The offices of the guerrilla army battling Yugoslav forces in Kosovo are in just another decrepit apartment building among thousands in this dilapidated capital.
The parking lot is a mud hole. Inside, the bare-walled rooms are largely empty except for a few battered tables and a personal computer or two. Young toughs who may or may not be guerrillas slouch in dingy hallways, smoking and glaring at strangers.
The political leaders, who seem to take turns sharing one navy blue polyester suit, trundle around Tirana’s crumbling streets in a dusty Mercedes, running late for appointments.
Yet if operations at the Kosovo Liberation Army’s Tirana offices seem almost comically crude, the secretive guerrilla force remains dead serious about its central role in any peace settlement in Kosovo–a role that includes, if necessary, the part of spoiler.
A recent case in point: the Group of Eight (G-8) peace plan, which remains the only working blueprint for ending the violence in Kosovo.
The Western powers, Japan and Russia hammered out the initiative a week ago without consulting the KLA, and they ignored the guerrillas’ key demand for the complete independence of Kosovo from Yugoslavia.
KLA spokesmen angrily insist –and most regional analysts and diplomats agree–that the G-8 proposal is doomed to failure, even as an interim measure, without the approval of one of the most hapless, disorganized guerrilla movements in the world.
“This isn’t a matter of our guns, it’s a matter of political credibility,” said KLA spokesman Visar Reka. “Go into Kosovo and ask people who they believe in. It’s us. You simply can’t have peace in this region without consulting us.”
It isn’t surprising, perhaps, that such tough talk comes at a time when the KLA is locked in a particularly nasty phase of a long power struggle against the guerrillas’ only political rival in Kosovo, the moderate leader Ibrahim Rugova, who was allowed to leave Yugoslavia recently and is now being feted by the West.
Rugova, the leader of the ethnic Albanian shadow government under Serb rule and a Gandhian figure embraced by the United States and its NATO allies, has been bluntly attacked by the KLA for allegedly making ambiguous, conciliatory gestures to Belgrade, possibly while under house arrest.
“He has no mandate to negotiate for Kosovars anymore,” said Reka. “He is a sad and embarrassing case, really.”
Indeed, many analysts question the West’s courtship of Rugova as a possible point man in any peace talks, especially as the KLA matures as a military power and begins scoring modest battlefield successes in Kosovo. In recent days, reports from the province indicate that the guerrillas are hitting back at Serb forces on at least two fronts, one north of the provincial capital of Pristina and another near the Albanian frontier, NATO sources say.
“Any peace deal that’s struck without the serious participation of the KLA is a non-starter,” said Zoran Kusovac, a Balkans military expert who writes for Jane’s Intelligence Review. “Rugova’s pacifist resistance against the Serbs didn’t work after the NATO bombing started. Given the horrors that have gone on there since, they’re discredited.
“The KLA, on the other hand, has won its power through the trenches,” Kusovac said. “They won’t give that up. It’s as simple as that.”
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Not that a guerrilla force that still drills with wooden sticks– there aren’t enough rifles to go around–would present a physical threat to a multinational peacekeeping force in Kosovo, Kusovac said.
“It’s more a question of stability,” he said. “If you can’t bring them into the peace process, then you have thousands of guys still crossing borders (with Albania), running around with guns. The problems will not stop.”
To assert its hand as the central negotiator for the Kosovars, the KLA last month formed its own provisional government, cold-shouldering the 9-year-old administration of Rugova’s party, the Albanian Democratic League of Kosovo.
KLA sources claim that their own prime minister, a fighter-turned-politician named Hashim Thaci, is holed up in a bunker somewhere in Albania “eating bread once a day and listening to bombs go off” while Rugova is wined and dined by Western powers. In an effort to portray itself as the legitimate Kosovar government-in-waiting, the KLA has reserved its deputy prime minister post for Rugova’s party.
The older party, known by its Albanian initials LDK, has icily declined.
Such fractiousness, of course, is the story of the Balkans in miniature, and has played into Serb hands by sowing dissension among the Albanian Kosovars. By the same token, experts warn, the West is making the same mistake by snubbing the KLA in its diplomatic drives.
“They’re just setting a bomb ticking,” said Musa Ulqini, Albania’s minister of information. “It’s very, very harmful because you end up focusing on separating the Kosovar factions and this helps no one but the Serbs. You must include the KLA in all negotiations.”
But the U.S. and its NATO allies seem to have painted themselves into a diplomatic corner. The West cannot appear to be taking the side of the most militant wing of Kosovar resistance, NATO sources say, while trying to bomb Kosovo back into a state of peace.
Moreover, the alliance is jittery about the Marxist pedigree of some KLA leaders, and opposes their calls for full independence for the troubled province, preferring autonomy under Yugoslav rule.
“We’re not cutting anyone out of the peace bargains,” maintained a State Department official familiar with the Balkans. He noted that the U.S. sent a delegation to the KLA in Albania recently to reassure the guerrillas that their interests were being looked after.
Asked about the KLA’s response, and about the lack of Kosovar input in the recent G-8 accord, the official refused to comment.
Regardless of whether the ragtag army has the power to sabotage any peace deals drafted by the big powers, their role in any settlement in Kosovo has been immensely complicated.
The KLA’s promise to disarm as agreed under the collapsed Rambouillet agreement, for example, has been buried under the bodies of thousands of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
And the longer the fighting goes on, the more the guerrillas gain strength–and diplomatic leverage–from the festering anti-Serb sentiment among brutalized Albanian Kosovars.
The KLA’s ranks already have swollen far beyond their capacity to arm and train soldiers. Hundreds of raw recruits are still headed to the remote northern Albanian training camps each day, if only to undergo a few hours of marching drill each morning, according to Western diplomats in Albania. Clandestine military indoctrination even goes on in refugee camps in Tirana.
“As a disciplined fighting force, they have a long way to go even now,” said military analyst Kusovac, who noted that the fighters are still taking heavy casualties. “No commander in his right mind would want to command them without 60 more good days of rifle training. But at this stage in the Kosovo tragedy, time’s on their side, and they know it, and the West would be crazy to deny it.”
The KLA, of course, could not agree more.
“The Albanians have decided: Never, never, never again will we be without protection,” said guerrilla spokesman Reka. “But once all the Serbs–to the last armed man–leave Kosovo and NATO is deployed, of course we will not need all 60,000 of our people.”
Numerical exaggerations aside, most observers in this sad, bloodied region do not argue with the swagger in that statement.
Whoever brokers peace in Kosovo, they say, will no doubt have to climb the muddy steps of the KLA headquarters in Tirana, and knock on the unmarked door guarding all those empty rooms filled with angry men.