Terrorists and Freedom Fighters Part 4

In February 1989, armed with a new const.i.tution which abolished Kosovo's autonomy (and, a year later, its stunned government), Milosevic quelled a miners' hunger strike and proceeded to inst.i.tute measures of discrimination against the Albanians in the province.

Discrimination was nothing new to Kosovo. The Albanians themselves initiated such anti-Serb measures following their new gained const.i.tutional autonomy in 1974. Now the tide has turned and thousands of Albanians who refused to sign new-fangled "loyalty vows" were summarily sacked and lost their pension rights (the most sacred possession of "h.o.m.o Socialismus"). Albanian media were shuttered and schools vacated when teacher after teacher refused to abide by the Serb curriculum. After a while, The Serbs re-opened primary schools and re-hired Albanian teachers, allowing them to teach in Albanian. But secondary schools and universities remained closed.

These acts of persecution did not meet with universal disapproval.

Greece, for instance, regarded the Albanians as natural allies of the Turks and, bonded by common enmity, of the Macedonians and Bulgarians. Itself comprised of lands claimed by Albania, Greece favoured a harsh and final resolution of the Albanian question.

There can be little doubt that Macedonia - feeling besieged by its Albanian minority - regarded Milosevic as the perfect antidote.

Macedonia actively a.s.sisted Yugoslavia to break the embargo imposed on it by the Western powers. Milosevic was not, therefore, a pariah, as retroactive history would have it. Rather, he was the only obstacle to a "Great Albania".

Within less than a year, in 1990, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) was able to claim a membership of 700,000 members. Hashim Thaci ("Snake"), Sulejman Selimi ("Sultan") and other leaders of the KLA were then 20 years of age. Years of Swiss education notwithstanding, they witnessed first hand Kosovo's tumultuous transformation into the engine of disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation. It was a valuable lesson in the dialectic of history, later to be applied brilliantly.

The leader of the LDK, the forever silk scarfed and mellifluous Dr.

Ibrahim Rugova, compared himself openly and blushlessly to Vaclav Havel and the Kosovar struggle to the Velvet Revolution. This turgid and risible a.n.a.logy deteriorated further as the Kosovar Velvet was stained by the blood of innocents. Dr. Rugova was an unfazed dreamer in a land of harsh nightmares. The Sorbonne was never a good preparatory school to the academy of Balkan reality. Rugova's ideals were good and n.o.ble - Gandhi-like pa.s.sive resistance, market economics, constructive (though uncompromising and limited to the authorities) dialogue with the enemy. They might still prevail. And during the early 1990s he was all the rage and the darling of the West. But he failed to translate his convictions into tangible achievements. His biggest failure might have been his inability to ally himself with a "Big Power" - as did the Croats, the Slovenes and the Bosnians. This became painfully evident with the signature of the Dayton Accord in 1995 which almost completely ignored Kosovo and the Kosovars.

True, the West conditioned the total removal of sanctions against Yugoslavia on its humane treatment of its Albanian citizens and encouraged the Albanians, though circ.u.mspectly, to stand for their rights. But there was no explicit support even for the re- instatement of Kosovo's 1974 status, let alone for the Albanians'

dreams of statehood. In the absence of such support - financial and diplomatic - Kosovo remained an internal problem of Yugoslavia, a renegade province, a colony of terror and drug trafficking. The Kosovars felt betrayed as they have after the Congress of Berlin and the Balkan Wars. Perhaps securing such a sponsor was a lost cause to start with (though the KLA succeeded where Rugova failed) - but then Rugova misled his people into sanguinous devastation by declaring the "Kosovo Republic" prematurely. His choice of pacifism may have been dictated by the sobering sights from the killing fields of Bosnia - and proved his pragmatism. But his decision to declare a "Republic" was pre-mature, self-aggrandizing and in vacuo. The emergence of a political alternative - tough, realistic, methodical and structured - was not only a question of time but a welcome development. There is no desolation like the one inflicted by sincere idealists.

