Global Reporting
Network Publications

    

Kosovo Albanians: Closing Ranks
A Global Beat Backgrounder
By Tihomir Loza, with Anthony Borden*
Global Beat Issue Brief No. 52, March 26, 1999
Reprinted with permission
 
This article originally appeared in Transitions magazine, May 1998 but is reprinted here to provide background central to the current conflict in Kosovo.
 
All signs suggest that Slobodan Milosevic's war machine, or what's left of it, is set for another adventure. The weather is turning, and as in Croatia and Bosnia, his wars tend to gain steam in early spring and reach full boil in summer. His special police forces are in Kosovo and have already massacred dozens of civilians, and the Yugoslav army has entered the fray. Thousands of people have fled their homes and flocks of foreign journalists have landed in Pristina in armored jeeps and bulletproof jackets. As one Pristina commentator notes, "You can feel the war psychology in the air."
 
More fundamentally, war may even be in the Yugoslav president's interest. If he negotiates now, he would not formally lose control of Kosovo, the 90 percent-Albanian province of Serbia. But any solution would inevitably return some power to the ethnic Albanians there, whose autonomy he crushed nine years ago. For a politician who has built his career by fueling conflict over Kosovo--and who lost three other wars along the way--this could be a defeat too far. With Albanians' confidence growing, they would view any solution within the existing constitutional structure of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as a mere temporary step on the path to independence. Milosevic knows this, and his reluctance to negotiate could be an attempt to provoke a war for the partition of the province--the best he and Serbia can realistically hope for in the long-run.
 
Kosovo's potential to create a humanitarian disaster and destabilize European security has been widely understood since Yugoslavia fell apart in 1991. The intermingling interests of all the states of the southern Balkans converge on neighboring Macedonia, which has its own large Albanian minority and is the focus of territorial and national claims by all of its neighbors. Thus war in Kosovo risks directly involving a half-dozen states in the region, including NATO members Greece and Turkey.
 
If little international effort has been spent on resolving the Kosovo dispute this decade, it's because there was no urgent need. It takes two sides to make a proper war, and Kosovo Albanians did not engage, pursuing a disciplined strategy of nonviolence. Kosovo was perceived as a problem of human rights, not of political rights and territorial status. As much as Serbia's iron grip on the province was an embarrassment for Europe and the United States, it was also convenient. As long as the province and its population were tightly controlled by Belgrade, it was believed that the Albanians neither could nor would dare to organize militarily. There would be no war, because there was no second army. Conflict would be avoided, and as Serbia democratized over time, Albanians would be re-integrated into society.
 
Today, Kosovo Albanians are engaging. The Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) is becoming that second side. Drastically inferior to Milosevic's mighty police and army, arms and ammunition are nevertheless reaching the units on the ground every day, and the number of gunmen claiming to be part of the UCK has mushroomed in most of rural Kosovo. Bardhyl Mahmuti, spokesman of the People's Movement for Kosovo (LPK) in Geneva, one of the few forces that have openly supported the UCK, says it won't be long before the UCK is ready to "engage its enemy at full steam." Serious clashes have already occurred.
 
Kosovo Albanians are engaging politically, too. While the Kosovo independence movement is acquiring all the features of a fully fledged pluralist scene, the common threat from Belgrade is pushing moderates and radicals toward each other. This pleases some more than others but nonetheless fosters fresh confidence throughout. It marks a critical phase in the ten-year development of the Albanian movement, offering substantial possibilities and enormous risks.
 
If the international community does not take steps to calm the escalating situation on the ground, "it is a matter of months before a merger [between radical and moderate Albanians] occurs," says Xhafer Shatri, information minister for the Kosovo Albanian parallel government. Far from a splintering of the Albanian movement, Shatri argues, "there is no historical precedent for the present level of the homogenization of the Albanian people." The prospects remain primarily dependent on steps taken by Belgrade and responses made by the major powers. Yet an active "other side" in the conflict is taking shape, setting the stage for other patterns to follow.
 
DIVIDED LIVES
 
Kosovo is formally a province of Serbia, a part of Yugoslavia controlled directly by Belgrade. But it takes just a crossing of the allegedly non-existent border between Serbia proper and Kosovo itself to realize that the province simply isn't Serbia.
 
With roughly 2 million inhabitants, of which only 8 percent are Serbian, Kosovo has long been the poorest and most neglected corner of Serbia. Underdeveloped, with few assets except coal and other mines, it is a maze of small villages, interspersed with a few treasures--such as the elegant Albanian-majority town of Prizren with its many mosques and the beautiful Serb medieval monastery of Visoki Decani--plus the grim and uneasy capital city of Pristina.
 
