ETHNIC ALBANIANS MAKE BID FOR SERB TERRITORY
By Tom Hundley
Tribune Foreign Correspondent
MUHOVC, Yugoslavia -- In the village he is known as Plaku. It means old
man. He is 61, but looks older.
His face is all furrows and angles framed by an elegant white handlebar
mustache. He wears a black commando beret that gives him the look of a
dapper professor. For years he served as secretary of the science faculty
at
Kosovo's Pristina University.
On March 7, 1999, with the help of two of his sons, he shot dead three
Serb
police officers.
The incident was a milestone in the grim escalation of conflict between
Kosovo's Serbs and Albanians that culminated in NATO's air war against
Yugoslavia. Slobodan Milosevic has been toppled from power, and now the
Serbs are all but gone from Kosovo. But for Plaku the war goes on.
Plaku is a member of the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and
Bujanovac, the UCPMB, an offshoot of the Kosovo Liberation Army that is
staging a persistent guerrilla war in the Presevo Valley, just across Kosovo's
borders in Serbia proper. Much of the fighting takes place at night and
within
sniper range of U.S. troops. If left unchecked, this little war could escalate
into the next major Balkan headache, and the first for President Bush.
"We've already been fired at," said Brig. Gen. Kenneth Quinlan, commander
of the 5,500 U.S. troops in Kosovo. "The Presevo Valley is a flash point
for
the Balkans. It is my main effort, it is KFOR's main effort ... to keep
this from
becoming the lighting-rod issue that plunges the region back into violence."
Plaku and half a dozen other UCPMB fighters, including the local
commander, Muhamet Xhemajli, warm themselves around a wood-burning
stove in their headquarters in the village of Muhovc.
Most of them are wearing camouflage fatigues with KLA insignia. They have
plenty of guns and ammunition. They all have boots of good quality.
Many of the UCPMB's guerrillas are KLA veterans in their 20s and 30s who
never laid down their arms after the Kosovo war. Others are recruits from
local villages. One knowledgeable civilian source estimates a fighting
force of
500 to 800 men. The Serbs say it's more like 2,000 to 3,000 men.
Commander Xhemajli enjoys the guessing game; he won't say how many
men.
Plaku describes himself as the unit's "moral and political" officer. His
smile is
grandfatherly and his eyes twinkle as he explains why UCPMB took up arms
one year ago.
"The essence of our existence is preventing what happened at Racak. We
don't want that repeated," he said. Racak is the village in Kosovo where,
on
Jan. 15, 1999, Serb police massacred 45 Albanians in retaliation for the
killing of two Serb police. The atrocity formed the basis of Milosevic's
indictment for war crimes by The Hague tribunal.
The guerrillas' stronghold is the so-called ground safety zone, or GSZ,
a
3-mile-wide strip that separates the Yugoslav army from KFOR, the NATO
peacekeepers in Kosovo. It is dotted with ethnic Albanian villages in which
paved roads are scarce and electricity is minimal. The population is about
70,000, but many of the women and children left the villages early last
year
after two Albanian woodcutters were killed by Serb police and the fighting
began to escalate. Most have taken shelter with relatives on the Kosovo
side
of the border.
"Our purpose is to defend the people who remain and create conditions for
those who left to come back," said Plaku.
"Although the international community considers this place a DMZ, they
were
not able to defend the people here from the Serbs. If we were not here,
the
same thing that happened in Kosovo would happen here. You know what the
Serbs did during the war--they are the same people," he said.
For most of the local population, this is a fairly persuasive logic. Even
with
Milosevic gone and a new, more democratic government in place, there is
no
trust for the Serbs.
"We should not forget that Serbia had four wars, and as a product of those
wars there are people who cannot be controlled by any government. Wars
create people who can only sustain themselves by the gun. They cannot go
back to normal jobs and normal lives," said Plaku.
Those words would seem to apply equally to the men on the Albanian side.
Certainly they are an apt description of Commander Xhemajli. He is a hard,
muscular man of 40 years with a thick black beard and fists covered with
tattoos. As a member of the KLA, he fought the Serbs in Kosovo.
In that war, NATO was his ally. In this war they are not his enemy, not
yet,
but they have become a hindrance.
The border between Kosovo and the GSZ is patrolled by U.S. and Russian
troops. In recent weeks they have been clamping down on cross-border
traffic, making it difficult to smuggle weapons. They also have been blowing
up some of the mountain trails used by smugglers and lighting up the night
with
flares to discourage the guerrillas' movement.
"Our role is to make it very difficult for them to operate," said Gen. Quinlan.
Xhemajli concedes that the Americans are doing a good job sealing the
border but says this has not cut into his weapons supply.
"We buy our weapons from Serbia, from generals who need money," he said.
