Rifts Are Rife in Separatist Serb Province

If NATO threats force Kosovo’s warring sides to start talking peace by Saturday’s deadline, Serbs and ethnic Albanians won’t be the only enemies sitting at the table.

There is open hostility among Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians themselves, most significantly between moderate political leaders such as Ibrahim Rugova and some guerrilla commanders who aren’t in the mood to compromise with Serbs after 11 months of fighting them in the separatist province.

Guerrillas in the Kosovo Liberation Army see their war with Serbian forces as the only reason that Kosovo is on the world’s agenda at all, and they deeply resent any effort to shift the focus back to Rugova’s peaceful struggle for independence.

“He is one man who has never done anything good for Albanians,” Sokol Bashota, a political representative in the KLA’s general command, said through an interpreter at his farmhouse command post here in southern Kosovo.

“Rugova is a figure who is under some kind of remote control by others. Even the devil, the devil himself, doesn’t know what Rugova is doing.”

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has in effect put a gun to the heads of Serbian and ethnic Albanian leaders by insisting that they attend peace talks outside Paris on Saturday or face the consequences. Rugova, long Kosovo’s most popular politician, was the first to agree to this weekend’s talks.

Jakup Krasniqi, the rebels’ military spokesman, said Tuesday that the KLA is ready to send three delegates to the peace talks--an announcement he made just hours after the KLA’s chief political voice, Adem Demaci, said he had recommended that the guerrillas not go.

“We are not asked to go to France to talk peace but to capitulate,” Demaci, who served 29 years in prison for demanding Kosovo’s independence, told a news conference in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina.

Serbs are also divided over whether to show up at the talks in France. Some are concerned that to attend would destroy their argument that Kosovo is an internal matter involving terrorists who have no right to negotiate anything. Kosovo is the southernmost province of Serbia, the dominant republic of what remains of Yugoslavia.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has left the formal decision to Serbia’s parliament, where his supporters and ultranationalists opposed to foreign intervention hold the majority of seats. The parliament is expected to vote on the issue Thursday.

Vuk Draskovic, a onetime opposition leader who is Yugoslavia’s deputy prime minister for international affairs, says the Serbs should send a delegation. But ultranationalist Vojislav Seselj, the Serbs’ deputy prime minister, is dead set against attending.

The U.S. and five European powers have already written the basic elements of the peace plan for Kosovo and have given ethnic Albanian and Yugoslav leaders until Feb. 19 to sign the deal.

The proposed interim accord would give Kosovo, where the population is 90% ethnic Albanian, more self-rule; for instance, it would have its own police force.

A final decision on Kosovo’s independence, which the West opposes, would be put off for three years, and thousands of NATO ground troops would probably move in to keep the peace until then, and perhaps long after.

The KLA will demand that any peace agreement declare Kosovo an international protectorate until its people are allowed to vote on independence after the three years, Krasniqi said.

Milosevic has to weigh the damage that NATO bombs would inflict on his security forces against the political wounds he would suffer if NATO troops took control of Kosovo, which Serbs see as the birthplace of their culture. Milosevic may decide that NATO bombs will be easier for him to survive.

The Yugoslav leader has proved himself deft at diplomatic games with the West, and he may gamble on the KLA’s acting as its own worst enemy at peace talks.

In the event of a peace agreement, Milosevic will probably be told to accept what amounts to an occupying force that, by some estimates, could total 40,000 or more NATO troops in his country.

The KLA also stands to lose big if NATO takes over Kosovo in support of moderates like Rugova, a Paris-educated pacifist who tried, and failed, to move the Serbs with secretly organized referendums that the governments in Belgrade, capital of both Serbia and Yugoslavia, simply ignored.

Rugova’s star sank last spring when Milosevic ordered his security forces to destroy the KLA, then only a small band of guerrilla fighters.

As Serbian tanks and artillery pounded village after village in Kosovo beginning late last February, driving more than 300,000 refugees from their homes, the guerrillas took in many more recruits. They also accumulated more weapons, which were bought, in part, with cash donated by ethnic Albanians living in the U.S. and other countries.

Now, almost a year after all-out war erupted, the KLA is a fractious alliance of regional commanders who usually prefer anonymity.

Rugova’s many supporters can suggest he is Kosovo’s Gandhi, but the guerrillas can’t point to a leader of their armed struggle, their own Nelson Mandela.

“Kosovo’s political spectrum hasn’t got one Mandela,” Bashota said. “But the KLA has its highest commander. Until now, we cannot tell you his name for security reasons. Every day, he is among the soldiers, cooperating with them, organizing with them. Only the members of the general headquarters know his name.”

Fighters like Bashota are convinced that Western diplomats want to divide the KLA, and they suspect that the intense pressure being placed on them to negotiate with the Serbs is part of that plan. He thinks it will fail.

“War in Kosovo is inevitable,” Bashota said, “just as the independence of Kosovo is inevitable.”