Most things Serbian seem more like surreal ethnic theme parks than normal components of everyday life. Some look sinister, such as Pristina's Hotel Grand, populated by journalists and plain-clothed policemen. Some are mysteriously pleasant, even dignified, such as the excellent restaurant Knezev konak near Kosovo Polje (Field of the Blackbirds), where the Serbs lost their fateful battle to the Ottomans in 1389 and where, 600 years later, Milosevic had his first open war cry before a cheering crowd of up to a million Serbs. Some are just ugly symbols of Milosevic's pathetic attempts to "Serbianize" Kosovo, like the huge Serb Orthodox cathedral in Pristina, never finished for lack of funds.
 
But the most jarring impression of Kosovo are the security forces: 13,000 police, 21,000 Yugoslav army troops, and a further 21,000 Kosovo Serbs possessing arms as official members of the police reserves. According to Jane's Intelligence Review, Belgrade can transfer an additional 25,000 reinforcements within days.
 
The Serbs, both civilian and uniformed, are in an unenviable position: front-line colonizers and armed protectors, they both serve and suffer under the chauvinist program driven by Belgrade. Nearly all the police and local state officials have developed the syndromes of an occupying force. They have been brutal and quick to extort money from the Albanians, perhaps sensing that their time in Kosovo is limited. The police in particular have been edgy, because they know it is they--and not the more-powerful Yugoslav army--who have been the primary target of the UCK.
 
"I am scared. How could I not be?" says a Serb policeman in Pristina. "They are cowards. They ambush us and then run away." Over the past seven years, according to figures from the Serbian Ministry of Interior, "Albanian terrorists" have killed 20 Serb police officers and wounded 62.
 
Serb civilians do not feel much more at ease. The angry Serbian crowds staging marches in Pristina, some bearing placards with the likeness of accused Bosnian Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic, are organized by Belgrade to counter the television footage of Albanian protesters.
 
Indeed, it is Kosovo Serbs who played a critical role ten years ago in jump-starting Milosevic's career. And as a result of the long-standing Albanian boycott of Serbian elections, the Kosovo Serbs are overrepresented in the Serbian parliament, and by the most radical nationalist deputies. At home, Kosovo Serbs may well have their bags packed and waiting by the door. Some say they feel they have been used by Belgrade one time too many.
 
"If war starts, we are the ones who are going to be killed first," says Momcilo Trajkovic, leader of the now strongly anti-Milosevic Serbian Resistance Movement-Democratic Movement. "Our people here are not for war precisely because they now have experience showing that war solves nothing."
 
Albanians have little sympathy. "The policemen control only the piece of land they cover with their boots. Everything else in Kosovo is ours," says a young Albanian journalist. Indeed, the majority population in the province, and the predominant feeling, is Albanian. Albanian communities, with their high walls and joined family houses, physically represent the extremely close familial ties that are the core of Albanian life. In Pristina's center, lively cafes are filled with young, suave Albanians, almost universally unemployed and therefore with time on their hands. Everywhere, elder Albanian men, wearing signature white skullcaps, make their way along the streets and the fields. While there are some professional women in the cities and towns, those from traditional families mostly remain at home.
 
Kosovo is in a state of expectation, and hardly anyone doubts that something big will happen soon. During the days, marches in Pristina draw thousands with placards and peace signs, many nicely printed in English. But since Milosevic's special police killed 80 people in Drenica in March, the streets of Pristina have been almost empty after dark. Beyond a general unease, Albanians appear to be obeying a self-imposed curfew. Indeed, the residents of Prizren, in the south, who have been less eager to give up their nightlife, were reprimanded by Pristina for their lack of solidarity.
 
But the Kosovo Albanians have been under siege for a long time. They have always been treated by Serbs, and to an extent by all South Slavs, as second-class citizens, and they have lived under effective police control throughout the 1990s. Denied equal access to education, health-care, and employment, Kosovo Albanians have been regularly subject to human-rights abuses. Political, civic, and electronic media organizations have been severely restricted and regularly repressed. Since 1989, according to conservative estimates from Human Rights Watch, scores of people have been killed by the police, hundreds have been imprisoned on political charges, tens of thousands have lost jobs in state industries, and 350,000 have emigrated because of economic and social marginalization.
 
The Albanian desire to break free from Serbia is not an aspiration born in the context of Yugoslavia's breakdown. The roots of Serbian-Albanian mistrust run deep. As a Belgrade journalist recalls, "When I was a kid, I thought a Siptar [pejorative for an Albanian] was an occupation"--essentially just another way of saying manual laborer. Albin Kurti from the Albanian Independent Union of Students in Pristina says, "We were an alien body in the Slavic sea." As nearly all Albanians do, he adds that they could not possibly live under Serbia: "Why should we, if even the Slavs couldn't live together?"
 
