Anti-Serb Militancy on the Rise in Kosovo

Hazy light streams through a window, slicing cigarette smoke that fills the room where 19 ragged men sit cross-legged on the floor. With bitter coffee and Muslim prayers, they solemnly pay homage to their martyr, a teacher killed in escalating violence between ethnic Albanian separatists and Serbian authorities in this desolate region known as Kosovo.

The sons, brothers and distant cousins of the dead man, Haljit Geci, tell of the abuse they say Albanians suffer at the hands of the ruling Serbs, and how it is driving the young men of their villages to take up weapons.

“Obviously, repression has reached the heights of being unbearable and no longer tolerable,” says one of the clan’s leaders, an elderly man wearing a wool beret who has risen to speak on behalf of his fellow mourners. “Faced with a wall and no way out, we will fight with every means available.”

Armed guerrillas grouped in something called the Kosova Liberation Army are rumored to have been operating in the barren hills around here for more than a year. But apart from faxes sent to journalists and a few sporadic terrorist attacks, there was little proof that the group really existed.

Until now.

A few weeks ago, three men in camouflage uniforms and masks burst in on Geci’s funeral. They declared themselves members of the Kosova Liberation Army and vowed to fight Serbian authorities to the death.

The more than 10,000 mourners said to be in attendance erupted into applause and cheers.

Kosovo, a region of Serbia where a huge ethnic Albanian majority is governed by a tiny, dwindling Serbian minority, is frequently singled out as the likely focus of the next Balkan war, should it occur. Such a conflict would engulf the region because of the presence of ethnic Albanians in other countries, such as Macedonia.

Kosovo’s Albanians, who make up about 90% of the region’s 2 million people, are chafing under rule from Belgrade, which is the capital of both Serbia and Yugoslavia.

Once an autonomous province, Kosovo was stripped of its special status in 1989 by Slobodan Milosevic, then Serbia’s warmongering president.

Albanian teachers, doctors and professionals were fired or walked off their jobs. Eventually, the Albanians created a parallel--if substandard--educational, health and social system that ignores Serbian authority.

Kosovo has been kept largely under control by pacifist Albanian leaders. But their authority appears to be eroding quickly.

Tension and frustration have run deep for a long time, and now, with the emergence of the Kosova Liberation Army, the option of armed struggle has become a realistic one.

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Geci, the teacher, was killed Nov. 26 in the largest skirmish yet between police and guerrillas. Police trying to collect taxes were ambushed just southwest of Lausa, at an isolated spot where the road bends and then dips between gentle hills covered with thick bushes that keep their leaves year-round.

Fierce fighting raged for four hours until, villagers say, the police withdrew, firing pell-mell as they fled. One of the bullets hit Geci, whose level of involvement in the separatist cause is unclear.

The stark countryside of this region has long been known for a tradition of resistance and rebellion. Albanian villagers fought off the Ottoman Turks in the last century and revolted against World War II’s Communist partisans.

Geci’s father was killed by partisans--tortured and executed, the family says, during the rebellion.

The men who gathered at Geci’s home recently were participating in a traditional mourning ritual. From dawn to dusk and for weeks after Geci’s death, the male relatives come to the communal room typical of every Albanian home and sit on hand-woven rugs, smoking constantly while receiving visitors who arrive to pay their respects.

Some Albanians, dressed in the traditional plis, a kind of woolen skullcap, arrive from as far away as Macedonia. Each visitor is given two cigarettes, tiny cups of coffee and a sweet drink. A shrine with a large red Albanian flag and a dated photograph of Geci is erected outside. No women are visible.

Up the road from Geci’s house, on the southwestern edge of Lausa, lives Sokol Zabeli, a 37-year-old father of five. His bright green tractor and white plaster house are dotted with bullet holes from the day of the gun battle, when six of his cows were shot dead and he took shelter with his children in the cellar.

That day was the last straw, Zabeli said.

“I will never again allow myself to be in that position, cowering in the basement with my children,” the unemployed factory worker said. “The fear is vanished.”

Zabeli’s home was searched six times last year by Serbian police, who said they were looking for weapons.

He was taken in for questioning seven times in one month last summer. His brother has been jailed on weapons charges, and his uncle fled the country to escape the same fate.

