KLA Vows to Disarm if NATO Occupies Kosovo

If the Yugoslav army were to withdraw from Kosovo and NATO troops successfully take control of the province, the Kosovo Liberation Army would give up its weapons, a top rebel commander said Sunday.

Disarmament would be a hard sell to much of the rebel army, which has been swelled by eager new recruits in the past two months, but the vast majority would obey the KLA leadership, insisted Beslim Zyrapi, operations commander in the border region around Krume, Albania.

“You cannot fight the war for independence only with guns. The war for an independent Kosovo will continue politically. Of course it is hard to say to soldiers who have lost many family members, but we are going to try to explain,” Zyrapi said.

Sunburned and unshaven, Zyrapi surveyed one of the KLA’s rear base camps as the sounds of Serbian shelling and gunfire reverberated off nearby Mt. Pastric. He said that he is in daily contact with the KLA chief of staff, Agim Ceku, and other commanders deep inside Kosovo, and that they all agree: Once the KLA’s political leader, Hashim Thaci, commits them to disarmament, they will hand over their weapons to NATO.

“Some small groups of extremists will resist. The staff of the KLA will work to disarm them,” Zyrapi said.

U.S. and NATO officials worry that a loosely organized and factionalized KLA might try to hold on to stockpiles of weapons while making a show of going along with a peace deal, or might not be able to command discipline from all of its troops.

Zyrapi insisted that those concerns are unfounded, as, he said, are fears that if Serbian forces pull back, the KLA will move in ahead of NATO troops to take their positions.

For now, the KLA and the Yugoslav army are fighting for the best endgame position in at least four areas of Kosovo during what could be the final days of the war.

The KLA launched an offensive two weeks ago in the Mt. Pastric border area to try to capture control of a highway linking the Kosovo towns of Prizren and Pec. The assault was unsuccessful--despite repeated NATO bombing of Serbian forces in the area--but the fighting has continued, with the Serbs using heavy artillery and up to 4,000 troops.

In the last three days, Serbian shelling of the town of Krume and surrounding villages on the Albanian side of the border has left one person dead and six wounded.

Zyrapi said the Yugoslav army has launched offensives against KLA troops in two areas of southwest Kosovo and around the town of Malisevo. He said the Serbs have about 15,000 troops in the region, including a “hired” Bosnian Serb force of about 2,500 soldiers called the Brigada Krajsh that arrived over the weekend.

His reports could not be independently confirmed.

Zyrapi said the KLA is trying to protect nearly 150,000 ethnic Albanian civilians who stayed behind in those areas. He would not say how many KLA troops are involved.

The KLA has grown dramatically in recent months with new recruits radicalized by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s campaign of “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo, which is a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic.

U.S. officials put the number of KLA rebels at about 17,000. Zyrapi would say only that that figure is low.

Some new recruits have come from the refugee camps in Albania, while others left jobs and families in the United States and Europe to fight for what they regard as their homeland. The influx has ballooned the KLA but has hardly made for a hardened guerrilla army.

“You can’t turn waiters into soldiers overnight,” said a KLA military observer.

Enver Bojkaj, 30, a pizza parlor owner from New York, was one of a handful of Albanian Americans at the border base camp Sunday. The others included a plumber and a 57-year-old retired schoolteacher.

Bojkaj joined two months ago “to help my brothers fight against the Serbs.” Born in Decani, near Pec, he said he thinks the NATO peace deal with Milosevic announced last week is a good one.

“If NATO moves in, I move out,” said Bojkaj, who was recovering from a hurt knee. “As long as they do the job.”

The U.S. government attitude toward the KLA has been ambivalent. The Clinton administration first considered the guerrillas terrorists, but then it began to work in tandem with them during the air campaign.

Although both the United States and the KLA have denied coordinating operations in advance, NATO has acknowledged that rebel attacks on the ground helped to flush out Serbian troops and armor for airstrikes, and the KLA says the airstrikes have helped its ground operations.

Still, the administration refused to arm the group out of fear that members would not give up their weapons once a peace deal was cut. The KLA wants an independent Kosovo, while the Americans, Europeans and Russians want Kosovo to remain part of Yugoslavia.

Many ethnic Albanians want to see a Greater Albania that would unite Kosovo, Albania and the Albanian communities in Macedonia and Greece--a scenario that would surely further destabilize the region.

But Zyrapi, the KLA commander, insisted that no rebels are thinking about a Greater Albania now.

“We are fighting for an independent Kosovo,” Zyrapi said. “Our war all along was only for Kosovo.”