Many have worked hard at co-existence. "Since 1912 [when Kosovo was incorporated into Serbia after the Balkan Wars], the Albanians always wanted to escape from Serbian rule," says Mahmut Bakalli, the leading ethnic-Albanian communist during the Tito years, who today works independently in Pristina out of his modest study dominated by hunting trophies and pictures of him with Tito. Yet according to this former proponent of the Titoist "brotherhood and unity" formula for inter-ethnic harmony, no combination of repression or liberalism halted Albanians' instincts for independence. "To be very honest," he insists, "the Serbian authorities, myself and Tito, we all tried very hard. It simply didn't work."
 
The biggest single initiative was the 1974 Yugoslav constitution, Tito's final effort to find a technical mechanism for cementing coexistence. By loosening Belgrade's central authority over the federation, he hoped to satisfy the desires of the republics, ethnic groups, and nations for increased control over their own affairs. The unstated aim was to balance power among the ethnic groups, reducing Serbian dominance without provoking a Serbian backlash.
 
For the Albanian minority, this meant enhancing the constitutional status of Kosovo province. Under the unique provisions of the new constitution, Kosovo and Vojvodina, in the north, remained formally part of Serbia but were practically granted almost all the rights of the other republics--except for the right to secede.
 
The point was less important in the multiethnic but Serb-majority Vojvodina but crucial for Albanians in Kosovo. Albanians were granted unambiguously Albanian and state-like political, cultural, educational, and financial institutions--even a police force. Unsurprisingly, the Albanians used these structures to articulate further their desire to leave Serbia. They took to the streets to protest against Serbia in 1981, when Belegrade's presence in the province was at an all-time low. The driving slogan was "Kosova! Republika!"
 
MYTHS AND MANIPULATIONS
 
It was within this context that a powerful grass-roots movement of Kosovo Serbs, centered in Pristina's suburb of Kosovo Polje, hit the sleepy Yugoslav public scene in the early 1980s. It would have enormous impact on Serbian, Yugoslav, and ultimately international politics. But while effectively sealing the Serbian position on Kosovo for the decade and setting the stage for the conflict today, the one thing it did not achieve was any improvement for its own constituency, the manipulated, abused, and forgotten Kosovo Serbs.
 
That is because, for Milosevic, Kosovo has little to do with the problems of the Serbian minority there and everything to do with the political machinations of the politics of Serbia itself. Almost all the rest is fiction, as was even the key moment for Serbian nationalist politics in 1987, when Slobodan Milosevic went down to Kosovo Polje.
 
The Kosovo myth has always been a critical part of the Serbian collective psyche. It represents a collection of historical, quasi-historical, and poetic reminiscences about the Serbian medieval state and uprisings against the Ottoman Empire. The myth is about struggle, and it is rehashed every time Serbia goes to war.
 
From the beginning of the 1980s, the Kosovo Serb movement used a wide range of racist arguments to fuel anti-Albanian sentiment. Miroslav Solevic, a talented folk rebel with a flair for public relations, managed to attract strong support from various corners of Serbian society but could not get recognized by the League of Communists of Serbia. Nationalism was still taboo, and Solevic wasn't getting anywhere. But when then-communist party President Milosevic, 45 at the time, agreed to visit Kosovo in April 1987, Solevic took no chances, deciding to engineer a fight between the mainly Albanian Kosovo police and his own followers.
 
"We asked all those guys who knew how to fight, 200 or 300 of them, to bring with them everything it takes," recalls Solevic, now out of active politics. This included steel rods and even pistols. A pile of stones was assembled by the building where Milosevic was to hold a meeting with Solevic's delegates. The plan, known only by the Kosovo Serb leadership, was to use the stones to provoke a response by the Albanian police. This would amount to a "beating of the innocents," which would force Milosevic to take sides.
 
No one could have predicted the success of the plan or the ramifications. After the police intervened, the meeting inside the building was interrupted, and Milosevic was challenged to go out to see what had happened. Followed by cameras, he walked into the electrified crowd. An old man told him that the "separatist police had just beaten women and children."
 
"No one should dare to beat you!" Milosevic declared. Minutes later, now addressing the crowd from a building, he exclaimed that there was "no need for the police to keep order. You do it yourself!"
 
