who wonder what monumental stupidity took the U.S. and NATO into this madness.
Looks good to me. Also definitely showing what monster NATO has created. This disarming issue is just an example of how modern PR works: lie to the face of the irrelevant party (the US) and buy time so that you can do whatever the hell you want regardless of what you say. The US did it to the Russians, and now the KLA is doing it to the US, because the KLA thinks it's in charge now, not the US, on the ground. And are they wrong?
Are they wrong? It depends. I suspect that there is so much deep desire for revenge on both parts that they will continue to chew at each other and we will be caught in the middle. It ain't gonna be pretty and it's going to last a long, long time.
this article has the story of the KLA partly correct but for the most part this is garbage . it is typical CFR propaganda . Under the guise of saying bd things about the KLA it hides the same old CFR crap .the KLA DID NOT originate as a political organization !!! the Albaanian clans he refers to have for many years ,been heavily involved in the heroin trade in Europe!! Interpol estimates that 70-80%of the heroin in Europe transits through Kosovo and Albania!!! the" first attacks by the KLA against YUGO police" were nothing of the sort. they were simply drug lords trying to intimidate the local police. the KLA was invented by these same drug lords in1996 after they had developed close ties with the corrupt members of the Albanian government who were also involved inthe drug trade!!! the "KLA" decide that being part of Albania would facilitate their drug dealing so they purposely provoked the YUGO police and hoodwinked the naive and gullible "western press" .because the dismemberment of Yugoslavia coincided with the plans of the CFR cotrolled U.S. government,especially the Stste Department,the CIA and the German government actively suported the training and growth of this geurrilla force . the CFR has been trying to destroy Yugoslavia since about 1981 when Tito died .you will notice that this article still continues with the demonization of the serbs ,back to the early 1990's,under cover of worrying about the KLA. now that the KLA is no longer useful to the new world order of the CFR ,they too will undergo the same type of demonization as the Serbs have suffered !!Anyway ,the one thing this guy does have right is that ,in the KLA , NATO and the CFR have created a monster they may not be able to control and may end up fighting as a geurilla army!!!
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