National Post - April 19, 1999
NATO is getting cosy with a ragtag guerrilla force Reports of KLA unconfirmed: Alliance makes rebels out to be a fighting machine
Isabel Vincent National Post
Last week, at one of the daily NATO press briefings in Brussels, the alliance's spokesman Jamie Shea noted that the Kosovo Liberation Army, the rebel force that is fighting for the independence of the troubled southern province of Serbia, was getting stronger.
"Like a phoenix that rises from the ashes, it [the KLA] will be able to conduct a number of attacks," he said, adding that the combination of NATO air strikes and attacks by members of the rebel group would have a vice effect on the Serb armed forces and Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president. The longer Mr. Milosevic resists complying with NATO demands, the more the vice will tighten, he noted.
On the same day, at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, William Cohen, the U.S. secretary of defence, described the KLA as resurgent. As if to illustrate NATO's and Mr. Cohen's statements, Kosovapress, the official news organization of Kosovo's provisional government run by the KLA, reported that over the weekend the KLA had made some "decisive" strikes against the Serb security forces in Kosovo.
According to Kosovapress, the KLA overtook one unit of the 124th Brigade of the Serbian army at Rahovec and killed five Serbian soldiers on Saturday. In another attack on Friday in Vushtrri, Kosovapress reported another KLA victory, claiming the rebels "liquidated" a Serb police patrol in the region, killing five Serb police officers.
Of course, the press reports and the statements by U.S. and NATO officials about the strength of the KLA are impossible to confirm in the absence of independent journalists in Kosovo.
In fact, just about the only credible information we have about the KLA is that they are lightly armed and poorly trained. But as NATO air strikes fail to have their desired effect in bringing President Milosevic to his knees, the KLA is gaining greater legitimacy in the eyes of the international community.
In their desire to appear on the side of morality and justice, the NATO allies are transforming what in reality is a ragtag guerrilla force, dependent on the drug trade and outside donations for its financing, into a "phoenix" and a well-organized fighting machine, capable of taking on the Yugoslav army. In the process, they are legitimizing their own intervention in what started out as an internal civil conflict, and now threatens to escalate into a geopolitical disaster.
Even though NATO officials have said that they are still reluctant to become the "air force for the KLA," their increasingly cosy relationship with the guerrilla force seems to suggest otherwise.
Perhaps NATO is gradually preparing the public for the day when its members decide to send ground troops to Kosovo. Those troops will inevitably find themselves fighting alongside the KLA, and therefore it is in NATO's interests to portray these guerrillas as noble warriors.
Already, the hundreds of diaspora Kosovar Albanians who have volunteered to fight alongside the rebels in Kosovo seem to recall the Spanish Civil War, when idealistic young people, known as internacionalistas, from around the world, volunteered to fight in Spain against General Francisco Franco's fascist forces.
Moved by the commitment of Kosovar Albanians to fight for an independent homeland, at least one U.S. senator has suggested that Washington commit funds to the rebel group to strengthen their position against the Serbs. The Canadian government says it no longer considers the KLA a terrorist organization, even though the U.S. State Department and the CIA still classify them as terrorists.
Unconfirmed reports on the weekend suggested that multi-billionaire George Soros and his Open Society Foundation, which supports nascent democratic movements in the former Eastern bloc, were giving financial assistance to the KLA. In the past, the KLA has directly benefited from diplomatic negotiations conducted hundreds of kilometres outside Kosovo. Since October, 1998, when NATO came close to launching air strikes against Yugoslavia, the KLA rebels believed that they had the world's most powerful military alliance on their side. Emboldened by NATO's threat of air strikes against President Milosevic, the KLA reclaimed territory abandoned by Serb security forces in Kosovo and mounted a series of small attacks in the region late last year. At that time, American intelligence reported that the rebels were building up arms and improving their training.
During the Rambouillet negotiations earlier this year, the rebels appeared at least conciliatory while Mr. Milosevic refused even to show up at the royal hunting lodge outside Paris where the talks were held. In his final meeting with U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke, two days before NATO air strikes began against Yugoslavia, President Milosevic accused the Americans of "sitting at the Albanian side of the table at Rambouillet," according to a recent report in The New York Times.
On that count, at least, Mr. Milosevic appears to be right. For in trying to justify their actions against Yugoslavia, both the U.S. and NATO appear to be getting closer and closer to the KLA.
While U.S. President Bill Clinton noted in an address to American newspaper editors last week that the U.S. administration does not support full independence for Kosovo (the chief demand of the KLA rebels), his words told a different story.
In his speech, President Clinton made what many on both sides of the conflict would have viewed as politically charged references to Kosova, the ethnic Albanian name for the Serbian province, which is known as Kosovo in Serb. If any NATO or U.S. officials had any hopes of still forcing Mr. Milosevic to the bargaining table, they might have been instantly dashed the moment Mr. Clinton began referring publicly to Kosovo as an independent state, and when the international community began to refer to the KLA as its ally.