Nationalism was unleashed. Milosevic came to Kosovo Polje as a gray party leader and left a Serbian tsar. The key was not only the event at Kosovo Polje itself but the extensive television coverage of it, drummed into audiences repeatedly over the three state channels.
 
Milosevic realized quickly the power of manipulating (and televising) Solevic's increasingly aggressive but disciplined crowd. He went on to overthrow the confused leaders of Serbia, Montenegro, and Vojvodina, thus destroying the delicate balance of power in Yugoslavia. But far more than those power struggles, the conquering of Kosovo was a blatantly chauvinist affair. Milosevic mounted an anti-Albanian media campaign that psychologically tore apart Yugoslavia, laying bare the worst of nationalist hatreds. He launched direct attacks on Albanians, even arresting moderate Albanian communist leader Azem Vllasi. There was no doubt Milosevic wanted to humiliate the Albanians.
 
He is still doing so today. The recent violence in Kosovo has been a political boon, mobilizing public support and pulling any straying politicians into line. With just a few exceptions, Serbian politicians support Milosevic's policy on Kosovo, with some even going further and openly advocating expelling Albanians from the province. His recent appointment to the post of deputy prime minister of extreme-nationalist Vojislav Seselj--also leader of a paramilitary group notorious for ethnic cleansing in Croatia and Bosnia--and his calling of a referendum on international mediation in Kosovo indicate his constant readiness to play patriotic games and rouse extremism over Kosovo.
 
A short war would in fact help Milosevic to discipline Montenegro and Republika Srpska. New leaders in both places have exploited international support to break free from Milosevic, but both operate on the basis of tiny and vulnerable majorities. Although the levels of war enthusiasm from the early 1990s will be unattainable for many decades, a televised quickie in the holy land of Kosovo could rouse the Serbian nation as a whole and allow Milosevic to launch yet another "traitor" hunt. The mounting international pressure triggered off by the Drenica massacre might convince him that it is better to hurry up with the war before new sanctions are imposed.
 
The aim of a war would be to partition Kosovo, hardly a new idea. Serbian nationalist writer Dobrica Cosic proposed it a decade ago. In 1996, Aleksandar Despic, president of the influential Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, resurrected the concept in what was believed to be a regime-orchestrated testing of waters: the coal mines would be awarded to Serbia, while hundreds of thousands of Albanians would have to be resettled. Although some Serbian brave-hearts made critical noises, the majority of Serbs did not object.
 
RUGOVA'S PARALLEL PEACE
 
Kosovo opened the decade in violence, just as it may close it. With the chauvinism unleashed by Milosevic, demonstrations in 1989 and 1990 led to the deaths of several Serbian policemen and dozens of Albanian protesters; hundreds of Albanians were arrested. Belgrade deployed 2,000 special police, as well as the armored units and air force of the Yugoslav People's Army. More than 100 leading public enterprises, including the Albanian-language media and publishing houses, were forcibly taken over, and thousands of Albanian workers were fired. On 28 September 1990, the Serbian parliament adopted a constitution that effectively ended Kosovo's autonomy.
 
Milosevic's aim was to pacify the province. In a sense, he was successful, because the demonstrations ceased. But while he took this to mean the end of the Kosovo story, it meant a new beginning for the humiliated Albanians.
 
Albanian politicians in the Serbian executive structures collectively resigned, proclaimed the Republic of Kosovo, and constituted their own parliament. These events mark the beginning of what has become commonly known as the Kosovo Albanian parallel society. As prominent Kosovo Albanian political writer Shkelzen Maliqi points out, the Albanians didn't start building their parallel political, cultural, education, health, and media institutions from scratch, as is sometimes thought. In most cases they just relocated their abolished institutions to new--often improvised and inadequate--venues. For example, school classes were brought into private homes.
 
The Kosovo Albanians began the decade centered on a broad right-wing party. The Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), founded in December 1989 by some of the most prominent and longtime proponents of the local Albanian cause, was the driving force behind what would become the Kosovo Albanians' independence movement.
 
In September 1991, the LDK organized a referendum on independence for the "Republic of Kosovo," which unsurprisingly won roughly 90 percent support. General elections followed in May of 1992. The 130 parliamentary deputies would never hold a session, though various committees were active. The government, as an effectively parallel state, was mandated to operate from abroad, with its Prime Minister Bujar Bukoshi living in Germany and coordinating funds raised to support the parallel institutions. Within Kosovo, power resided in the hands of President Ibrahim Rugova, the LDK leader elected with 76 percent of the vote.
 
