BOSTON - WEDNESDAY, APRIL 15, 1998
SPECIAL REPORT

CASH FOR KOSOVO
Inside a Rebellion: Banking On War

Jonathan S. Landay    Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
     Send e-mail to: landa@csmonitor.com
The URL for this page is:   http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1998/04/15/fp1s2-csm.htm

        WASHINGTON, NEW YORK, AND AARAU, SWITZERLAND

     In 1982, they were arrested, beaten, and jailed for belonging to the Kosovo People's
Movement, a coalition of underground groups in a campaign for greater political rights for
Serbia's ethnic Albanian-dominated province of Kosovo.
     Now, Bardhyl Mahmuti, Jashar Shalihu, and Bilall Sherifi have abandoned peaceful
protest for armed struggle, one the United States and other powers are scrambling to keep
from erupting into a war that could engulf the region.
     The trio is helping run international fund-raising for the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA),
funneling cash from Albanians in the US, Europe, and elsewhere to buy weapons for
rebels fighting for Kosovo's independence from the iron-fisted rule of Serbia, which with
Montenegro is all that remains of Yugoslavia.
     The three spoke openly for the first time in an interview with the Monitor about the
KLA's strategy, views, and the support from Albanian communities around the world.
Added to interviews with KLA sympathizers in the US, the information provides one of the
most comprehensive pictures to date of the world's newest ethnic insurgency.
     They scoff at an arms embargo slapped on Yugoslavia March 31 by the United Nations
at the behest of the US, European allies, and Russia in a bid to keep a lid on the crisis.
     The KLA, they say, is buying arms in Serbia and Montenegro, flush with weapons from
the wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. Arms are also known to flow in from Albania.
     The interview with the three former political prisoners was arranged by their main US
operative, an immigrant from Kosovo who has relatives in the KLA and meets regularly
with their leaders in Europe. It was held late last week in Aarau, a village 30 miles from
Zurich, at "The Voice of Kosovo," a newspaper published by members of their party who
were given political asylum in Switzerland in the early 1990s.
     The office was adorned with large photographs of a KLA leader named Adem Jashari,
his brother, and father. All three were killed in a Serbian police crackdown on the
separatists in February and March in which more than 80 ethnic Albanians were slain in
the Drenica region.
     In the pictures, Mr. Jashari poses in a camouflage uniform and wields a machine gun.
His father and brother are clad in traditional Albanian garb and clutch rifles.
     To Belgrade, the US, and other powers, the Jasharis and other KLA fighters are
"terrorists" who have killed postmen and other civilian minions of Serbia's colonial-style
rule of Kosovo, including Albanians loyal to Belgrade. But as a result of brazen KLA
attacks on police stations and the Serbian crackdown in Drenica, ethnic Albanians inside
and outside Kosovo have now come to revere the rebels as freedom fighters.
     "The UCK has killed only members of the repressive state structure," said Mr. Mahmuti,
using the KLA's Albanian-language acronym. "One thing must be clear, the repressive
state structure is formed by officials in uniform ... and without uniform."
     He and his associates say they funnel to the KLA cash raised by sympathizers in the
large Albanian communities in Western Europe, the US, Turkey, and Australia. Enraged
by the slaughter of women and children in the Serbian assaults, these communities are
donating sums that Mr. Salihu puts at "tens of millions of dollars.
     "It [money] is coming from everywhere," says Salihu, who has piercing dark eyes and a
bushy moustache.

A rising threat

     Indeed, even senior US officials acknowledge that the Serbian crackdown has brought
fame and funds to the KLA, making it a serious threat to international efforts to push
Belgrade and moderate ethnic Albanian leaders into talks on restoring the province's
autonomy.
     The KLA fundraisers reject any accord short of independence for the province, where
ethnic Albanians, 90 percent of whom are Muslim, outnumber Christian Orthodox Serbs 9-
to-1. "The only legitimate negotiations can be to arrange the borders between Kosovo and
Serbia," declares Mahmuti. "Anything else signed will be good for nothing."
     The KLA was founded in 1993 by former ethnic Albanian political prisoners and young
activists disillusioned with the peaceful non-cooperation movement launched by Ibrahim
Rugova, the unrecognized president of a self-declared Republic of Kosovo, after the
province's autonomy was revoked in 1989, the Swiss-based sympathizers say.
     The rebels, they say, do not intend to go head-to-head with the 20,000 Serbian police
and troops in Kosovo; instead, when ready, they will begin a guerrilla-style war that will be
so costly that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic will have to relinquish the province.
     "Firstly, morale is on our side. The Albanians have nowhere else to go, while the Serbs
have to come from Belgrade to fight in Kosovo," explains Mahmuti, who appears to be the
group's ranking member. "Secondly, we are trying to equalize our differences. We don't
intend to buy tanks, but we have to have antitank weapons. We have no airplanes, but we
are trying to buy antiaircraft weapons."
     "When we have those weapons," he continues, "Serbia will sue for peace."
     The decision to resort to violence was prompted, he and others said, by the
international community's failure to halt onslaughts against Bosnia's Muslims by Serb
forces armed by Mr. Milosevic in his attempt to create a "Greater Serbia." They worry that
the same outcome awaits Kosovo's ethnic Albanians.
     "The international community will do nothing for Kosovo," asserts the KLA's main US
operative, who spoke in Brooklyn, N.Y., on condition of anonymity. "The only time that the
international community will intervene is when we go on the offensive. The basis of this
whole thing is that we are Muslim. The international community does not want a Muslim
state in Europe. They will let the Serbs butcher us."

