Killings in Kosovo Push Lasting Peace Out of Reach

Although an October cease-fire ended the cruelest attacks on Kosovo’s civilians, ethnic Albanian guerrillas and Serbian police have turned their guns on each other in a hit-and-run killing campaign in the separatist province.

In the six weeks since most Serbian security forces withdrew from Kosovo to avoid NATO airstrikes, police have killed at least six guerrilla commanders in ambushes, according to the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army and human rights activists.

In turn, the KLA guerrillas have killed five Serbian police officers and wounded 18 more in what the government calls escalating terrorist attacks.

The dirty war of killings, kidnappings and disappearances is making the efforts of U.S. diplomat Christopher Hill to negotiate a lasting peace all the more difficult as Kosovo slips back toward all-out war--a war, increasingly, without uniforms or battle lines.

Kosovo is part of Serbia, the dominant republic of what is left of Yugoslavia, but ethnic Albanians make up 90% of the province’s population. Hundreds of people, mostly civilians, died in this year’s Serbian crackdown on the guerrillas.

For months, Hill has been trying to get ethnic Albanian leaders to drop their demands for independence, but his draft agreements offering limited self-rule have been scorned by both sides in the conflict.

At a meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels on Wednesday, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright warned Kosovo’s Albanians to “abandon their rhetoric of independence.”

“Both Serb and Albanian leaders have made public statements that do not help the cause of peace,” Albright said. “Serb threats to launch a renewed offensive in Kosovo are dangerous, and we view them with extreme seriousness.”

When the threat of NATO airstrikes forced the government to withdraw most of its forces and heavy weapons in October, Serbian police simply changed tactics, KLA guerrillas said in several interviews.

The battle lines that once marked government and rebel territory have disappeared, so it is easier for security police to infiltrate and attack the guerrillas, said Nuredin Lushtaku, a KLA commander.

“They can kill anyone they can reach,” said Lushtaku, a 21-year-old KLA fighter in one of Kosovo’s most devastated areas, the Drenica Valley west of the province’s capital, Pristina.

“They are transforming themselves,” he said. “They are not moving just in uniform. They are also in civilian clothes and cars.”

For its part, the government insists that it is doing all it can to comply with the terms of the October agreement, and it accuses the guerrillas of taking advantage of the Serbian pullback to move into new territory and attack police.

A Serbian official charged that NATO played favorites in the October showdown. The alliance’s strategy of making military threats against Serbian targets, while using more gentle persuasion with Kosovo’s guerrillas, only encouraged the rebels, charged Zoran Andjelkovic, who heads the temporary council ruling the province.

“This strategy could be described as a public call for the terrorists to organize even better and to attack even better,” he said in an interview. “In fact, we could say this is in support of the terrorists’ actions.”

By meeting with KLA guerrillas last month, Hill revealed an American double standard when it comes to isolating and fighting terrorists, Andjelkovic said.

“In America, you’re allowed to fight directly against terrorists, but here this battle is sort of a virtual one,” he said. “On the one hand, you’re condemning them publicly, but on the other you’re basically cooperating with, and supporting, terrorists.”

In the escalating violence in Kosovo, the guerrillas lost a senior commander named Hizri Talla when police opened fire on a car in Pristina last Thursday.

Talla died along with Kosovo journalist Afrim Maliqi and student Ilir Durmishi. All three were dressed in civilian clothes. Police said the car didn’t stop when ordered.

Five commanders of local KLA units died in a Nov. 6 ambush as they left the village of Dragobil after a meeting between Hill and several KLA leaders.

Serbian police opened fire on the guerrillas’ car about 10 minutes after the rebels had left the meeting at which Hill, Washington’s point man on Kosovo, had tried to get the KLA to accept something less than independence.

In the October agreement that averted NATO attacks, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic agreed to grant an amnesty for “crimes related to the conflict in Kosovo” in addition to withdrawing his forces. But he has reneged on that commitment too, the New York-based Human Rights Watch charged in a report released Tuesday.

Local and international human rights groups believe that as many as 1,500 ethnic Albanians are in Serbian jails where they are routinely tortured to provide information about the guerrillas, Human Rights Watch said.

The politicians’ charges and countercharges, and the fighters’ attacks and counterattacks, make Kosovo’s cease-fire appear more shaky by the day. Both sides are regrouping for more war, NATO analysts have reported.

The eight-month Serbian offensive was so brutal that the guerrillas’ resolve has only strengthened, Lushtaku said. Young ethnic Albanian men are lining up by the hundreds to volunteer for a guerrilla army that was small and weak only a year ago, Lushtaku and other fighters said.

Lushtaku was a close friend of Adem Jashari, the KLA commander whose death during a Serbian attack on a village in early March marked the beginning of the war that made the KLA known throughout the world.

“We will continue Jashari’s role,” he said. “It is either freedom or death.”