KLA/KPC RELATED NEWS: http://www.centraleurope.com/features.php3?id=166765 June 7, 2000 KLA:
The Army of Liberation [There is a growing
tendency among foreign observers] to identify the criminal They were terrorists
in 1998 and now, because of politics, they're freedom fighters. The Albanian villages
are much better, much richer than the Serbian ones. The When spring comes,
we will manure the plains of Kosovo with the bones of Serbs, Instead of using
their authority and impartiality to restrain terrorist gangs of Getting history
wrong is an essential part of being a nation. - French historian We spent the 1990s
worrying about a Greater Serbia. That's finished. We are going There is no excuse
for that, even if the Serbs in Kosovo are very angry. I accept I am like a candle.
I am melting away slowly, but I light the way for others. - Adem Before The founding fathers
of the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA, or UÇK from the Albania Contrary to typically
shallow information in the media, the KLA is known to have The historical and
cultural roots of the conflict in Kosovo have been described elsewhere Kosovo is a land
of great mineral wealth and commensurate agricultural poverty and has Infant mortality
was six times that in Slovenia. Kosovo was an African enclave in a Inevitably, unemployment tripled from 19 percent in 1971 to 57 percent in 1989. As a result, the
Federal government had to quell a three month-long series of paralyzing The hotbed of hotheads
was, as usual, the University in Priština. Students there were Serb insensitivity,
backed by indiscriminate brutality, led to escalation. Calls for the Yugoslavia's ruling
party, the League of Communists, was in the throes of its own The Communists panicked
and embarked on a rampage of imprisonment, unjust Miloševiæ,
visibly ill at ease, surfed this tide of religion-tinged nationalism
straight into Oppression breeds
resistance, and Serb oppression served only to streamline the This was, the reader
should recall, before Albania opened up to reveal its decrepitude Nationalism is a
refuge from uncertainty. As the old Yugoslavia was crumbling, each of Paradoxically, though
rather predictably, they fed on each other. Miloševiæ was
as much The love-hate relationship
between the Kosovars and the Albanians is explored In February 1989,
armed with a new constitution which abolished Kosovo's autonomy Discrimination was
nothing new in Kosovo. The Albanians themselves initiated such Albanian media outlets
were shuttered and schools vacated when teacher after teacher These acts of persecution
did not meet with universal disapproval. Greece, for instance, There can be little
doubt that Macedonia - feeling besieged by its Albanian minority - Within less than
a year, in 1990, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) was able to The leader of the
LDK, the forever silk-scarfed and mellifluous Dr Ibrahim Rugova, Rugova's ideals
were good and noble: Gandhi-like passive resistance, market economics, This became painfully
evident with the signature of the Dayton Accord in 1995, which In the absence of
such support - financial and diplomatic - Kosovo remained an internal His choice of pacifism
may have been dictated by the sobering sights from the killing In 1991, Rugova
set about organizing a Republic from a shabby office building opposite Successive American
administrations funneled money into the province and warnings An agreement to
abolish the parallel Albanian education system and re-open all the The "Kosovo
Republic" never advocated ethnic cleansing or even outright independence Though dominant
for some years, Rugova and the LDK did not monopolize the Kosovar The political scene
in Kosovo in the 1980s and early 1990s was vibrant and Demaçi, the
reader will recall, was a long time political prisoner and the founder
of the Meanwhile, the 1981
demonstrations gave rise to the Popular Movement for Kosovo The Serbs were not
impressed, but they were provoked into an escalating series of ever The author of this
article, aware of the Balkan's lack of propensity for long-term planning The KLA's selection
of targets is very telling. At first, it concentrated its fiery intentions The KLA attacks
were militarily sophisticated and coordinated. Serb policemen were What finally transformed
the KLA from a wannabe IRA into the fighting force that it The arms ended up
in the trigger-happy hands of drug lords, mafiosi, pimps, smugglers The convulsive dissolution
of Albania led to changes in high places. Sali Berisha was At a certain stage,
he even accused Fatos Nano, his rival and the Prime Minister of Albania had a growing
say in the affairs of the KLA as it recomposed itself - it was This armed revelry
coupled with the rising fortunes of separatism, led Robert Gelbard, This stern consistency
was followed by a tightening of the embargo against Yugoslavia The KLA mushroomed
not because it attacked Serbs - the attacks were, in fact, very Still, it is an
impressive figure in a population of 1.7 million. During the war, it
was joined The influx of volunteers
put pressure on the leadership, both organizational and In short, it reacted
to changing fortunes by creating a bureaucracy. Concurrently, it The KLA had shoulder-fired
anti-tank rocket launchers, such as the German "Armburst," All this required
a financial phase transition. That the KLA benefited, directly and However, the KLA
