-----Original Message----- From: Michael Perelman <michael at ecst.csuchico.edu> To: pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu <pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu>
>Thanks Yoshi for the reports on the KLA. I just heard Michael Parenti and
>somebody from the international action center discussing Yugoslavia. They
>reported that Soldier of Fortune magazine had an article about the
recruitment
>of mercenaries for the KLA, and that the group, which only recently had a
>handful of members suddenly grew to enormous proportions.
So the anti-bombing rhetoric now moves from attacking the US to attacking the victims of ethnic clensing? The KLA is now being labeled in various posts as a tool of NATO along with deriving from bizarre Stalinist roots.
The KLA is not some bizarro force but a group funded by a broad network of ethnic Albanian emigres; as this DAILY NEWS article describes:
--------------------------------------------- New York Daily News Copyright 1999 Daily News, L.P.
Sunday, February 7, 1999
News
THE BRONX CONNECTION JIM DWYER
'WE ARE getting good," said Hajdari Bajraktari. The men, even the young ones, all seemed to sport razor-crisp gray pompadours and well- cut suits. A pack of cigarettes sat on each table. Late Friday evening, the banquet room at Bruno's Restaurant on E. 58th St. hums with prosperous Albanian-Americans like Bajraktari, most of whom immigrated to New York from Kosovo.
Now Bajraktari was speaking to the prime minister of Albania, Pandeli Majko.
Bajraktari was doing the arithmetic of survival.
"A million Albanians live abroad," said Bajraktari. "If we give just one dollar a day for a year, that's $365 million. We're getting good."
He smiled proudly across the table.
"We can get good guns," said Bajraktari, 42, a former building superintendent who has accumulated a handsome portfolio of apartment houses in the city.
This was not bragging, merely a statement of proven fact. Yesterday outside Paris, talks began on the future of Kosovo, an event that follows a straight line from the refusal of Albanian- Americans to allow their families to be slaughtered by the Serbian police and military.
A campaign that began in the Bronx and Brooklyn has carried a small, smart community of first-generation immigrants to the White House and Capitol Hill, sent millions of dollars in private military and humanitarian aid and has helped bring European leaders to the negotiating table.
After a decade of "quiet diplomacy," Albanian-Americans finally refused to let their families be sacrificed as the price of stability in the Balkans.
Kosovo is a poor southern province in Serbia, where the ethnic Albanian majority had ruled with autonomy from 1974 through 1988, when Belgrade stripped the regional parliament of power. During the Balkan war, the province of Kosovo stood apart, largely because the leader of the ethnic Albanians, Ibrahim Rugova, was an advocate of nonviolence.
Until the last two months or so, Rugova was strongly supported here and by the U.S. State Department. Now, after 2,000 Albanians have been killed, it's clear that principled nonviolence isn't working. All that stood between the ethnic Albanians and the butchery of the Serbian forces were their defenders from the Kosovo Liberation Army.
And the money for the KLA poured out of apartment buildings and pizza parlors and insurance agencies in New York, where 300,000 or so Albanians are settled.
"The KLA is not an organization or a goal that was created just for its own sake," said Majko, at 31 the youngest prime minister in Europe. "The KLA was a consequence of what the Serbs were doing. Protecting children and wives was an obligation."
In a nondescript office, upstairs from an insurance company on Crescent Ave. in Belmont, a part of the Bronx once known as a Little Italy, there are two big folding tables and chairs for meetings, computers to pick up news from the Internet. This is the headquarters of Homeland is Calling, the fund that supplies the KLA.
History shows that New York City is the bank of first choice for resistance fighters around the world. And like the Jews and the Irish earlier this century, the Albanian-Americans were hit hard with war fever when they learned of atrocities at home.
"Meetings, day and night, lots of groups, and everyone was trying to make the difference," said Bajraktari. "We pushed the agenda from all angles diplomatic, in the press, money for humanitarian aid. And money for weapons, to defend our people."
Legally, money can be sent from America to a foreign army, provided that the group has not been designated a "terrorist" organization.
At the Homeland office, where Vehbi Berisha minds the phones, no one takes seriously the idea that the KLA could be labeled "terrorists." Said Berisha: "We have never done anything against the Serbian civilians or youths."
Last spring, though, the American government wanted no part of the KLA, no matter how much they disliked Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian strongman, or his tactics. The State Department did not want to disrupt the peace agreements made in Dayton in 1995, which made no mention of Kosovo.
THE MESSAGE to stay away from the KLA was issued by Robert Gelbart, a special envoy to Bosnia.
"He told me, 'We're getting ready to designate them as a terrorist group,' " said Alir Zherka, executive director of the National Albanian American Council who had worked in the Clinton campaign. "He said, 'Don't give them money. We'll seize it.' "
Zherka replied: "The support is so deep and wide, nothing you can say about them is going to change people's minds."
Through the summer, the U.S. and its allies tacitly allowed the Serbs to hunt down the KLA, even as the Serbs destroyed 300 villages and mutilated innocents. An entire family was slaughtered, the throats of children slit. Finally, in shame, NATO threatened air strikes unless the Serbs declared a ceasefire.
Back at Bruno's, a handsome restaurant run by Albanians, the U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke met with 25 Albanian-Americans. He wanted their support for a ceasefire by the KLA. They agreed.
At the next session in Bruno's, they made clear that their goal was independence for Kosovo. The Albanian-Americans had worked on Capitol Hill, starting with Elliot Engel, the Bronx congressman, making their way to Mitch McConnell, the senator from Kentucky who happens to oversee the budget for the State Department. They got his ear, and support.
Moreover, they wanted the KLA at the bargaining table, no matter how much the Serbs screamed "terrorist."
A few weeks ago, after 45 civilians were massacred by Serb forces in Racak, the diplomatic walls began to crumble. "As a friend of the administration, I met with Larry Rosin, who works on Kosovo for the State Department," said Alir Zherka.
"I told him: 'Everyone in the community is going to swing to the KLA this is a defining moment for you and for us.'
"Larry said, 'I guess you're laying down your marker.'
" 'The Serbs laid down the marker,' " I said. " 'We're just picking it up.'
"He said, 'I recognize that the KLA has to be involved.' "
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