 |  |  |
| Return to: Left History: a digital archive | Return to: Say no to imperialist wars! | Return to: NATO-Yugoslav War Internet Resources |
| | |
| Return to: Left History: a digital archive | Return to: Say no to imperialist wars! | Return to: NATO-Yugoslav War Internet Resources |
Today is the final deadline for the Kosovo Liberation Army to "demilitarize." But that does not mean it will be disbanded or disarmed.
Although 10,000 weapons have been turned in, 5,000 Albanian guerrillas will be allowed to keep "light arms" and wear their uniforms in a civilian force called the Kosovo Corps. No one knows exactly what this corps will do, but it is supposed to be controlled by the United Nations.
Senior NATO officials concede, however, that KLA commanders are trying to keep the organization intact and squirrel away some of its arms, which include automatic weapons, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. This could put them on a collision course with the peacekeeping force known as KFOR.
Agim Ceku, the KLA's military commander, bluntly admits: "The KLA will not be disarmed. There is a big difference between being disarmed and demilitarized. The KLA will be transformed into a civilian force -- one that will eventually become the army of Kosovo with the right to demand military service."
Russia and Serbia say this simply perpetuates the separatist movement in a new guise. Both see the Kosovo Corps as part of an international effort to weaken Serbia's hold on the province, with some justification. For although NATO recognizes Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo, there is very little left in the province that is Serbian.
Most of the prewar population of 200,000 Serbs has fled and those who remain are being murdered, beaten and harassed right under the noses of NATO peacekeepers. Observers say the abuses go far beyond spontaneous reprisals for the "ethnic cleansing" suffered by Albanians when the Serbs were in charge. They are organized by the KLA and so systematic as to constitute another pogrom.
The German mark is now the official currency in Kosovo and the U.N. mission runs the customs service. But although the latter is technically in charge of Kosovo's civilian administration, the KLA has set up a shadow government that controls most municipalities and maintains a "ministry of public order" that acts as a police force.
British police sent to train a new multiethnic force for Kosovo found just one Serb among the first 200 recruits. Most of the others were KLA members, and some had to be rejected after it was discovered that they were either suspects in atrocities or belonged to organized crime gangs.
The KLA's links with the Albanian mafia, its principal source of funds during the guerrillas' "liberation war" against Serbia, have opened the province to hordes of gangsters. They have taken over apartments vacated by Serbs, are robbing international aid workers and collecting "taxes" from trucks bringing in relief supplies.
Kosovo's self-styled "prime minister," Hashim Thaci, has pledged to build "a society of tolerance." But analyst Michael Radu, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, says the KLA is doing just the opposite, and proving more adept at it than the Serbs.
"None of this is surprising," he wrote. "The KLA's deeds are fully consistent with its ideology of authoritarianism and ethnic exclusionism. What is completely inexcusable, however, is the response of the international community" -- namely KFOR and the U.N. "viceroy" in Kosovo, France's Bernard Kouchner, who refuse to acknowledge the KLA's role in attacks on Serbs and Gypsies.
"Once NATO went to war portraying Serbs as evil and Albanians as angels," said Radu, "it became impossible to admit that there are no angels in Kosovo, but only a shifting balance of evil against evil. To hope, as President Clinton did, for a 'multicultural and multiethnic' Kosovo, or to lament the zero-sum game played by both Serbs and Albanians, as Kouchner did, is nonsensical.
"The cold reality is that, except for a few tenuous Serbian enclaves, Kosovo is on the way to becoming a purely Albanian area under the de facto control of a profoundly anti-democratic, duplicitous and violent organization. And Thaqi and Co. are no doubt aware that as the minority exodus from Kosovo nears completion there will be even less incentive for KFOR to crack down on the KLA.
"Worse still, the growth of this totalitarian cancer is being encouraged by KFOR's inability or unwillingness to stop it, and paid for by West European and American taxpayers."