Rugova was a low-profile literature historian who, malicious critics are keen to recall, used to receive journalists in his modest Pristina flat unshaven and in tattered socks. But he quickly rose to become a big-time political player. Besides the clear credentials as one of the keenest proponents of independence, the key to his success was his excellent instinct for making international--especially American--connections, starting off wisely with members of the U.S. Congress who represented districts with strong Albanian constituencies. At the same time, he made sure to observe the rules of the Kosovo Albanian patriarchal society and build his party infrastructure by winning the trust of the heads of Kosovo Albanian families.
 
Rugova had one key defining policy, for which he has been both widely praised and increasingly criticized: his articulation of and determined adherence to a strategy of nonviolence. The aim is to gain independence through the support of the West by displaying moderation and patience, retaining high moral standards, and--not incidentally--counting on the hugely disproportionate birth rates between Albanians and Serbs (16-to-1) to ensure that Belgrade will inevitably lose the all-important demographic war.
 
With several other conflicts in Yugoslavia brewing in the early 1990s, the Serbian military might looked unbeatable, and nonviolence was the obvious choice for an extremely vulnerable, unarmed community such as the Kosovo Albanians. Rugova exuded a quiet confidence in reaching his goal, arguing that it would be better to wait a decade and achieve it peacefully than try to rush and risk hundreds of thousands of lives. This was a straightforward position, and it distinguished him from many independence-minded Balkan leaders.
 
Indeed, it was mostly thanks to him that a policy born out of powerlessness was powerfully articulated and wrapped in very acceptable, modern packaging. Adopting the grand manners of a head of a state, which often looked surreal in the context of Kosovo's grim reality, Rugova miraculously retained the air of a dissident, an almost Havel-like intellectual. Today's picture of the smartly dressed president driven in a limousine and surrounded by bodyguards is undercut by the signature scarf around his neck and the image of the phlegmatic professor it projects.
 
Nevertheless, according to many Albanians, Rugova went too far in striking fear into the Albanian's hearts. "Before Krajina was liberated, Rugova terrorized the Albanians psychologically," says Bardhyl Mahmuti, the Geneva-based LPK representative who supports the Kosovo Liberation Army, referring to the territory in Croatia from which Serbs were expelled in summer 1995. "[Rugova would say] 'Serbia is strong, strong, strong!' Then we saw how in a few days Croatia destroyed those who even threatened to bomb Zagreb."
 
As a figure advocating peaceful policies and in firm control of his population, Rugova was seen as an ideal partner by the West. He was never promised support for independence but did receive frequent, often high-profile encouragement for his nonviolent methods, most notably President George Bush's Christmas 1992 warning to Serbia that the United States would use air strikes if faced by ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. The fact that Rugova was frequently welcomed in the Western capitals, most of all in Washington, strengthened his standing at home and helped to further persuade Albanians that he would eventually win them the prize of independence.
 
Milosevic was happy with Rugova too. Rugova's activities in the "cradle of Serbian nationhood" could have easily gotten him 20 years in prison under Serbian laws for anti-state activity, endangering public security, and secessionism. But while most of Milosevic's main political opponents have spent some time in jail, been severely beaten by the police, or sued by the state, Rugova has never been personally touched by the repressive instruments of his regime. Veton Surroi, the editor of Koha Ditore, explains this by what he calls "an equilibrium of interests." Milosevic tolerated Rugova as long as he kept the Albanians quiet, which provided Rugova with the space for what he believed would be a steady if slow advancement of the cause of Albanian independence.
 
'TO SEEK FREEDOM ACTIVELY'
 
Ibrahim Rugova's strategy of peace and patience offered little to those Albanians who continued to suffer the daily indignities of life in Kosovo. That frustration and the crucial influence of an insistent diaspora strained the general political consensus. The parallel government's Information Minister Xhafer Shatri, who operates from Geneva, says the Kosovo Albanian government always knew a radicalization was coming. "Hardly a day passed when groups of people wouldn't call us to say that what we were doing was an illusion, was stupid," he says.
 
The government split with Rugova shortly after the great powers failed to address the Kosovo issue at the Bosnia peace negotiations at Dayton in November 1995. Rugova's great strength was supposed to be access to Western governments, but he--and thus the Kosovo Albanians--had failed to win an invitation to the biggest Balkan talks of the decade.
 
True, the so-called outer wall of sanctions, which excludes Serbia and Montenegro from international financial institutions, was understood to be dependent on respect for human rights in Kosovo, as well as on implementation of the accords within Bosnia. But the agreement demonstrated to the Albanians that they would have to develop a more dynamic strategy if they wanted to press the question of Kosovo's status. Others believed it justified violence. "The media reported many times that the Bosnian Serb terrorist paramilitary units committed crimes. Those forces, however, became a legal and legitimate army at Dayton," argues the LPK representative Mahmuti.
 
