What's beyond Uck-Kla?

WHO AND WHAT IS THE KLA?

By Gregory R. Copley, Editor

The Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosove (UCK) or Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) has several “parents” — including the Iranian and Bosnia-Herzegovina governments — and several important “midwives-cum-doting aunts”, including the United States, Croatian and Turkish governments and a wide range of individuals.
The KLA would not be the significant factor it is today in the Kosovo crisis, however, had it not been for the blessing of the United States Clinton Administration, and for the direct and indirect support given to it by the Clinton Administration.
It now seems clear that the US Clinton Administration and the German Government have been actively supporting the KLA since 1992 with weapons, training, intelligence and, most importantly, significant political encouragement.
The final turning point in KLA fortunes came when US special envoys Richard Holbrooke and Peter Galbraith posed in 1998 for pictures with the KLA leadership, thereby cementing the endorsement.
Ironically, the KLA has its origins in the stalinist/leninist/maoist Albanian Party of Labor of the late Albanian leader Enver Hoxha. Today, although clearly of a maoist bent — its leader, Adem Demaci, uses the maoist clenched fist salute constantly — it also uses the appeals of nationalism and religion to win converts among the Kosovar Albanians.
Gradually, following the end of the stalinist era in Albania in 1992, the KLA, by now mainly operating out of Germany and among the expatriate Albanian Kosovars, as well as inside Albania, began drifting more toward becoming a purely criminal organization, almost totally preoccupied with narcotics trafficking and extortion to sustain itself. Not much has changed since then, apart from the addition to the KLA’s persona of political-military support from the Iranian Government and then from the US and German governments.
In a landmark report — Italy Becomes Iran’s New Base for Terrorist Operations — written for Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy in late 1997, and published in the April-May 1998 edition, Senior Editor Yossef Bodansky noted: “[B]y late 1997, the Tehran-sponsored training and preparations for the Liberation Army of Kosovo (UCK — Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves — in Albanian; OVK in Serbian), as well as the transfer of weapons and experts via Albania, were being increased. Significantly, Tehran’s primary objective in Kosovo has evolved from merely assisting a Muslim minority in distress to furthering the consideration of the Islamic strategic access along the Sarejevo-to- Tiranë line. And not only by expanding and escalating subversive and Islamist-political presence can this objective be attained.”
“In the Fall of 1997, the uppermost leadership in Tehran ordered the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps; the Pasdaran] High Command to launch a major program for shipping large quantities of weapons and other military supplies to the Albanian clandestine organizations in Kosovo.”
“... [B]y early December 1997, Iranian intelligence had already delivered the first shipments of hand grenades, machine- guns, assault rifles, night vision equipment, and communications gear from stockpiles in Albania to Kosovo. ... the Iranians began sending promising Albanian and UCK commanders for advanced training in [Iranian-controlled] al-Quds forces and IRGC camps in Iran. Meanwhile, weapons shipments continue. Thus Tehran is well on its way to establishing a bridgehead in Kosovo.”
The report detailed the KLA’s requirements for men and equipment, and outlined the KLA’s proposed theaters of operations. [The full text of the report is available on the Defense & Foreign Affairs website at www.StrategicStudies.org.]
The report further went on to say that the KLA’s radical wing was considering the assassination of the leader of the moderate Democratic League of Kosovo (DLK), Dr Ibrahim Rugova, and Fehmi Agani, the DLK deputy chairman, and blaming Belgrade for the killings. Dr Rugova, however, escaped assassination and remained in Yugoslavia to help negotiate a peaceful solution to the Kosovo crisis. Even after the NATO bombings began on March 24, 1999, he remained in Yugoslavia to help negotiate an end to the crisis, a move which has led KLA sources to “leak” to the media the fact that Dr Rugova was, in fact, “a virtual prisoner” of the Yugoslav Government, something which Dr Rugova’s visibility in the Yugoslav media should have dispelled.
Dr Rugova’s position, however, is not one which the US Clinton Administration wishes to hear. The US committed itself to the KLA, and therefore to trying to break off Kosovo — with its 20 ethnic groups, not just the Kosovar Albanians — into a separate state. So the thought that Dr Rugova was “a virtual prisoner” remained in the media interpretation, blessed by the Clinton White House. Either because of political commitment, or to simplify the public’s perceptions, the Clinton Administration has promoted the view that the KLA represents those Kosovo residents of Albanian origin. Clearly, the KLA does not. The KLA has for some years based its revenue collection on extorting money from expatriate Kosovars under the threat of assassination of their relatives at home, and on drug trafficking and violence aimed largely at the Kosovo people themselves.
The KLA is the principal proponent of the “greater Albania” philosophy, under which the organization first hopes to achieve an independent Kosovo under its control and then to use that base to take over Albania itself, given that Albania is currently in a virtual state of anarchy. Before that stage is reached, however, the swelling Albanian minority in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYRM) would be targeted for either complete takeover or for the “Albanian part” to be targeted for “independence”. These are objectives which the KLA does not bother to hide. However, the German and US administrations have chosen to ignore these objectives, and the ongoing criminal activities of the organization.
As noted, the KLA, supported since 1992 by the US and Iran — who are, in fact, strategic opponents, given the Iranian clerical administration’s structural incompatibility with the West — received much support and training from the radical Muslim leadership of Bosnia-Herzegovina, under President Alija Izetbegoviæ. It may be a matter of some significance that during 1992, before William Clinton became US President, he signed, as Governor of the US State of Arkansas, an “initiative” with the “Socialist Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina”. In response, the Bosnians “pronounce[d] the month of April 1992 as ‘The Month of Bosnia-Berzegovina and Arkansas’”. The Official Gazette of the Bosnians, in February 1992, published the following item, dated February 15, 1992: “On acceptance of the initiative of the governor of the state of Arkansas, on establishment of close cooperation with the Socialist Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina: The initiative of the governor of the state of Arkansas on establishment of close cooperation between the Socialist Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the field of culture, education, economy, science and other forms of cooperation is hereby accepted.”
The implications for the KLA are apparent in this closeness.
Ironically, the KLA’s head of élite forces, Muhammed al-Zawahiri, is the brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the military commander for Saudi-born terrorist leader, Osama bin Laden. The US Clinton Administration has, of course, declared bin Laden “public enemy number one” for his alleged involvement in the bombing of the two US embassies in East Africa in 1998. And Ayman al-Zawahiri has been implicated in the assassination attempt in 1995 against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Little wonder that numerous US policy analysts, even those who are hostile to Yugoslavia as a basic stance, are extremely uncomfortable with the Clinton Administration’s close ties with the KLA.
There is no doubt that the involvement of the two brothers al-Zawahiri in the two movements is not coincidental. Ben Works, director of the Strategic Research Institute of the US, noted: “There’s no doubt that bin Laden’s people have been in Kosovo helping to arm, equip and train the KLA. ... [T]he [US] Administration’s policy in Kosovo is to help bin Laden. It almost seems as if the Clinton Administration’s policy is to guarantee more terrorism.”
Noted strategic analyst and columnist, former US Army Colonel Harry Summers, said on August 12, 1998, that in Kosovo, the US found itself “championing the very Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups who are our mortal enemies elsewhere”.
The KLA’s criminal activities are well-known in Europe, but in nearby Italy, they are of greatest concern, because increased war will make its first impact on the European Union’s prosperity by affecting Italy. In the first two weeks of January 1999, alone, there were nine murders carried out in Milan by KLA assets. The line between the KLA and the other purely criminal Albanian mafia elements is now indistinguishable. And yet this is the group favored by the Clinton Administration (and as a result by the Blair Administration in the UK) over the moderate Kosovo Albanian leaders who have always sought to create a situation in which Yugoslavs of Albanian origin could live, pray and work in harmony alongside the other 25 Yugoslav nationalities. Indeed, Clinton and Blair deliberately overturned a workable agreement signed by all Yugoslav parties in Kosovo so that the KLA-written “Rambouillet Accords” could be served up as an ultimatum to the Yugoslav Government. Agim Gashi, 35, an ethnic Albanian from the Kosovo capital, Pristina, was, until his recent arrest, the major drug dealer in Milan. In a March 15, 1999, article (ie: before the bombing began) by writer William Norman Grigg, an Italian police telephone intercept was cited in which Gashi urged his Turkish heroin suppliers to continue shipments during the holy Muslim period of Ramadan. Gashi said that the continuation of the shipments was for the sake of an important cause: “To submerge Christian infidels in drugs.” But at least part of the billions which Gashi made from the narcotics trade went to buy a variety of weapons for the KLA. Most of the weapons were from pirated Russian stocks, ironically. Today, Russia is trying to reinforce Yugoslavia in the fight against the KLA and NATO.
Grigg’s article continued:

