Albanians in Serbia Fight for Their Independence

By CHRIS HEDGES

   GENEVA -- An Albanian immigrant, wearing a pair of black jeans, a gray jacket and
purple T-shirt, sat late one afternoon in the cafe of a Geneva train station.
    The crowds that walked to and from the platforms took little notice of the man, seeing in
him, most probably, just another of the 180,000 Kosovo Albanians who have washed up in
Switzerland in recent years.
    But to the Serbian police, whose prisons the man has frequented in the last two
decades, he is one of the most wanted terrorists in Yugoslavia, which now includes only
Serbia and Montenegro.
    To many of the 2.2 million ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, a part of Serbia, he is a hero,
one of the handful of leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a shadowy group that has
begun an armed campaign for an independent Kosovo free from Serbian control.
    An interview with him was arranged by several prominent Albanian opposition leaders
on condition that their identity be kept confidential.
    "We are not a terrorist organization," said the man, who gave his nom de guerre as
Alban. He carried a copy of the Journal de Geneve to identify himself at the train station to
a foreign reporter.
    "We are not like the Irish Republican Army or the Basque separatists," he said. "These
groups represent minority populations and carry out random attacks against civilians. We
have the support of nearly all Albanians. The only attacks we carry out are against the
representatives of the Serbian regime. We target the secret police, the Albanians who
collaborate with the regime and Serbian leaders."
    Backed by contributions from the 700,000 Kosovo Albanians living overseas, the
Kosovo Liberation Army is working hard to become a major player in the twisted and
bloody Balkan arena in the coming months. The Serb-ruled area of Kosovo, where more
than 90 percent of the inhabitants are ethnic Albanians, now appears on the verge of a
costly guerrilla war.
    The outside world has heard little of this militant group, and it was not possible to
confirm some of the claims advanced by Alban. A senior U.S. official who has read the
intelligence reports on the organization said the information was sparse and inadequate.
Nonetheless, U.S. officials take the organization seriously and believe it has the potential
for serious disruption of the Serbs' control over Kosovo.
    The Serbian police have acknowledged that in the last year the group has staged at
least five armed attacks. While the authorities have declined to release casualty figures,
they said the last attack, on Jan. 31, left three Serbian police officers wounded. Alban said
several dozen Serbs were wounded or killed.
    He is fluent in French and spoke quietly and without noticeable rancor for over an hour
in another, largely deserted, coffee shop near the train station.
    Alban, who travels clandestinely in and out of Kosovo, drew small diagrams on a piece
of paper to illustrate the guerrilla movement's strategy, making slashing marks with a blue
pen. He portrayed Serbian authority in Kosovo as an empty box, and predicted it would be
dismantled within three years.
    In the rebel movement's first contact with the Western press, he said the insurrection is
led by ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and Macedonia who fought as volunteers against the
Serbs in Bosnia.
    "To be honest, we do not know how many police and soldiers we have killed and
wounded," Alban said, crushing a cigarette into an ashtray.
    "After each clash the Serb authorities sealed off the hospitals and did not allow death
announcements to appear in the Serbian papers," he said. "But the Serb authorities are
anxious and worried. They are beginning to lose control. There are villages the police will
not enter and roads the police will not travel after dark."
    Kosovo, a barren and impoverished corner of Europe, was once part of Albania, but it
was handed over to the kingdom of Yugoslavia after World War I. The Albanians in
Kosovo have, however, long looked to Albania for guidance and support in their efforts
during this century to break free from Serbia.
    "The Kosovo Liberation Army will probably soon become a major political force in
Kosovo," said Sami Korteshi, a political scientist who fled Kosovo after being badly beaten
by Serbian police last year and who now lives in Bern. "This is the movement people
support now. But an armed movement will bring great difficulties to Kosovo. Because of
Albania's political and economic poverty, it won't be able to help us. We will be alone."
    The Kosovo Liberation Army has proposed holding a referendum, once independence
is established in Kosovo, to see if people want to unify with Albania.
    When Yugoslavia disintegrated six years ago, the Albanians in Kosovo announced they
were forming their own country.
    But the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, swiftly annulled Kosovo's autonomous
status within Yugoslavia and sent army and police units, accompanied by members of
Serbian paramilitary groups, to protect what Serbs view as part of their country.
    The ethnic Albanians, in reaction, withdrew from all participation in the state. The men
dodged the draft. All institutions, including schools, were boycotted, and the underground
government set up parallel Albanian schools, clinics and social services.
    The Kosovo Albanians, with about 400,000 immigrants in Germany and Switzerland,
began paying 3 percent of their income to the self-styled Kosovo government.
    But the 1995 Bosnian peace agreement marked the end of the nonviolent
independence movement for Kosovo Albanians and the birth of an armed struggle. While
they had opted for a peaceful, nonviolent resistance to the Serbs, and had hoped to
gather the support of the international community, their aspirations were ignored at the
peace conference in Dayton, Ohio.
    "The dream of all Albanians is the independence of Kosovo," said Xhafer Shatri, who
lives in Geneva and is the information spokesman for the Kosovo government-in-exile.
"And the majority of Albanians are capable and ready to die for this independence."
    "Albanians saw at Dayton that the international community only respects and reacts to
the law of the jungle," he said. "This had a terrible impact, especially on the new
generation that for six years has had little work, little schooling and lived under brutal Serb
occupation. We have gone beyond frustration. We speak now of revolt."
    Since the Dayton agreement, the self-styled government in Pristina, the capital of
Kosovo, which still calls for nonviolent resistance against the Serbs, has had a harder time
raising money.
    By contrast, Albanian leaders living overseas assert that the Kosovo Liberation Army's
coffers are fat and growing. Expatriate Albanian newspapers like The Voice of Kosovo,
which is published in Zurich, print the communiques of the guerrilla group and run calls for
donations.
    Swiss police officials have concluded that an Albanian organized-crime network now
dominates the heroin trade in Switzerland. They have no evidence that the proceeds are
going to the guerrilla group, as they do in the case of the Kurdistan Workers Party's war
against Turkey. The Swiss police also say they have noted increasing signs of an illegal
arms trade by the Kosovo Albanians.
    "The quantities we find are small, usually just enough to be packed in a car," Valentin
Roschacher, a senior Swiss federal police official, said in an interview in Bern. "But we
know it is going on. The weapons are high quality."
    Kadri Osmani, one of the most militant and energetic leaders in the Kosovo
independence movement for decades, arrived in Switzerland four months ago, his health
broken by 18 years in Serbian prisons, dozens of beatings that left him unable to walk and
the stress of a life of resistance.
    Interviewed in a Bern hospital, he said he had sold nearly all his possessions, including
his house in Kosovo, before he left to help finance the movement.
    "It is the Kosovo Liberation Army that will bring us one unified country where all
Albanians can live together in freedom," he said, sitting cross-legged on the bed. "The
peaceful route is futile. No one wanted to help us. This period of our struggle is over. It is
time for war."

Copyright 1997 The New York Times