"The government advocated that we shouldn't only be proclaiming an independent Kosovo, but that our institutions should become active," says the parallel government's Prime Minister Bukoshi, in Bonn. "If the Lithuanian parliament was able to gather in front of the Russian tanks, then why couldn't we hold our parliamentary sessions in Kosovo? In other words, to achieve freedom actively, because it never comes otherwise."
 
The Bukoshi-Rugova rivalry touched the most delicate subject, as it is the prime minister who controls the international funds for the parallel institutions. But there was no open suggestion of a violent option within the Kosovo Albanian establishment. The primary ideas were various forms of non-cooperation with the Serbian authorities, such as not paying Yugoslav taxes or communicating with Serbian police. "Don't pay the electricity bill. It doesn't matter if they cut you off," says Shatri. "For centuries we lived without electricity. We could live for a few more years without it."
 
Within Kosovo, Rugova's most pronounced opponent was Adem Demaqi, leader of the People's Party of Kosovo (PKK), the second largest party after the LDK. An unflinching and controversial figure who had spent 24 years in prison, Demaqi was a strong critic of the Albanians' parallel political system, which he described as a "ridiculous caricature of democracy," calling instead for the formation of a broad Albanian front.
 
But it was the students who really took up the concept of active nonviolence. Their march on 1 October 1997 drew 20,000; it called for the opening of the educational institutions but was based on criticism of the president. "Rugova's policy blocks the energy of the people and if you block that energy, their anger is going to explode, says Albin Kurti, the students' union representative. "He is just looking toward the international community. But he should do it the other way around. He should organize the Albanian population here and demonstrate, and then the international community would be naturally attracted to deal with the problem of Kosovo."
 
Rugova misplayed his hand then, refusing to support what were the first Albanian demonstrations in Pristina in five years. This caused a serious division within the leadership of the ruling LDK. Bukoshi's allies expressed their extreme frustration: the students' rally was exactly the kind of activation of Albanian institutions the prime minister had envisaged.
 
Meanwhile, the more than half a million Kosovo Albanians in Western Europe and thousands in the United States have exerted strong influence on the process of radicalization. The Diaspora has been the crucial source of financial support for the Albanian parallel structures, without which it would have been impossible to maintain a nonviolent approach. But as is often the case with exiles, they have sought a more engaged opposition to the oppressor at home.
 
Facing considerable pressure from outside Kosovo, from the students on the streets, and from within his own party, Rugova struck back by forcing through presidential and parliamentary elections on 22 March. The stated aim was to ensure a fresh legitimacy for the leadership in the event of any negotiations with Belgrade. But many in Kosovo saw it as a mechanism to clear out the "radicals" and reconfirm the president's unchallenged position.
 
Almost all other ethnic-Albanian political parties, joined by the students, boycotted the vote. In a speech announcing her withdrawal from the race for the presidency, the Social Democratic Party's Luleta Pula-Beqiri argued that it was "morally unacceptable to participate ... until the Serbian military and police withdraw from Drenica." Rexhep Qosja, a leading Kosovo Albanian intellectual, called elections in such circumstances "Rugova's treason." The PKK's Demaqi, the other potential candidate, also declined to take part: "I am convinced that Rugova loves to be president, so let him be," he remarked.
 
In the event, sole candidate Rugova not only won the vote but drew an 80 percent turnout. One explanation for this is LDK's links to the family networks throughout rural Kosovo, which ensures control over the most powerful means of communication, namely word of mouth. But it is also the case that whatever the internal disputes, Rugova remains the key figure and is especially valued for what he does best--representing Albanians on the international level. As Bukoshi notes, "the Kosovo political scene is pluralistic ... but when it comes to the status of Kosovo, with just a few exceptions, all forces are for independence."
 
VIOLENCE ENGAGED
 
The first public appearance was dramatic and carefully staged: three armed men in camouflage uniforms and black balaklavas arrived suddenly at a funeral of an Albanian killed in a gunfight with Serbian police. "We are the Kosovo Liberation Army [UCK], the true representatives of the Kosovo struggle," they declared to enthusiastic shouts from the crowd of 15,000. The Albanian movement had "officially" gone violent.
 
That episode, from 28 November 1997, is taken as the first direct confirmation of an armed Albanian grouping, rumored for several years to be in formation and growing logically out of the decade-long independence struggle. Surroi, a founder of the opposition PKK, argues that the failure of the LDK to build a dynamic nonviolent movement "led to a piling up of problems and finally to the creation of the UCK. ... These small guerrilla groups are now growing into a larger guerrilla movement."
 