In 1991, Rugova set about organizing a Republic from a shabby office building and the opposite "Cafe Mimoza". His government constructed makeshift schools and hospitals, parallel networks of services staffed by the Serb-dispossessed, capitalizing on a sweeping wave of volunteerism. Albania recognized this nascent state immediately and international negotiators (such as Lord Owen and Cyrus Vance) conferred with its self-important figurehead (for instance, in September 1992). Successive American administrations funnelled money into the province and warnings against "ethnic cleansing" were flung at Yugoslavia as early as 1993. Internally, Serb extremists in both Belgrade and Pristina prevented Serb moderates (like then Yugoslav Prime Minister Milan Panic) from re-opening the schools of Kosovo and reducing the ma.s.sive, Northern-Ireland-like Serb military presence in it. An agreement signed in 1997 by both Rugova and Milosevic to abolish the parallel Albanian education system and re- open all the educational facilities in Kosovo was thus frustrated.

Kosovo fractured along ethnic lines with complete segregation of the Serbs and the Albanians. To avoid contact with the Serbs was an unwritten rule, breached only by prominent intellectuals. The "Kosovo Republic" was far from advocating ethnic cleansing or even outright independence (there were powerful voices in favour of a federal solution within Yugoslavia) - but not far from re-inventing an inverted version of apartheid.

It faced the ubiquitous problem of all the other republics of former Yugoslavia - not one of them was ethnically "pure". To achieve a tolerable level of h.o.m.ogeneity, they had to resort to force. Rugova advocated the measured application of the insidious powers of discrimination and segregation. But, once the theme was set, variations were bound to arise.

Though dominant for some years, Rugova and the LDK did not monopolize the Kosovar political landscape. Following a poll in 1998, boycotted by all other political parties, which resulted in the re-election of Rugova as president - the disenchanted and disillusioned had plenty of choice. Some joined the KLA, many more joined Rexhep Qosaj's (Qosje) United Democratic Movement (LBD). The political scene in Kosovo in the 1980s and early 1990s was vibrant and kaleidoscopic. Adem Demaci - the Marxist ideologue of the KLA, a long time political prisoner and the founder of the "revolutionary Movement for the Merger of Albanians" in 1964 - established the Parliamentary Party of Kosovo (PPK) before he handed it over to Bajram Kosumi, a dissident and another venerable political prisoner.

The PPK was co-founded by Veton Surroi, the English-speaking, US- educated, son of a Yugoslav diplomat and editor of Koha Ditore, the Albanian language daily. The Albanians are not a devout lot, but even Islam had its political manifestations in Kosovo.

The 1981 demonstrations gave rise to the Popular Movement for Kosovo (LPK). Apparently, it gave rise to the KLA, probably in 1993, possibly in Pristina. Whatever the circ.u.mstances, the KLA congregated in Decani, the region surrounding Pristina. Two years after the Golgovac attack - it tackled a Serb border patrol (April) and a Serb Police Station (August) in 1995. Light weapons and a crude bomb were used. The Serbs were not impressed - but they were provoked into an escalating series of ever more hideous ma.s.sacres of Albanian villagers (the turning point might have been the slaughter by the Serbs of the Jashari clan in Prekaz). Machiavellian a.n.a.lysts ascribe to the KLA a devilish plot to provoke the Serbs into the ethnic cleansing that finally introduced the West to tortured Kosovo. The author of this article, aware of the Balkan's lack of propensity for long term planning and predilection for self- defeating vengeance - believes that, to the KLA, it was all a serendipitous turn of events. Whatever the case may be, the KLA became sufficiently self-a.s.sured and popular to advertise itself on the BBC as responsible for some of the clashes - a rite of pa.s.sage common to all self-respecting freedom fighters.

The selection of targets by the KLA is very telling. At first it concentrated its fiery intentions only upon military and law and order personnel. Its reluctance to effect civilians was meritorious.

A subtle shift occurred when the Serbs began to re-populate Kosovo with Serbs displaced from the Krajina region. Alarmed by the intent - if not by the execution (only 10,000 Serbs or so were settled in Kosovo) - the KLA reacted with a major drive to arm itself and by attacking Serb settlements in Klina, Decani and Djakovica and a refugee camp in Baboloc. The KLA attacks were militarily sophisticated and co-ordinated. Serb policemen were ambushed on the road between Glogovac and Srbica. The Serb counter-offensive resulted in dozens of Albanian victims - civilians, men, women and children (the "Drenica Ma.s.sacre"). The KLA tried to defend villages aligned along a Pec-Djakovica line and thus disrupt the communications and logistics of Serb Military Police and Special (Ministry of Interior) Police units. The main arena of fighting was a recurrent one - in the 1920s, Albanian guerillas, based in the hills, attacked the Serbs in Drenica.

