Defying NATO, Rebels Try to Grab Government Control

The separatist Kosovo Liberation Army is trying to assert government control in Kosovo, despite NATO’s insistence that a U.N. civilian administration will run the Serbian province.

An interim government declared and dominated by the KLA this week named a Cabinet whose ministers will meet in the guerrillas’ headquarters here to deal with such issues as financial affairs, education, health care and justice in the province.

In many neighborhoods of this provincial capital, small groups of armed KLA rebels are posted in private homes that serve as unofficial police stations.

Out in the countryside, KLA checkpoints are springing up in many places as the guerrillas insist that they must defend against Yugoslav paramilitary forces still in the province. Rebels have seized a coal mine, paraded their armed troops through liberated towns and are exercising civil authority in some villages.

The KLA efforts to assert authority risk bringing the group into conflict with U.N. officials, who are still struggling to get their footing in Kosovo, and with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Alliance troops have had confrontations with KLA forces while trying to disarm the rebels.

The moves also put the rebels at odds with Kosovo’s official Serbian-dominated government, which has not yet been dismantled and is still trying to function.

NATO officials have said their primary concern still is completing the deployment of alliance peacekeepers in the province, with many issues of its civil administration left to be resolved.

The KLA-declared government is a necessary tool for beginning the work of repairing schools, hospitals and other institutions ruined under Serbian rule, Jakup Krasniqi, spokesman for the KLA-declared government, said Friday.

The KLA is confident that the U.N. won’t overturn the rebels’ government, Krasniqi said, because the world body’s workers “are not here to destroy or take control by themselves, but to control the state with people like us.”

NATO forces have moved into several places to counter the KLA’s bold efforts to assert its authority. German troops took charge at a border crossing between Albania and the province Wednesday, two days after the ethnic Albanian rebels had seized the post. The Germans lowered the Albanian flag raised by the KLA and ran NATO’s flag up the pole to show who is in charge.

“We told them they had no mandate at the border because they were not democratically elected or installed by the international community,” said German army Col. Wolf Best. “It took a lot of work to bring them down from this ‘victory feeling’ they had.”

Guerrillas Install Mayor in Prizren

The KLA has been even bolder in the southwestern city of Prizren, where the guerrillas earlier this week put Kadri Kryezici in charge as acting mayor. He plans to replace the Yugoslav flag on license plates with the flag of Albania.

Kryezici said he will fill the post until an election is held, but his phone at the town hall doesn’t ring much. Ethnic Albanians don’t know the number, an aide said, because they never phoned the Serbian mayor, who has fled.

“We are trying to fill the vacuum that was here,” the acting mayor said in an interview. “The Serbs left, and we are filling the jobs. Anyone could be in my place.

The German forces that have responsibility for Prizren as well as the surrounding area of southwestern Kosovo sought early Friday to rein in the KLA. The Germans told KLA fighters, who stroll around the city with AK-47s and sniper rifles, that beginning at midnight Friday they will no longer be allowed to carry weapons in public.

After Sunday, the deadline for Yugoslav forces to complete their retreat from the province, the guerrillas won’t be allowed to wear their uniforms in town anymore, the Germans announced earlier.

Later Friday, German troops evicted KLA soldiers from a police station and freed about 15 prisoners who showed signs of recent torture, German army spokesman Lt. Col. Dietmar Jeserich said. Another prisoner had died only hours earlier, he said.

KLA officials said the prisoners were criminals, but some residents said they recognized at least two as informers for the Serbian police, who fled the city Monday.

The peacekeepers took 25 rebel members into custody. In the police station they found grenades, machine guns, mortars and shells--and spike-studded truncheons.

NATO is determined to reassure Kosovo’s Serbs, who are a minority in the province, that they are safe and that alliance forces are in control. NATO’s commander in Kosovo, British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, appeared on Serbian television Thursday to promise that the KLA will soon be “demilitarized.”

While Krasniqi confirmed that the KLA and Jackson are negotiating an agreement on demilitarization, the KLA official insisted that the rebels will never give up their weapons.

U.S. diplomats said months ago that Washington’s strategy was to convince KLA commanders to become politicians instead of rebel leaders, and to give their fighters more stable jobs in a new police force or national guard.

That is the direction that the KLA is moving, Krasniqi said, but it will keep its weapons and continue to insist on independence for Kosovo after three years of interim rule under NATO and U.N. supervision.

“First of all, NATO won’t disarm the KLA,” he said. “This is not in any of the [peace] documents. The KLA will be demilitarized, will be transformed.”

Such talk leaves Kosovo’s once-ruling Serbian minority feeling that the balance has now tilted sharply against them, despite NATO’s assurances that foreign soldiers and officials will be evenhanded.

And increasingly, ethnic Albanian civilians are following the example of the KLA and asserting themselves. After years of suffering discrimination and brutality under the Serbs, ethnic Albanians are in a hurry to take what they believe is rightfully theirs.

Medical Workers Demand Jobs Back

Hundreds of ethnic Albanian doctors, nurses and other medical workers converged on Pristina’s main hospital Friday morning to demand their jobs back. They said Serbian hospital officials, whom they accused of corruption, had kicked them out.

Altene Hashani, an ethnic Albanian nurse at the hospital for 33 years, carried a letter in her purse announcing that her services as head pediatric nurse were no longer needed as of June 4. The letter, stamped and signed by the hospital’s Serbian director, said the order was made under the war emergency law. She had received a second letter, she said, that cited security reasons for her dismissal.

She would receive 80% of her salary, about $50 a month, until further notice, the first letter had promised.

After Friday’s angry protest at the hospital, and the intervention of British troops and U.N. officials, the medical faculty’s ethnic Albanian dean and the hospital’s director reached a compromise on staffing. Anyone with a job at the hospital immediately before the air war began March 24 can return over the weekend, while the more contentious dispute over another removal of ethnic Albanian staff members, in 1991, will be negotiated further.

“We do not want you to make a political statement, or political demonstration at this office,” British Col. Jeremy Rowan told the crowd from a tabletop, standing in drizzle. “The only people who will suffer are the patients.”

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Watson reported from Pristina and Miller from Prizren. Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report.

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All of Paul Watson’s dispatches from Kosovo are available on The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/dispatch.