Rugova consistently denied the UCK's existence, if anything arguing that it is a Serbian setup to justify a crackdown. In fact, the organization was founded in 1993 by a group of activists, most of whom were linked to the LPK, with the aim of attacking Serbian institutions in Kosovo. The first notable action was the ambush of a Serbian police vehicle in May 1993, in which two policemen were killed and five wounded. In January 1997, Serbian authorities arrested 61 Albanians, claiming it had struck at the "core of Albanian terrorism."
 
But in September 1997, the UCK staged 12 simultaneous raids on police premises throughout the province. By November 1997, the UCK was believed to have been associated with about 40 actions. This past winter harassment by the UCK had caused Serbian police to withdraw from Drenica, leading Albanians to refer to a "liberated territory" controlled by the UCK. The Serbian police responded with raids on UCK strongholds in early March, in which many women and children were killed. Again, the police claimed to have destroyed the UCK leadership. But in reality it has only fostered massively increased support, both in terms of recruits and cash.
 
Little is known about the military structure or troop strength of the organization, which may be better described as a loose network of militias rather than an army. It grew out of a debate over whether the government should set up defense and interior ministries. While established Kosovo Albanian figures wanted ministries without armed forces, the LPK and other exile or underground forces--including those in Serbian prisons--advocated building an army. The LDK's Shatri notes that since 1992, Albanians have regularly contacted Kosovo Albanian government offices in Western Europe demanding that an armed force be formed.
 
"We believed that if the balance of power was so unfavorable for the Albanians, something should be done to change it," says the LPK's Mahmuti. "The LDK was categorically against. But we were not adventurers. We wanted to prepare ourselves." The LPK itself split, however, over whether an army should be built through actions or established first and then activated. Most supported the former, while a group favoring the latter approach established a splinter party, the National Movement for the Liberation of Kosovo (LNCK). The split led to a series of arrests of LPK and LNCK members shortly after the UCK had been formed, undermining the radical wing of the Albanian movement.
 
The LPK has had little problem finding like-minded people. It runs its fund in Germany and Switzerland. "We don't say publicly that the money is intended for the UCK," explains Mahmuti. "We say that we send money to areas that Serbia does not control, and it is up to people there to decide what they will buy, flour or weapons. But nobody is dying of hunger in Kosovo. They are dying because they don't have enough weapons." Mahmuti says a Kalashnikov rifle can be readily purchased for 70 German marks from sources in Serbia. As for Albania, "the people themselves are well-armed. If the government and the parties don't want to help us, the people have arms, and you can buy as many as you want," he says.
 
Reacting to the current crisis, Albanians abroad are providing substantial support. A single fund-raising evening in the United States reportedly can raise up to $200,000. Bukoshi's government has received substantial donations for its Drenica fund, some of it no doubt because people thought the money would be channeled to the UCK. The UCK has publicly called on his government to give it some of these funds, which the government says it has refused to do.
 
"We have tried to channel all of the money, to have it all going through the government, because with all that money, people could start anything," says Information Minister Shatri. There is regular speculation in Albanian circles about the relationship between the UCK and the government, including Prime Minister Bukoshi himself. But in late March, Mujo Rugova, minister for the diaspora, resigned because of the government's reluctance to finance the UCK. "We don't have a mandate to start a war," Shatri insists.
 
But the UCK does have a plan for the liberation of Kosovo, says Mahmuti, and fast-moving developments on the ground give the appearance of two sides squaring for a conflict that could erupt at any moment. According to Mahmuti, by mid-April the regions of Djakovica, Decani, Pec (near the mountainous border with Albania), and Drenica were evacuated of pregnant women, children, and the elderly. The men, Mahmuti says, (and reportedly even some women) are being trained by the UCK. According to the Serbian Resistance Movement-Democratic Movement, Serbs in the Decani region are leaving because of "Albanian terrorists." The Yugoslav army has shelled Albanian border areas, claiming to have halted incursions by hundreds of UCK troops.
 
If real conflict does erupt, the borders with Albania and Macedonia will be "erased," says Mahmuti, and the UCK will hold the countryside. Northern cities of Pristina, Podujevo, and Mitrovica, which Albanians would not be able to hold, will only be contested with symbolic resistance. The aim would be to attract heavy Yugoslav barrages and thus win strong international sympathy, as the Croats did in Vukovar.
 
Much of this talk may be bravado to attract international attention and make Milosevic think twice before he taking his next move. Yet it also coincides quite precisely with his own interests: an aggressive Albanian movement seeking to join with Albania and parts of Macedonia in the context of a partition of Kosovo--exactly what he needs to keep Serbian nationalism on the boil and himself in power.
 
