U.S. May Use Rebels to Get Food to Kosovo

After months of holding the rebels at arm’s length, the Clinton administration is now quietly considering the use of the Kosovo Liberation Army to help funnel food and other aid to refugees in Kosovo, say relief groups and U.S. officials.

Amid reports that starvation threatens many ethnic Albanians displaced within the Yugoslav region, officials are weighing the feasibility of having ethnic Albanian fighters help local volunteers and other aid workers carry supplies along backwoods guerrilla routes into Kosovo.

This approach would face daunting political and logistical obstacles. Working with the KLA would probably be highly controversial, in part because of the rebel group’s alleged connections with drug dealing and other criminal activities. And the guerrillas might be able to transport only a small fraction of the food needed by the ethnic Albanians forced from their homes by Yugoslav military, police and paramilitary forces.

Yet the administration is “desperate” to avert mass starvation in Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, Serbia. Famine on that scale could raise political pressure for a ground invasion, said one person familiar with officials’ thinking, who added that administration officials are “burning the midnight oil” to come up with some workable solution.

Though the plan is at an early stage, its consideration is a sign of how in recent weeks some senior administration officials have become increasingly interested in collaborating--in limited ways, at least--with the ethnic Albanian guerrillas.

While others in the administration are still dubious about working with the rebels, some U.S. officials are portraying these thinly armed and often barely trained guerrillas as a capably led force with a good chance of eventually overwhelming Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s forces in the province.

U.S. and NATO officials freely acknowledge the increasing urgency of feeding refugees within Kosovo. No one knows how many ethnic Albanians have been forced to leave their homes or have left in fear; estimates range from 200,000 to 800,000. NATO officials spent hours discussing this problem during last weekend’s NATO summit in Washington, officials said.

In recent days, physicians and other humanitarian aid workers have reported that refugees are emerging from Kosovo in increasingly weak condition. Refugees have described going without food for days or weeks; they have told tales of infants dying of starvation.

“In just the last couple of days, it’s gotten a lot worse,” said Leonard Rubenstein,] director of Physicians for Human Rights in Washington.

While the administration remains intent on avoiding the use of ground troops, some analysts believe that television news footage of mass starvation is one of the few developments that could force the Western alliance to shift its position and order an invasion.

Officials believe that the rebels might be able to help lead relief workers through mountain paths into Kosovo, perhaps transporting supplies by mule.

Some humanitarian groups believe that the group best equipped for distributing such aid is the Mother Teresa Society, a Kosovo-based organization that in the past has helped a variety of outside relief organizations funnel assistance into the province.

While this group has struggled to continue its work since Yugoslav forces stepped up their “ethnic cleansing” campaign last month, its workers know the terrain and the people, relief workers say.

Still, everyone involved acknowledges the obstacles. Carrying the supplies would mean traversing dangerous mountains that Yugoslav forces are pounding with artillery.

One Pentagon official said the Serbs consider the KLA “the targets they’re trying to hit. . . . If you’re near them, you’re going to be a target too.”

By most estimates, sustaining the “internally displaced persons” within Kosovo over weeks and possibly months of continued NATO air attacks on the province would require a regular flow of trucks carrying food. And this approach might feed only a fraction of these refugees.

“The problem is, the volume [of food carried by rebels] would be small,” acknowledged one administration official.

While the KLA forces are concentrated primarily in the western part of Kosovo, near Albania, the displaced persons are scattered throughout much of the province. Because they are dispersed by design--to hide out from the Serbs--aid workers would have a hard time finding many of them.

Despite these drawbacks, this approach has advocates within and outside the administration because of the problems with the other possibilities.

“This is probably the only realistic way for them to be supplied,” said Jim Bassuener, associate director of the Balkan Action Council, a nonprofit advocacy group that has pushed for more aggressive measures to help the Kosovo Albanians.

There are precedents for such an approach. During the Afghan civil war in the 1980s, aid groups teamed up with the moujahedeen rebels to bring in aid. Relief groups allied with partisans also have transported aid in the ongoing Sudanese civil war.

NATO officials still are looking at other options, but none seem to offer great hope.

Milosevic has talked to the International Committee of the Red Cross about allowing safe passage for relief workers, but so far this has come to nothing. Meanwhile, the relief workers who have entered the province have been too few in number to have much impact.

Using airdrops to deliver food to the refugees would require a large number of cargo planes flying at low altitudes, making the aircraft vulnerable to Serbian antiaircraft artillery and shoulder-mounted missiles, NATO officials say.

NATO planners have estimated that it would take 50 to 100 C-130 cargo planes to carry enough food for 250,000 displaced persons; to feed 800,000--the high end of the estimated range--would probably require more than 300 planes and would so congest the airways as to force a halt to airstrikes, German Gen. Klaus Naumann, NATO’s second-ranked general, said this week.

Another possibility, setting up protective enclaves for refugees, would involve the use of ground troops--still unacceptable to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Bassuener, of the Balkan Action Council, said his group believes that ground forces are the only real solution, and that bringing in aid with KLA help is a halfway measure.

“We’re talking about palliatives,” he said. “But this is at least feasible.”