might have traded weapons. It might have dabbled in smuggling. It That the KLA had
to resort to such condemnable methods of financing is not surprising. Another source of
income was the three percent "War Tax" levied on 500,000 Kosovar The United State,
pragmatic superpower that it is, began to divert its attention from
the "The Clinton
administration has diligently put everything in place for intervention,"
wrote by mid-July US-NATO
planners had completed contingency plans for intervention, Dempsey published
another article, "The Plight of the Kosovars" in the Middle
East All along, the KLA
prepared itself to be a provisional government in waiting. It occupied In September 1998,
NATO threatened air strikes against Serbia, following reports of a The KLA was all
but ignored in these events. Rugova was not. He was often consulted On 15 January, 1999,
in the village of Raçak, someone murdered scores of people and Faced with sovereignty-infringing
and regime-destabilizing demands at Rambouillet, the Rambouillet was
a turning point for the KLA. Evidently on the verge of war, the United Thaçi took
some convincing and shuttling between Rambouillet, Switzerland and Kosovo Rugova's position was never more negligible and marginal. After The KLA will transform
in many directions, not just a military guard. One part will Finally, a part will form a political party. KLA military commander Agim Çeku. The Western media
hit a nadir of bias and unprofessional sycophancy during the Kosovo It also interfaced
marvelously with the youthful prime ministers of Albania, Pandeli During the war,
the KLA absorbed new recruits from Macedonia (many Macedonian It was engaged in
field guerrilla warfare and reconnaissance without the proper training One must not forget
that victory was not assured until the last moment. The West's Then, when the dust
settled, the spoils of war served to widen the rifts. Internecine But, contrary to
media-fostered popular images, crime was but one thread in the Other, no less critical issues were and are demilitarization and self-government. Albanians and Serbs
have more in common than they care to admit. Scattered among The possession of
weapons and self-government have always been emblematic of the This quandary is
a typically anodyne European compromise which is bound to ferment It is, therefore,
inconceivable that the KLA has disbanded and disarmed or transformed Its chain of command,
organizational structure, directorates, operational and assembly The enemies are
numerous: the Serbs (should Kosovo ever be returned to them), NATO The war is Far From Over In the meantime,
life is gradually returning to normal in Kosovo itself. Former KLA Such normalization
can prove lethal to an organization like the KLA, founded on strife It failed at its
initial effort to establish a government with Qosja's Democratic Union The KLA was so starved
for cash that it was unable even to pay the salaries of its own At this stage and
with elections looming, Hashim Thaçi sounds conciliatory tones.
He is Politically, then,
the KLA has not yet pupated. Recently, it has embarked on a spate of This coveted and
negotiable access to Western structures of government bears some Thus, when KTC was
formed in the wake of Operation Allied Force, it was made of Many newly-formed
political parties, such as Mahmuti's, were left out of the KTC and The Executive Council
virtually paralyzed Thaçi's self-proclaimed and self-appointed I have no doubt
that this photo-opportunity brand of politics will backfire. The KLA's To regain its position,
the KLA must regenerate itself and revert to its grassroots. It must If it remains intransigent
and peevish, it is likely to end up barely a bloody footnote in Also see Part I,
The Union of Death , Part II, The Insurgents and the Swastika , Part
III ***************************************** The author: The author is General
Manager of Capital Markets Institute Ltd., a consultancy firm with
BBC
World Service Europe's drug gangs Drug smugglers
are finding new routes When Ray Kendall, the British outgoing Secretary General of Interpol, visited Albania in the early 1990s, he was shocked by the untrained state of the local police. Forget computers. There were hardly any typewriters either. Much has been done
since, with Western help. But after renewed political and social Last year's war over Kosovo has provided another opportunity for criminals to prosper. According to Ray Kendall, at least 80 percent of the heroin entering Western Europe does so through Turkey and the Balkans - with Albanian gangs playing an increasingly important role. Clan loyalty The "Albanian mafia" has acquired a fearsome reputation. It has now established itself within the European Union as well - reportedly wresting control of the criminal underworld in north Italian cities like Milan and Turin from gangs linked to the Italian mafia. The Western media has written extensively about the "clan structure" of Albanian society; of the traditional code of silence known as "besa"; of the difficulty of penetrating tight-knit family structures. But Albanian observers say this is largely a myth. The clan tradition is stronger in the north, but the drug trade is more active in the south of Albania. Family clans are stronger in the villages, but the drug traffic goes on mainly in the cities. Nonetheless, they acknowledge the difficulty of imposing Western notions