International human rights organizations say arbitrary arrests and unprovoked and violent searches of Albanians’ homes are the most common forms of harassment used by police.

Albanians have generally followed their politicians’ lead and toed the line of nonviolence. But such patience is ending, and the heavy-handed crackdown by police is only fueling the anger.

Many say they are now ready to take up a gun.

“My 66-year-old father left me the same set of problems, the same repression, that I am leaving to my children,” Zabeli said. “It is becoming a tradition. Nothing changes.”

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Just how extensive--and how well organized--the Kosova Liberation Army is remains a question.

Serbian officials suggest that the guerrillas are receiving training in countries like Iran but offer no proof of such claims. Several people familiar with the movement said the armed guerrillas probably do not number more than a few hundred.

The guerrillas appear to be an extension of armed militants who have operated in the region for decades as self-defense committees formed to patrol their villages.

This loose network is believed to have gotten its impetus from diaspora money and from weapons, most of which probably filtered in from neighboring Albania after political turmoil there last spring poured guns, rocket launchers and ammunition into the black market.

Serbian police have not ventured into some of the more remote villages, where the armed groups are reportedly the strongest, since 1991.

During Serbian presidential elections in December, the authorities could not open polling stations in much of the region.

Police beatings and torture have undoubtedly helped swell the guerrilla ranks.

The guerrilla violence, in turn, has drawn an even more systematically brutal response from the police.

By Serbian count, dozens of terrorist acts have been recorded in the past year, including armed attacks on police stations.

About 40 people have been killed, including 12 police officers and 16 Albanians suspected of being informers or collaborators with the Serbian regime. Six Albanians have died while in Serbian police custody, and more than 50 have been put on trial--most from the region around Lausa.

In one trial that ended in mid-December, 17 men were convicted of being members of the Kosova Liberation Army and sentenced to a total of 186 years in prison for various terrorist acts.

Among the men was Nait Hasani, a reputed ringleader. Most of the men testified that they were tortured in jail so they would confess. All said they were innocent. Most stated at the start of the trial that they were residents of an independent “Republic of Kosova.”

Serbian authorities dismiss the extensive accounts of mistreatment that Albanian human rights organizations have collected, including volumes of gruesome photographs that the Albanians say document torture.

“Our police are not so naive as to leave traces that can then be photographed,” said Bosko Drobnjak, spokesman for the Serbian government in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina. “There are a lot of methods that don’t leave marks behind. Speaking hypothetically, of course.”

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The potential for widening violence and instability is made all the greater by the continued inability of Milosevic--now the Yugoslav president--and the Albanian leadership to negotiate a political solution.

Milosevic refuses to negotiate in good faith, diplomats say. His representatives stormed out of an international peacekeeping meeting in Bonn last month when the issue of human rights violations in Kosovo was raised.

At the same time, the ethnic Albanian leadership, while insisting on peaceful resistance, refuses to compromise.

Under the monarchical rule of Ibrahim Rugova, the principal Albanian political group has insisted on nothing short of independence. And that is precisely the one thing the Serbs, who consider the Kosovo region the cradle of their civilization, will not grant.

The West has always looked to Rugova to keep the peace, showering upon him unquestioning support. But with no progress to show his people for their sacrifice in the past eight years, Rugova is increasingly isolated from his followers.

Governments that support Rugova--chief among them the United States--are beginning to realize how counterproductive his role is.

“Rugova has been a useful instrument for keeping Kosovo on the back burner,” said a Western diplomat familiar with the region. “But his presence has been very bad for the development of intelligent dialogue among Albanians. He creates a fantasy world, and anyone who talks about reasonable solutions involving compromise is cut down.”

Rugova, who until last year controlled all of the Albanian-language press in Kosovo, routinely told his people that the West supported Kosovo’s drive for independence. In fact, Washington and European capitals support a special status for Kosovo, but within Yugoslavia.

When that was reported in Kosovo for the first time last year, in a new, independent newspaper, many Albanians were stunned. The news injected a dose of reality into the minds of many.

Separately, students from the Kosovo Albanians’ ad hoc university, which holds classes in bare rooms and basements, held street demonstrations to protest Serbian rule. Significantly, they defied Rugova, who forbade the protests.

The dilemma for Western governments, however, is that no other leaders have emerged. And now they view with alarm the rise of an armed movement.