What finally transformed the KLA from a wannabe IRA into the fighting force that it has become was the disintegration of Albania.

History is the annals of irony. The break-up of the KLA'a role model - led to the resurgence of its intellectual progeny. The KLA absorbed thousands of weapons from the looted armouries of the Albanian military and police. Angry mobs attacked these ordnances following the collapse of pyramid investment schemes that robbed one third of the population of all their savings. The arms ended up in the trigger-happy hands of drug lords, mafiosi, pimps, smugglers and freedom fighters from Tetovo in Macedonia to Durres in Albania and from Pristina in Kosovo to the Sandzak in Serbia. The KLA was so ill-equipped to cope with this fortuitous cornucopia - that it began to trade weapons, a gainful avocation it found hard to dislodge ever since. The convulsive dissolution of Albania led to changes in high places. Sali Berisha was deposed and replaced by Rexhep Mejdani, an even more sympathetic ear to separatist demands. Berisha himself later allowed the KLA to use his property (around Tropoja) as staging grounds and supported the cause (though not the "Marxist- Leninist" KLA or its self-appointed government) unequivocally.

At a certain stage, he even accused Fatos Nano, his rival and the Prime Minister of Albania of being the enemy of the Albanian people for not displaying the same unmitigated loyalty to the idea of an independent Kosovo, under Rugova and Bujar Bukoshi, Rugova's money man (and Prime Minister in exile). The KLA was able to expand its presence in Albania, mainly in its training and operations centres near Kukes, Ljabinot (near Tirana) and Bajram Curi. Albania had a growing say in the affairs of the KLA as it recomposed itself - it was instrumental in summoning the KLA to Rambouillet, for instance.

This armed revelry coupled with the rising fortunes of separatism, led Robert Gelbard, the senior US envoy to the Balkan to label the KLA - "a terrorist organization". The Serbs took this to mean a licence to kill, which they exercised dutifully in Drenica.

Promptly, the USA changed course and the indomitable Madeleine Albright switched parties, saying: "We are not going to stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what they can no longer get away with in Bosnia".

This stern consistency was followed by a tightening of the embargo against Yugoslavia and by a threat of unilateral action. For the first time in history, the Kosovars finally had a sponsor - and what a sponsor! The mightiest of all. As for Milosevic, he felt nauseatingly betrayed. Not only was he not rewarded for his role as the Dayton peacemaker - he was faced with new sanctions, an ultimatum and a direct threat on the very perpetuation of his regime.

The KLA mushroomed not because it attacked Serbs (very sporadically and to a minuscule effect). It ballooned because it delivered where Rugova didn't even promise. It delivered an alliance with the USA against the hated Serbs. It delivered weapons. It delivered hope and a plan. It delivered vengeance, the self-expression of the downtrodden. It was joined by near and far and, by its own reckoning, its ranks swelled to 50,000 warriors. More objective experts put the figure of active fighters at one fourth this number.

Still, it is an impressive number in a population of 1.7 million Albanians. During the war, it was joined by 400 overweight suburbanites from North America, Albanian volunteers within an "Atlantic Brigade". It also absorbed Albanians with rich military experience from Serbia and Croatia as well as foreign mercenaries and possibly "Afghanis" (the devout Moslem veterans of the wars in Afghanistan, Lebanon and Bosnia).

The influx of volunteers put pressure on the leadership - both organizational and pecuniary. The KLA - an entrepreneurial start up of insurgency - had matured into a national brand of guerilla. It revamped itself, creating directorates, offices and officers, codes and procedures, a radio station and a news agency, an electronic communications interception unit, a word of mouth messenger service and a general military staff, headed since February 1999 by "Sultan"

and divided to seven operational zones. In short, it reacted to changing fortunes by creating a bureaucracy. Concurrently, it armed itself to its teeth with more sophisticated weapons than ever before (though it was still short of medical supplies, ammunition and communications equipment). The KLA now had shoulder-fired anti-tank rocket launchers (like the German "Armburst"), mortars, recoilless rifles, anti-aircraft machine-guns and automatic a.s.sault rifles.