of an impartial, equal and nationwide system of justice on a society in which the state has not been respected and where many people have traditionally governed themselves by a medieval code based on strict loyalty to the local community. Market forces Where there is demand - and Europe by some estimates accounts for about one third of the world market in illegal drugs - there will also be those willing to supply it: farmers growing opium poppies in countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan; criminal gangs controlling the transit trade; local dealers; and legions of "mules" - obscure individuals who help in the smuggling. The crime prevention authorities in the transit countries pride themselves on the size of drug seizures being made with the aid of new detection procedures. But this may often simply mean that the volume of drugs being smuggled is increasing. Alarm bells started ringing when the Hungarians announced recently that seizures this year are already double last year's entire haul. Drug gangs have proved adept at shifting routes and switching partners. In a way, they are behaving like any successful company adapting to market conditions. Despite much earnest talk from politicians, West European countries themselves have yet to agree uniform sentencing policies in relation to drug dealers - or to enact Europe-wide legislation giving access to criminals' assets and the right to confiscate them.
Italians bust Albanian-run prostitution, drug ring ROME, June 20 (AFP)
- Police on Tuesday cracked an Albanian-run
RADIO FREE EUROPE - RADIO LIBERTY Macedonian Drug Haul Jun 22, 2000 --
(RFE/RL) Macedonian police confiscated some 260 kilograms of hashish A police spokesman
said that the drugs have a street value of about $1 million and that Impoverished Albania
has in recent years become one of the Balkans' main producers of
[Albanian Daily News July 13, 2000 ] European Foundation Kosovar refugees fear being murdered by KLA As Serbs continue
to be killed in Kosovo by Albanians, and as their US
'covered up' for Kosovo ally Special report: Kosovo Sunday September
10, 2000 American officials in Kosovo are being accused of interfering with an investigation into a senior Kosovo Albanian politician implicated in murder, drug-trafficking and war crimes. Ramush Haradinaj, a former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), was the key US military and intelligence asset in Kosovo during the civil war and the Nato bombing campaign that followed. In the latest twist in the saga of an increasingly flawed electoral process, United Nations police in the province complain that US personnel withheld evidence about a gunfight involving Haradinaj, who is now head of one of the province's leading political groups. UN investigators leading the case say US officials based at their main base, Camp Bondsteel, removed forensic evidence from the scene of the gun battle, including bullets retrieved from walls. The incident, which took place in the village of Strellc in the west of Kosovo, is well out of the US Army's area of responsibility, which lies in the south-east of the province. Following the shooting Haradinaj, known almost universally in the province as simply Ramush, was flown by helicopter to Camp Bondsteel and then onto Germany to be treated in an US Army hospital for shrapnel wounds. UN investigators were denied access to him during that time. Evidence from the incident was eventually handed over after angry phone calls from Fred Pascoe, the American policeman heading the UN investigation. The news of American reluctance to co-operate with the investigation comes amid a catalogue of accusations linking Haradinaj to murder, drugs trafficking and war crimes. The shooting revolved around a dispute between Haradinaj and members of the Musaj family, who accuse him of ordering the murder of their brother and three other men shortly after the arrival of Nato troops in Kosovo in June 1999. The men were all part of FARK (Armed Force of the Republic of Kosovo ), a rival group to the Kosovo Liberation Army. Three Musaj brothers had visited Haradinaj's father to demand the bones of their brother, a right they had according to Albanian custom. Haradinaj admits he went to the Musaj family home at around one in the morning to stop the brothers from visiting his father again. This is the second time this year Haradinaj has been caught up in violence. He was injured in a fight with Russian soldiers at a K-For checkpoint in the spring. Western diplomats say he has damaged his party's prospects in UN-organised local elections due this October. This latest incident does not appear to have damaged his contacts with US military or political figures. His party officials were invited to a discussion on the future of Kosovo at a meeting organised by the US state department. He himself is currently in Washington on a fund-raising trip and as the guest of a US Congressman, Benjamin Gillman. His standing with the international community is summed up by British officials who describe him as 'one of the few former commanders of the KLA who can deliver'. They say he was crucial in smoothing over the transition of the KLA from a guerrilla army to a civilian-based national guard. But British military personnel who liaised with Haradinaj before and during the Nato bombing campaign paint a different picture. One former soldier, who served with the Kosovo Verification Mission, described him as 'a psychopath' and accused him of terrorising his own men and the local population into loyalty to him. 