Seeking confrontation

     Once loyal to Mr. Rugova and his Democratic League of Kosovo, this operative and
other Albanian-Americans say they switched support to the KLA after the Clinton
administration bowed to Milosevic's refusal to address Kosovo in the 1995 Dayton peace
accords on Bosnia. At that point, they say, Rugova failed to adopt a more confrontational
approach.
     "If Rugova and our leaders there [in Kosovo] had stood up, it would not have come to
the point that Albanians have to take up arms," says Agem, another Kosovo native and
KLA sympathizer living in New York, who asked that his last name not be used to protect
relatives in the province.
     At the moment, however, the KLA does not yet appear ready for anything other than
guerrilla-style encounters.
     Mahmuti and other KLA collaborators say the rebels had intended to build up slowly,
and were unprepared for the outpouring of support they have received since the Serb
police actions. As a result, they are having to turn away volunteers, including ethnic
Albanians returning from Europe, because of a shortage of arms. But they assert that the
deficit will be bridged.
     "We gather money and send the money to Kosovo. The economic situation in Serbia is
so bad that in the middle of Belgrade you can buy all the weapons you need," says
Mahmuti. He adds that arms are also being obtained outside Montenegro and Serbia, but
he declines to elaborate.
     While it was not possible to confirm those claims, well-armed KLA fighters in Kosovo
now sport new walkie-talkies and uniforms. Furthermore, it was common during the wars
in Croatia and Bosnia for enemies to sell each other weapons.

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LIBERATORS' DILEMMA

Should Iran Help Fund War in Muslim Kosovo?

Jonathan S. Landay     Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
     Send e-mail to: landa@csmonitor.com

     Kosovo's liberation movement may be beset by deep tactical and political divisions.
     The movement's main US operative, who spoke in an interview in Brooklyn, N.Y., on
condition of anonymity, asserts that some rebels want to accept offers of weapons and
training from Islamic radicals, or mujahideen, from Iran and other Muslim states who
fought for the Bosnian Muslims.
     "I am personally against this. But there are people who have offered help and you can't
stop them giving help when help is needed," he says. He warns that the Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA) could be driven to align with radical Islamic groups should Serbia launch an
all-out offensive in Kosovo and the international community sit by, as occurred in Bosnia.
     But associates of the movement who are based in Switzerland vehemently deny any
contacts with Islamic radicals. "For us, religion means nothing. We are Europeans and we
have nothing to do with mujahideen or other extremists. We have decided to fight alone to
the end," says Jashar Salihu, whose 1987 release from jail, where he had been a political
prisoner of the Serbs, was championed by Amnesty International. Danielle Mitterrand, wife
of late French president François Mitterrand, also wrote letters on Salihu's behalf.
     In the United States, KLA sympathizers are actively soliciting funds from affluent
Albanian-Americans, some of whom are said to have carried suitcases of cash to
Switzerland. They also brought KLA members to a fundraiser in Brooklyn, N.Y., earlier this
year.
     "There is a lot of money flowing now because there is a fear of war, a fear of more
massacres, a great emotional flux within the community," asserts Isuf Hajrizi, a native of
Kosovo who writes for Illyria, a Bronx, N.Y.-based Albanian-American newspaper.
     KLA supporters in the US are also working through the Albanian-American Civic
League, a lobbying group, to drum up political support for their cause in Washington. They
have spoken to officials at the National Security Council and have the attention of a
number of influential lawmakers, including Sen. Jesse Helms (R) of North Carolina and
Rep. Benjamin Gilman (R) of New York, the chairmen of the Senate and House foreign
relations committees.
     The league's political action committee has seen its donations skyrocket. While it
collected some $9,000 in the last quarter of 1997, since the Serbian police crackdown it
has won pledges and cash totalling more than $120,000 for campaign contributions to
sympathetic lawmakers up for reelection this year.
     The league not only supports the KLA and its goal of independence for Kosovo, but
advocates the "liberation" of areas of Macedonia, Montenegro, and Greece, in which
Albanians have lived for centuries, a recipe for a regional cataclysm.
     "The Albanians are a divided nation. We need to stand up for the nationhood of these
people," asserted Joseph DioGuardi, a former Democratic congressman from New York
and the league's president, as he sat recently with members of his group in a private room
off the House of Representatives dining room, waiting to meet congressman Gilman.
     Said Mr. DioGuardi, whose father was from Albania: "We are trying ... to use our
influence in Congress in the American tradition."

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