Some of the weapons were even bought from Serb army officers or imported through Hungary. All this required a financial phase transition. That the KLA has benefited, directly and knowingly, from money tainted by drug trafficking and smuggling of both goods and people across borders - can be in little doubt. But I find the proposition that the KLA itself has traded in drugs unlikely. The long-established Albanian clans which control the "Balkan Route" - the same clans that faced down the fearsome Turkish gangs on their own turf - would have never let an upstart such as the KLA take over any of their territory and its inc.u.mbent profits.

The KLA might have traded weapons. It might have dabbled in smuggling. It might have received donations from drug lords. In this, it is no different from all major modern guerilla movements.

But it did not peddle drugs - not because of moral scruples but because of the lethal compet.i.tion it would have encountered. That the KLA had to resort to such condemnable methods of financing is not surprising. Rugova refused to share with it the funds abroad managed by Bujar Bukoshi on behalf of the "Kosovar People". It had no other means of income and, as opposed to Rugova, it could act only clandestinely and surrept.i.tiously. The West was no great help either - contrary to the myth spun by the Serbs.

Another source of income was the 3% "War Tax" levied on 500,000 Kosovar Albanians and their businesses in the diaspora (though most of it ended up under Bukoshi's and Rugova's control). Officially collected by the People's Movement of Kosovo, the ultimate use of the proceeds was the sustenance of the shadow republic. The KLA made use of the voluntary and not so voluntary donations to the Swiss- based fund "Homeland Calls" (or "Motherland is Calling").

The USA - the pragmatic superpower that it is - began to divert its attention from the b.u.mbling and hapless Rugova to the emerging KLA.

The likes of Gelbard and, his senior, Richard Holbrooke, held talks with its youthful political director, Hashim Thaci - suave, togged up and earnest, he was just what the doctor ordered. To discern that a showdown in Kosovo was near required no prophetic powers. The KLA might come handy to espy the land and to divert the Serb forces should the need arise.

"The Clinton administration has diligently put everything in place for intervention. In fact, by mid-July US-NATO planners had completed contingency plans for intervention, including air strikes and the deployment of ground troops. All that was missing was a sufficiently brutal or tragic event to trigger the process. As a senior Defence Department official told reporters on July 15, 'If some levels of atrocities were reached that would be intolerable, that would probably be a trigger.'" - wrote Gary Dempsey from the Cato Inst.i.tute in October 1998. The author of this article published another one in the "Middle East Times" in August 1998 in which the Kosovo conflict was delineated in reasonably accurate detail ("The Plight of the Kosovar"). The article was written in April 1998 - by which time the outline of things to come was plain.

All along, the KLA prepared itself to be a provisional government in-waiting. It occupied regions of Kosovo, established roadblocks, administration, welfare offices. Its members operated nocturnally.

The Serb reaction got ever harsher until finally it threatened not only to wipe the KLA out of existence but also to depopulate the parts of the province controlled by it. In September 1998, NATO threatened air strikes against Serbia, following reports of a ma.s.sacre of women and children in the village of Gornje Obrinje.

This led to the October 20th agreement with Belgrade, which postulated a reduction in the levels of Yugoslav troops in the province.

The KLA was all but ignored in these events. Rugova was not. He was often consulted by the American negotiators and treated like a head of state. The message was deafeningly clear: the KLA was a p.a.w.n on the chessboard of war. It had no place where the civilized and the responsible tread. It had no raison d'etre in peacetime. It reacted by hitting a number of "Serb collaborators" (mostly of Gorani extract - Muslim Slavs who speak a dialect of Albanian). One of the disposed was Enver Maloku, Rugova's close a.s.sociate.

On January 15, 1999, in the village of Racak, someone murdered scores of people and dumped them by the roadside. The KLA blamed the Serbs. The Serbs blamed the KLA and William Walker, the head of the OSCE observer team. The media reports were inconclusive. While everyone was fighting over the smouldering bodies, NATO was preparing to attack and Walker withdrew his observer team from Kosovo into an increasingly reluctant and enraged Macedonia. Faced with sovereignty-infringing and regime-destabilizing demands at Rambouillet, the Serbs declined. Under pressure and after days of consultations, the Albanian delegation accepted the dictated draft agreement hesitatingly. In the absence of the predicted Serb capitulation, "Operation Allied Forces" commenced.