'He would beat his own men to maintain a kind of military discipline,' he said. 'Someone would pass him some information and he would disappear for two hours. The end result would be several bodies in a ditch,' he added The man said he was also present when Ramush 'went to deal with' an Albanian family who had let Serb police into their house. The incident matches a human rights report issued by the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) last year in which seven masked men entered a house in the village of Gornja Lucka. Two men were beaten and a third was taken to a nearby canal and never seen again. During this time the same former soldier says Haradinaj was maintaining daily contact with American military personnel in the US and that these links were then taken over by Nato at the beginning of the bombing campaign in Kosovo. Another alleged victim of Ramush's men was Suad Qorraj, who had operated a satellite telephone for a rival KLA commander during the war. His family say he went missing from the town of Decani on 23 June 1999, two weeks after the end of the war. On 1 August Suad's charred remains were found in a nearby forest. The burial notice said he had been 'killed by Serbs'. A year on from Suad's death, Haradinaj still wields considerable power in western Kosovo. 'He can very easily bring the area to a halt,' says Robert Charmbury, UN administrator of the biggest town in the region, Pec, citing as evidence the fight against Russian peace keepers in which the town was 'blockaded in minutes'. The Alliance party has strong representation on local municipal boards and is discussing the possibility of a pact with the Kosovan Democratic Party (PDK), led by Hashim Thaci, former political leader of the KLA. Such a deal might squeeze out the favourites to win in the region, the Democratic League of Kosovo, in October's elections. Whatever the outcome of the polls, senior UN officials are concerned about Haradinaj's long-term impact on the province. One aide claims Haradinaj is now financed by two men, Naser Kelmendi and Ekrem Lluka, both of whom are suspected to be involved in smuggling. UN police reports, seen by The Observer, go further and describe Lluka as trafficking drugs and cigarettes in Greece, Kosovo, Albania and Italy. Meanwhile the Musaj brothers are worried about what Haradinaj will do in the next few weeks. 'If he doesn't attack us before the elections he'll attack us afterwards,' said Sadic Musaj. He and his brother have already built up the walls around their compound in case of another attack. He doubts however whether anybody will take action against Ramush. 'Nothing will happen, he has strong people behind him.' From
LRB Vol 21, No 3 | cover date 4 February 1999 London Review of Books Kosovo's
Big Men
Milosevic is clearly the bigger figure; larger than death, you could say, and thoroughly Orientalised: the West is aghast at the Federal President's 'cunning', his staying power, his hecatombs, yet over the years and around the world, we have not done badly ourselves. For some time now Milosevic has had the better of Washington. He has also stood the normal order of events on its head: in Kosovo, the last few months of 'peace' have not been the logical outcome of exhaustion, defeat or satisfaction in war, but a necessary prelude to renewed hostilities. Late last year, the weather in Kosovo turned momentarily in favour of Holbrooke's ceasefire. In Pristina, the provincial capital, the change began with a warning volley of snowflakes just after dark. By the following morning the roads were nearly impassable. Food deliveries to the villages ravaged by the Serbian offensive - scores of villages in Kosovo - were delayed. And the low-key war, the sporadic skirmishing that has since escalated, was reduced to a minimum. A few centimetres of snow had done more than any monitors or roving ambassadors to muffle the ardours of the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Serbian authorities. The road out west to Pec - Peja in Albanian - was an ice rink. The villages we passed were gutted and quite deserted: the most recent addition, and presumably the last, to a long trail of ruin, consuming hundreds of peasant communities, which dates from the early Nineties and curves down through much of the former Yugoslavia. Stray dogs limped across the white fields. With the disruption of rural life, they had learned to run in packs. We stopped in a village sacked by the Serbs during the offensive which ended in September. The damage was near-absolute and the place was still largely abandoned. A handful of people had returned but they were now in a state of terror: two days before, the KLA had killed two policemen and wounded four others in an ambush in the village and the Serbian police had taken summary revenge on any ethnic Albanians they could lay hands on. Nobody was dead, but there had been severe beatings. Two EU staff attached to the Diplomatic Observer Mission, a forerunner of the much bigger OSCE verification mission now in deep water in Kosovo, had moved in promptly to investigate the reprisals. One of the monitors had been in Kosovo for four or five months. He sat in his armoured vehicle with the door open and checked his ledger for details of the village: 'Originally 1861 inhabitants, 187 houses, 95 per cent destroyed in the Serbian offensive.' He accused the KLA of irresponsibility: they must have known what would happen to the villagers after the ambush. There was daily harassment of Albanian-speakers by the police in this area, he told us, but reckoned that the KLA was responsible for 90 per cent of the serious provocations. The local KLA commander is a man named Ramush. 