What bothers Xhemajli more is the way the Americans have been arresting
members of his army in Kosovo. In recent months, U.S. soldiers have picked
up about 110 suspected members of the guerrilla group. They are holding
about 60, including Xhemajli's brother, in the stockade at Camp Bondsteel,
the main U.S. base in Kosovo. "We can arrest, too, you know," Xhemajli
said. "It's not hard to capture an American or a Russian, but we don't
do
that."
The UCPMB's overall political goal is to detach their little piece of territory
from Serbia and attach it to Kosovo. There appears to be very limited
support for this among Kosovo Albanians. There is no support at all within
the international community.
The Kosovo Albanian leadership "understands that this is hurting them with
us," said a senior Western diplomat in Kosovo.
Xhemajli is not worried. He knows that Western diplomats said the same
about the KLA when it began attacking Serb police in 1998. A year later
NATO found itself in its first shooting war, with the KLA calling in targets
for
NATO warplanes.
Even with no international backing, Xhemajli believes the UCPMB can
achieve its objective. How? "With guns," he said.
In the Presevo valley there is an oversupply of men with guns. Every hamlet
has its armed guards and checkpoints. Along the ridgelines in the hills
overlooking Serb positions, Albanians have dug trenches and built bunkers.
They have Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, even anti-tank
missiles.
Light skirmishing occurs almost every day.
According to Serbian figures, there were 399 attacks on police between
Jan.
1 and Dec. 15 last year. This resulted in the deaths of 11 policemen, nine
citizens of unspecified ethnic origin and seven Albanian guerrillas.
"They think that if they can provoke a Serb crackdown, the international
community will ride to their rescue," said the diplomat. "But the Serbs
cracked the code early on and didn't rise to the bait."
A few miles from Muhovc, the village of Lucane straddles the border
between the GSZ and Serbia. A light snow is falling, and from his command
post on the Serb side of the village police Capt. Radomir Djeric points
out
two Albanian bunkers about 300 yards away.
"They are openly walking in front of our weapons. They want to provoke
us.
They used to have our answer pretty quickly, but this time there will be
no
attack from us," said Djeric, a burly former soccer player.
Djeric said the Serb police no longer ran patrols through the territory,
even
though they are entitled to under terms of the agreement that ended the
Kosovo war.
"We are honestly trying to avoid violence," he said. He sounded sincere.
If he
was, it indicates the breadth of the political transformation that has
taken
place in Serbia since the collapse of the Milosevic regime.
Col. Milenko Arsenijevic, police commander of the sector, said he could
see
new weapons pouring into Lucane every day. He estimated that there were
now 200 to 300 armed Albanians on the other side of the thin river that
divides the village.
He argues in favor of shrinking the GSZ from its present 5 kilometers (3.1
miles) to 1 kilometer, giving the guerrillas less room to rove.
"This buffer zone was established to prevent clashes between the Yugoslav
Army and KFOR, and in the last year there have been almost no problems,"
he said.
The idea of reducing the size the GSZ has picked up support from some
NATO members, but not the ones who count.
"Why do the Serbs deserve to have the GSZ rolled back? What steps have
they taken to improve the situation?" asked the diplomat. He praised the
restraint the Serb police had shown over the last few months but said
Belgrade still had a long way to go before the international community
could
trust it to deal with an armed ethnic minority.
For the Bush administration, a worst-case scenario would be that the Serbs
revert to form and respond to an Albanian provocation with a Racak-style
retaliation.
"If the Serbs go in and burn villages, the pressure for KFOR to go in and
do
something would grow," said a Western diplomat. If NATO did respond, it
would prove that the hard-liners like Xhemajli and Plaku were right all
along
when they gambled that NATO could again be maneuvered into taking the
Albanians' side.
If NATO did nothing, most Kosovo Albanians probably would see this as
siding with the Serbs. NATO peacekeepers could no longer be assured of
their welcome in Kosovo.
Last month, UCPMB guerrillas opened fire on a joint U.S.-Russian patrol
that was blowing up one of their supply trails into the Presevo valley.
The
Americans and Russians returned fire. There were no casualties.
A few days later, the Americans were back to finish the job of sealing
the
supply route. This time they brought Apache helicopters with them. The
guerrillas stood aside.
U.S. officials--military and civilian--have warned of the "heavy hammer"
that
would come down on anyone foolish enough to mess with American troops.
But Xhemajli and Plaku have listened carefully to America's internal debate
over the last few months. They know the Bush administration is unhappy
with
the hand it has inherited in the Balkans. They also understand the political
uproar that would ensue if American soldiers started dying in the Balkans.
Men like Xhemajli and Plaku might be given to believe that if Americans
start
taking casualties here, they would pack up and go home.