Waiting to Give the Boot to Serbs

An abandoned shoe factory, hastily filled with tents and makeshift military housing, has become command central for NATO’s operation to bring peace to Kosovo.

The Gazela shoe plant is now the temporary headquarters--and home--of the man directing the mission, British Lt. Gen. Michael Jackson, as well as of 700 to 800 members of a key NATO military unit. It will be the staging base for the peacekeepers expected to be sent from Macedonia into neighboring Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic.

The factory was rented by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in late February and until a few weeks ago had been occupied by shoes stacked to the ceiling, acres of old machinery and piles of dust. A neighboring factory owned by Gazela still churns out 1,800 pairs of shoes each day, though it is now separated by fences and barbed wire from the NATO operation.

NATO’s plans to move into Kosovo as quickly as possible were dealt a setback last weekend after Yugoslav delegates refused to sign off on NATO’s prescribed road maps and seven-day timetable for a pullout of Serbian police and soldiers from the province. The orders, presented to the delegation by Jackson, were drafted after Yugoslav lawmakers last week agreed to a peace settlement. Direct talks have not resumed, though both sides say they have left communication channels open. NATO says it will not move into Kosovo until Yugoslavia agrees to its terms.

Despite the setback, it is business as usual for NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, whose leaders are now housed in the factory. The unit is still preparing to move in tanks and soldiers to Kosovo at a moment’s notice once the agreement is signed and the signal is given. The intent, says Robin Clifford, NATO’s spokesman for Macedonian operations, is to “fill the vacuum” that will be created when Serbian soldiers and police withdraw.

Already, more than 15,000 multinational NATO soldiers are camped in Macedonia and about 31,000 others are expected in the coming weeks. Some, however, have been held up by the Yugoslavs’ failure to sign on: For example, the U.S. has not yet given “move orders” for a few thousand troops to relocate from their base in Germany to Macedonia to join the 2,000 U.S. troops already here.

But once the orders are given, the troops can arrive quickly, said Sgt. William Ellis, a spokesman for U.S. forces headquartered at a nearby camp known as “Able Sentry.”

“The soldiers will come in by bird [plane], the equipment and supplies by rail,” he said.

Other complications have arisen. About 2,200 U.S. Marines were set to arrive in Greece on Sunday but instead are stuck at sea after Greek officials refused to let them disembark at Salonika. The Greeks said they wanted to put off the landing until after elections next week, said Lt. Christopher Van Avery, a spokesman for the allied forces in Europe. All in all, the U.S. will provide about 7,000 of the NATO troops.

About three months ago, NATO rented and began a quick and dirty renovation of the vacant, 270,000-square-foot Gazela factory building. Tens of thousands of shoes and shoe molds were stacked on the first floor, said Pvt. Lee Jeapes of Swindon, England, whose job it was to get rid of them.

What kind of shoes? “The worst shoes you can imagine,” Jeapes said.

The private and his cohorts gave the boot to the old machinery, which had to be disassembled by hand, attempted to clean the place up and erected tents across the factory floors to give the officers some privacy and separate some space for meeting areas. One section that is partitioned by a tent flap has been dubbed the “Luge Room” because it still contains big chutes onto which shoes or materials were loaded.

Though there are still some tents inside the three-story building, most have been replaced by rows and rows of prefabricated rooms that house the officers and soldiers. The British soldiers have nicknamed their quarters “Veal Crates,” a sarcastic reference to the small boxes in which young cattle are transported to keep their meat tender, a controversial issue among animal rights activists.

Jackson, the commander, sleeps in his office, which was where the factory’s manager, Nikola Cvetkoski, once worked.

No one is happier about NATO’s move into the factory than Cvetkoski.

Though he says he is forbidden under the terms of the agreement to disclose the rent he receives, he acknowledges that the company makes as much from its NATO boarders as it does from making shoes.