'He speaks fluent French and people say he is a former legionnaire. His English is also good. He corrects our interpreters.' The monitor had had several dealings with Ramush and believed he was tough, fanatical even. 'He wants to stay in the hills forever and cleanse this whole area of Serbs.' He answered to no one, the monitor thought; certainly not to the KLA office in Pristina, headed by Adem Demaci, a symbolic figure from the Parliamentary Party of Kosovo whose links with the liberation army are not hard and fast, although he is widely respected as a militant secessionist who spent 28 years (longer than Mandela's term) in Yugoslav jails. The independence of a well-equipped kacak - or outlaw - like Ramush weakens the chain of command that is needed to turn an assortment of dedicated maquisards into the armed wing of a co-ordinated political movement and the dangers of warlordism in some KLA sectors are correspondingly high. Yet the organisation enjoys widespread support in the western part of Kosovo, above all in the Drenica valley: if civilians pay a high price for KLA actions, the liberation army is recognised as the only challenge to a minority regime that has stripped ethnic Albanians of most rights of citizenship, deprived them of jobs, forced them to develop a parallel system of schooling and health care, lately destroyed their rural infrastructure and cast them yet again in the historical role of Muslim intruders. The KLA also receives material support from Albania (the Democratic Party of Albania has purchased weapons on their behalf or passed on the contents of the government arsenals looted in 1997) and can count on funds from the Kosovar diaspora in Germany, which has the largest community of Kosovar expatriates, and Switzerland, where the organisation holds its main bank accounts. Switzerland is a major KLA recruiting ground; many Kosovar exiles have returned to fight for independence alongside people who have remained in the province, or dipped in and out of Albania between periods of detention. 'When you meet the fighters,' a young Albanian interpreter in Pristina announced, 'you will see how they are. They are epic.' This was not a frivolous description. She meant that the fighting tradition among ethnic Albanians is long (the current bout can be thought of as a continuation of hostilities that go back 85 years or more); that it has a robust undercarriage of myth, further strengthened by fierce notions of uprightness - moral notions that lie somewhere between honour and bravado; some would say courage. She was worried that the most reckless wield great authority, irrespective of their rank, and that this could happen within any given command (just as, on a bigger scale, semi-autonomous sectors can act as they see fit). The willingness to die is also a difficult issue. Death is easily reconfigured in terms of sacrifice and heroism, but it's a setback just the same, and in war the presence of forces - living, able-bodied forces - in the field is always an asset. The statuesque figure of the KLA fighter hewn from the bones of his forebears and caked with the dust of earlier struggles is part archetype and part identikit - and mostly suspect. Yet the term 'epic' tells us something about the KLA's strengths and its weaknesses. It also serves to distinguish their approach from the more admirable and ponderous efforts of Ibrahim Rugova's alternative administration, the Government of the 'Kosovo Republic', voted into existence by the provincial chamber that Milosevic stripped of its effective powers ten years ago. Two days after our journey to Pec, I took up with another interpreter, a young journalist who supplemented her income with work at Rugova's information centre. M. had had many dealings with the KLA. She understood their impatience with Rugova, an impatience bordering on contempt, but she would not denounce the project of independence by peaceful means that he has so honourably, and hopelessly, pursued. She wanted a coherent front moving ineluctably towards an independent state of Kosovo, but she was a realist who thought better of her wishes. M. knew a KLA base off the road leading north from Pristina to Podujevo and up into Serbia proper. We drove for forty minutes or more, the traffic decreasing as we got further from the capital. We passed a Serbian police post, continued until we were beyond sight of it and got out. The driver took off with the car. Working from memory - she had been here several months earlier - M. found a narrow track leading up to a rise, about half a mile off. On either side of it ran a low wall, and sometimes hedgerow, clotted with snow and ice. After a few hundred yards we were visible from the police post, but almost at once the track dipped and a long rampart of snow hid us from view. M. took me to a farmstead surrounded by a palisade of rough thatch. She spoke to a man who directed us across the fields and some time later, tired now, we