Rambouillet was a turning point for the KLA. Evidently on the verge of war, the USA reverted to its preferences of yore. The KLA, a more useful ally on the ground in battle, took over from the LDK as the US favourite. At the behest of the United States, KLA representatives not only were present, but headed the Kosovar negotiating team. Thaci took some convincing and shuttling between Rambouillet, Switzerland and Kosovo - but finally, in March, he accepted the terms of the agreement with a sombre Rugova in tow.

These public acts of statesmanship: negotiating, bargaining and, finally, accepting graciously - cemented the role and image of the KLA as not only a military outfit but also a political organization with the talent and wherewithal to lead the Kosovars. 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 become part of the police, one part will become civil administration, one part will become the Army of Kosovo, as a defence force. Finally, a part will form a political party."

Agim Ceku, KLA CDR The Western media hit a nadir of bias and unprofessional sycophancy during the Kosovo crisis. It, therefore, remains unclear who pulled whose strings. The KLA was seen to be more adept at spin doctoring than hubris-infested NATO. It started the war as an outcast and ended it as an ally of NATO on the ground and the real government of a future Kosovo. It capitalized ingeniously on Rugova's mysterious disappearance and then on his, even less comprehensible, refusal to visit the refugee camps and to return to liberated Kosovo. It interfaced marvellously with both youthful prime ministers - Albania's Pandeli Majko and Macedonia's Ljubco Georgievski. This new-found camaraderie ended in a summit with the latter, organized by Arben Xhaferi (Dzaferi), an influential Albanian coalition partner in Macedonia (and, many say, Thaci's business partner in Kosovo). Georgievski, who did more for Macedonia's regional integration and amicable relationships with its neighbours than all the previous governments of Macedonia combined - did not hesitate to shake the hand of the political leader of an organization still decried by his own Interior Ministry as "terrorist".

It was a gamble - bold and, in hindsight, farsighted - but still, a gamble. Rugova himself was not accorded such an honour when he finally pa.s.sed through Macedonia, on his way to his demolished homeland.

During the war, the KLA absorbed new recruits from Macedonia (many Macedonian Albanians died in battle in the fields of Kosovo), from Germany, Switzerland, the USA, Australia and some Moslem countries.

In other words, it was internationalized. It was equipped (though only n.i.g.g.ardly) by the West. And it coped with the double task of diplomacy (Thaci's famous televised discussions with Madeleine Albright, for instance) and political organization. It was engaged in field guerilla warfare and reconnaissance without the proper training for either. Add to this tactical military co-ordination and the need to integrate a second, Rugova and Berisha sponsored Armed Forces of the Republic of Kosovo (FARK) and the KLA seems to have been taxed to its breaking point. Cracks began to appear and it was downhill ever since. Never before was such an enormous political capital wasted so thoroughly in so short a time by so few.

One must not forget that victory was not a.s.sured until the last moment. The West's reluctance to commit ground troops to the escalating conflict - as ma.s.s expulsions c.u.m sporadic ma.s.sacres of the indigenous population by the Serbs were taking place - was considered by many KLA fighters to have been a violation of a "Besa"

(the sacred Albanian vow) given to them by NATO.

Opinions regarding the grand strategy of conducting the war differed strongly. The agreement with Milosevic that ended the war did not mention any transition period at the end of which the Kosovars will decide their fate in a referendum. It felt like betrayal. At the beginning, there was strong, gra.s.sroots resistance to disarmament.

Many Kosovars felt that the advantage obtained should be pressed to the point of independence or at least, a transition period.

Then, when the dust settled, the spoils of war served to widen the rifts. Internecine fighting erupted and is still afoot. The occasional murder served to delineate the territories of each commander and faction within the strained KLA. Everything was and is subject to fluid arrangements of power and profit sharing - from soft drink licences, through cigarette smuggling and weapons dealing and down to the allocation of funds (some of them still of dubious sources). The situation was further compounded by the invasion of criminal elements from Albania proper. The Kosovar crime clans were effected by the war (though their activities never really ceased) and into the vacuum gushed Albanian organized and ruthless crime.