This reality signals the pathos in the Albanian position. Over nearly a decade of struggle, the movement distinguished itself from so many other national groupings in the Balkans and beyond by enduring its hardships with patience and firmly holding onto a strategy of peace. Yet it had all but nothing to show for its efforts and risked further social erosion, especially through emigration.
 
Now a part of the movement has taken up violence, and the entire political struggle has become engaged in it, directly or not.
 
"U-C-K! Ru-go-va! U-C-K! Ru-go-va!" At a pro-Kosovo rally in Bonn just after the Drenica massacre, the crowd's chant created a seemingly contradictory link between the UCK and the president. The crowd was obviously calling for a closing of the ranks. Faced with the risk of war, the distinctions between the parties, and even violent and nonviolent approaches, become less relevant.
 
It may never be clear how much the radicalization is in fact being steered by the establishment--including any of the top leaders--to improve their own position as the moderate alternative. Indeed, Albanians themselves are hardly clear where, for example, the money trails are actually leading--and how they want them to be drawn. In any event, as the UCK expands, it is inevitably beginning to rely on the only other available institutions--those of Rugova and the LDK, as well as the rural-based family structures.
 
In rural Kosovo, LDK activists spontaneously behave like spokesmen of the UCK. "Of course the LDK activists are all UCK sympathizers," explains Bukoshi. "All of them have triumphed in the actions of the UCK, especially the LDK activists." After so many years of repression, people in general, he says, naturally take encouragement from the violent actions. And while the activities of the UCK may have narrowed the maneuvering space within the national movement for him and other Albanian politicians, they have also definitely strengthened Albanians' negotiating position.
 
Thus at the very moment that war may erupt, the possibility of talks are at least being discussed. And the moment when Kosovo Albanian politics are at their most fraught and internally divided, they have also never been more closely aligned.
 
At the end of March, Rugova announced his team of advisers for negotiations with Belgrade, which included some of his most prominent critics. Obviously he wanted to demonstrate Albanian unity in the aftermath of the Drenica massacre. By presenting his critics with an offer they could not refuse, Rugova is also spreading the burden of painful future decisions over the whole political spectrum.
 
If the Contact Group of Western powers plus Russia manages to corner Milosevic into negotiating seriously with the Albanians, it will also demand that Rugova abandon the concept of independence. On 6 April, Rugova sent a signal that he would be willing to settle for less than independence by announcing that his four-member negotiating team would include the editor Surroi, seen as a moderate by the international community; long-time associate Fehmi Agani, a highly regarded and skillful realist; and the independent and former Titoist Bakalli, who advocates Kosovo's becoming a third republic within Yugoslavia. On 17 April, the group paid a visit to President Fatos Nano in Tirana, after which Agani said that Tirana does not demand altering the international borders between Yugoslavia and Albania but "accepts the concept according to which Kosovo would become an equal unit" of Yugoslavia.
 
Whatever the reason, the Kosovo Albanians have found their long-lost self-confidence. The radicals credit the UCK. The moderates think the awakening is the result of a more general maturing of the Albanians. And there is a chance to achieve positive change.
 
Yet at the very moment when they are showing this new-found political strength, they face a risk: the destruction of so much of their society through a one-sided war between a bitter army and an small and untrained militia lacking any concrete ally. If the Contact Group fails, events on the ground will continue their highly dangerous dynamic. Kosovo Albanian politicians maintain that whether war breaks out in Kosovo depends entirely on Milosevic. They differ on how big a price the Albanians would have to pay. But they all insist that their sheer numbers, their attachment to the land, their morale, and their commitment to sacrifice for the goal of independence will all ensure that they are the ultimate winners.
 
But war and partition leave Milosevic a winner too, and day by day, the real losses are already beginning to mount. As the Yugolav army launched attacks in late April on UCK fighters on the Albanian border, Albania placed its forces on alert, and the politics of nonviolence slipped further away.
 
 
*Tihomir Loza is a journalist from Sarajevo and formerly associate editor of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting's magazine, WarReport. Anthony Borden is executive director of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, and former editor of WarReport and Transitions.
 
Click here for the Institute of War & Peace Reporting

Return to Global Beat Home Page

Nuclear Watch | Balkan Conflicts | East Asian Security |

EU Integration & Enlargement | Middle East | NATO Expansion |

Nuclear Weapons and Proliferation | South Asian Security |

U.S. Defense Policy | Publications | Events |

Experts Directory | Links Directory |

About the GRN |