reached an isolated house with three pairs of frozen boots stood on the tiled floor of the porch. On the sloping roof above us, where you might have expected a weather vane, there was a white satellite dish. We knocked and an elderly man with a smattering of teeth appeared in the doorway, two younger men behind him. M. introduced us and showed them a pass she'd obtained from Demaci in Pristina. One of the younger men came out of the house and put on his boots. The other handed him an old Kalashnikov and two magazines strapped together with masking tape. We followed our burly, convivial guide across the fields, breaking the crust of virgin snow as we went, and sinking up to our shins. He was fitter than either of us. On our way we encountered two other KLA men. He shouted to them and the sound of laughter clattered back at us through the lean air. 'He says he has two suspects from Pristina,' M. explained, 'and we're both under arrest.' As the terrain levelled out we found ourselves in a plantation of young oak trees. M. wanted a photograph and the fighter stood motionless on the path between the trees with his gun in both hands. He could have held the posture for as long as it took a singer to recite the history of his village. 'Epic', it struck me again, was not a bad word. It was only as we left the plantation that I noticed the ground underfoot. It consisted of a thick snowfall strewn with autumn leaves. The trees, too, were still hung with straggler foliage. In Kosovo, winter had stolen a march on the fall and the normal order of events seemed once again to have been reversed. We must have reached the village an hour or so later. It was quiet at the bottom but the path rose, and beyond that was a well-manned KLA checkpoint. We were shown into a house that M. had visited before. One of the officers recognised her. There was a woodstove burning in the front room. A big blown-up photograph of a pastoral landscape with a stream running over boulders covered the back wall: a homely, tautologous reminder of the KLA motherland that was all around them, large sections of it now under their control. The stovepipe ran up through the picture some distance from a weeping willow. The stutter of walkie-talkies, and from somewhere at the back of the house, the rasping crackle of a base-set, came and went in the room. Our meeting was short and not very frank. We sat with three men in uniform. I'd come to Kosovo, I said, to trace the family of some refugees and knew that here only a small number of the people displaced during the Serbian offensive - 250,000 according to the UN, nearly double that by the reckoning of an American NGO - had actually left the province (which M. translated as 'republic'). The officers said that a lot of people had moved from their sector last July, and that the KLA had helped them. There were probably twenty villages in the area and around 15,000 people. Most were gone by August, when the Serbian offensive was frenzied. They said that people had left by car, on buses, in tractors, swarming into Pristina and Podujevo, and that the KLA had stuck close to them, in the rear, with the idea of protecting them if the worst came to the worst. One of the men, a short, engaging char acter with a deferential smile, said that he'd urged his parents to leave; reluctantly they'd agreed, but had kept coming back. The inhabitants of one village had been moved wholesale and brought under the protection of the fighters at the base. The officers insisted they were still at war, despite the Holbrooke/Milosevic agreement. And, yes, the ceasefire was an occasion to plan and regroup - 'a good moment,' M. said, translating the words of the senior commander, chain-smoking at a desk behind a portable typewriter, 'to collect materiel. Training we have already done.' Independence was the unequivocal goal. The idea that the medium-term outcome of the Holbrooke/Milosevic negotiations would redefine the province as a third republic, along with Serbia and Montenegro, within what remains of federal Yugoslavia was addressed with serious interest. But this interest is strictly provisional. Whether Kosovo is recast as an 'autonomous region', as it became in the Forties, or an 'autonomous province', as it became in the Sixties, or a republic in all but name, as it did under the Tito Constitution, or simply a Serbian stomping-ground, as it did in 1989, these officers - like many ethnic Albanians I met - have simply had enough of the Yugoslav project. They wanted international guarantees that the option of independence would remain open after any interim return to autonomy, in whatever guise. At the same time, they know there are no international guarantees. Disruption and violence on a scale that the West finds unsettling are the likeliest guarantors of their ambitions and these are the things they intend to call on. Complete separation from the remains of Yugoslavia is the objective. The KLA base seemed backwoods-ish, ominously easy-going as it went about its business, preparing for the bleak days ahead. There were men chopping firewood; others attending to cars - plenty of cars, some of them four-wheel drives in good condition. It was a military version of the extended family that is everywhere in Kosovo: an advantage in this kind of war, but yet another obstacle, perhaps, to the creation of a modern chain of command in a small world of village notables and well-respected clans. There can be few Kosovars who do not have distant relatives in the KLA and so, to the authorities (above all Milan Milutinovic), every ethnic Albanian is a terrorist suspect, which means that in Kosovo those who condone terrorism outnumber Serb citizens by nine to one. To our hosts, the close family connections between fighters and civilians proved that the movement swam in the waters of popular support. In eight months, they had lost only seven fighters and 14 civilians. But here, the KLA had not been put to quite the same test in the eyes of their followers as units further south in Drenica, which bore the brunt of Serbian revanchisme, or the units that were active near Recak before the recent massacre. A day after leaving the base, I drove through the wreckage of Malisevo, a town in Drenica which the police and Army had taken apart with all the more vigour for the fact that the KLA had occupied it and proclaimed it a liberated 'capital'. The snow looked like a demure attempt to cover the charred remains of the place, as you'd cover the dead, but it is a monument of shame, both to the Serbian Army and police for what they did to it and to the KLA for having turned it into such an object of enmity, knowing full well that they could never hold it. The police were sandbagged in; there was armour half-hidden on the outskirts. Down the road to Dragobilje, the KLA had regrouped; it was a frontline of sorts, with the two sides staring one another down across a fraying cordon of foul weather and shuttle diplomacy. No one imagines it will hold. M. had handed me a sheaf of her photographs before we parted. Most were from a recent trip in the field and, of these, the ones she urged on me showed a dead man - an ethnic Albanian - washed and readied for burial. He had been killed by the Serbian Army, she said. The wounds were brutal, the post-mortem stitching was crude. The body was bluish grey. She had used up the rest of the film at a gathering of her family and friends. The prints were all poor. It wasn't the body that was troubling, so much as the business of showing the photos at all, and the fact that the shots of the dead man were on the same roll as the family snaps. I think M's motive was simple. I was fond of saying that I knew nothing about the Balkans and perhaps she thought the photos would illustrate how bad things had been here. But one of the distinguishing features of Kosovo seems to be the readiness with which people light on the subject of atrocity. You'll hear often, in differing detail, how one killing or another was a lingering and terrible affair, all this without a trace of the reticence you'll find in other places where things have gone equally badly. It's not simply that these horrors are fresh in people's minds and have to be exorcised. For a people at war, atrocity, like death and heroism, is always a building block in the edifice of national identity, but is there anywhere it sits so snugly in the foundations? 'The state,' a member of Rugova's Parliament told me, 'holds the monopoly of violence now' - which is how it looked last year and how it looks again since the massacre at Recak, but only at a glance. In any case, it doesn't have a monopoly on atrocity. Late one night, as the thaw came on, I walked through a marsh of blackening melt-water to the Grand Hotel in Pristina, picked up a Serbian interpreter, and made my way to the police station. It was nine o'clock. I was instructed that anything arising from this meeting should be attributed to 'official government sources'. Let's call him the Source, a stocky, intense man with a witheringly powerful stare, a profound sense of grievance and a tendency to draconian exposition. A pile of white ring-bound folders lay stacked on the table at which we sat, but these would not be broached before 'a short resume on the situation in Kosovo'. It was, in fact, lengthy and punctuated by harsh criticisms of the Western media. Since the Holbrooke/Milosevic agreement, the Source had lost nine policemen; another 25 had been wounded and 11 kidnapped (those figures have since risen). In the course of 1998 - with a few weeks to go - 112 police had been killed (a figure broadly consistent with the ratio of Serbs to ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, given the 1998 death toll of something between one and two thousand people) and nearly 400 wounded. The Source had a register of 1,632 terrorist - that is, KLA - attacks, but emphasised that in the wake of the Serbian offensive, the authorities had decreed an amnesty for anyone handing in firearms and had so far received nine thousand weapons, manufactured mostly in Nato member-states and China. He was speaking for the moment as a police chief, responsible for the welfare of his men, with a body of law to uphold and the integrity of a state to defend. All around him he saw terrorism in its purest form: two Serbs are abducted as profiteers for selling firewood to ethnic Albanians, then an ethnic Albanian is shot on the spot for buying the same firewood; a road is mined, a police post is assaulted, his officers die; whole villages are forced to take up arms which they're at pains to part with once the amnesty is declared. 'What,' he inquired, 'could my Government do? Would the Government of your country tolerate such a situation?' We passed now to the white folders, forensic evidence of killings in Kosovo, complete with autopsy reports compiled by the office of the coroner, with poorly printed colour photographs, like M.'s, exposed on the same kind of camera as hers. 'Six corpses unidentified, in a hole, estimated to be three months old, discovered on 3 October 1998 as a result of dogs carry ing human remains.' 'August 16 and 17 1998, police officers Srdan Perovic and Milorad Rajkovic tortured to death in Lausa after being abducted by men in civilian dress'; the photos show one body, severely bruised, with the hand cut into strips; the other with an ear severed, the nose cut, both arms broken and, in a picture taken from another angle, a gaping hole in place of a shoulderblade. The cor oner's report advises that these injuries were sustained before death. There were scores of cases, all of them terrible. The more eager I became to draw our meeting to a close, the more agitated and persistent the Source became, standing over me, pointing, recapitulating, insisting, enraging himself with the ghastliness of the detail until his face became ashen. The last dossier contained three photographs of an outright villain, identified as Aslan Klecka, born in 1947. He was the embodiment of everything a Serb might fear in an ethnic Albanian. The stereo type of the Muslim extremist, whose pre sence in Bosnia was so briskly milked for the credulous West, is once again stressed in Belgrade's propaganda about Kosovo. In one photograph, Aslan was wearing a robe and keffiyeh and posing beside an enormous mounted machine gun. In another he was Abraham, raising the knife over Isaac, except that he was leering and the blade was already running with blood. In the third, he was at prayer in what appeared to be open countryside. Across from these photos was a forensic shot of a distended body on the floor of a garage with the head severed and blood seeping through the trousers at the crotch. The Source claimed that this was one of Aslan's last victims, that Aslan was found dead in a car, killed by a member of his own entourage - which may or may not be true - in September 1998, and that the other pictures were removed from Aslan's house during a police investigation. The parody of militant Islam compromised the Aslan dossier. The rest of the evidence had been as credible as any allegations from the 'terrorist' side, but this looked like montage. I suspect nonetheless that it was genuine, a piece of good luck for the authorities, allowing them to tar the organisation with the Islamist brush in a way that's neither fair nor representative, despite the fact that Mujahidin elements are active in the KLA. 'Wild West,' said the Source, stubbing his forefinger on the picture of this Oriental Charles Manson posturing with a machine gun. The trouble with atrocity, and tit-for-tat evidence, is that it explains only the brutality of war. Neither side in Kosovo is a stickler for the Geneva Conventions, and both are deeply invested in updating their national myths. Both feel wronged by history, which is why they incline to the historical view. To inquire of someone like the Source why he has so many chilling deeds on file is to ask him to speak as an ordinary person and therefore as a Serb. He would say (as he did) that decent people don't commit such crimes; perhaps too (though he didn't) that the forces of the Serb prince, Lazar Hrebeljanovic, marshalled against the Turks on the plain of Kosovo in 1389, were defending the nearest thing to a civilisation, in the hectic world of medieval Balkan polities, against the nearest thing to barbarity; and finally that this model holds good six centuries on. As the night grew longer, the line between the diligent policeman and the embattled Serb became harder to trace. Which of them was it who ventured the opinion that the Serbian offensive had been drawn to a close too soon last autumn? ('Three more weeks and the job could have been done.') And which of them urged me to take copies of the photos in the dossiers back to Britain? (It would be unethical on my part, and an affront to the dead, not to get them published.) I declined politely and the mood of my 'official government sources' - policeman, statistician, bureaucrat and Serb - rapidly darkened. The ability to suppress rage is always admirable - and this was no exception - though many Serb policemen and soldiers would surely disagree. Their own is contracted out to the strategy of terror that now passes for law enforcement in Kosovo. But rage, as we know, is a law unto itself. Jeremy Harding is
a senior editor at the London Review of Books Foreign Affairs May/June 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 The emergence of
this militant armed group, now numbering The KLA is important
out of all proportion to its size -- The grim reality
is that we had better get to know the KLA THE NEW RADICALS Kosovo's Albanians
have grown increasingly embittered. By The good news is
that the Western alliance's response to the But, as in Bosnia,
the West is wedded to a solution that The Albanians have
been radicalized, and their new voice is The KLA fighters
are the province's new power brokers. The first KLA armed
attack took place in May 1993 in The KLA splits down
a bizarre ideological divide, with hints The second KLA faction,
comprising most of the KLA leaders The two KLA factions
have little sympathy with or Given these deep div |