The developments leading up to the Administration’s announcement of a US mission to Kosovo were projected with uncanny prescience in an August 12, 1998 analysis by the US Senate Republican Policy Committee (RPC). The report noted that ‘planning for a US-led NATO intervention in Kosovo is now largely in place ... The only missing element seems to be an event “with suitably vivid media coverage” that would make the intervention politically salable, in the same way that a dithering Administration finally decided on intervention in Bosnia in 1995 after a series of “Serb mortar attacks” took the lives of dozens of civilians: attacks which, upon closer examination, may in fact have been the work of the Muslim regime in Sarajevo, the main beneficiary of the intervention.’
“That the Administration is waiting for a similar trigger in Kosovo is increasingly obvious,” observed the RPC report. Last July [1998], the Administration had already described the “trigger” event it was seeking as a pretext for intervention. The August 4 [1998] Washington Post quoted “a senior US Defense Department official” who told reporters on July 15 that “we’re not anywhere near making a decision for any kind of armed intervention in Kosovo right now”. The Post observed that the official “listed only one thing that might trigger a policy change: ‘I think if some levels of atrocities were reached that would be intolerable, that would probably be a trigger.’
The “trigger” was pulled on January 16, 1999, when William Walker, the [US] Administration official assigned to Kosovo with a team of observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), announced that a “massacre” of more than 40 ethnic Albanian peasants by Serbian security personnel had taken place in the village of Raèak. The January 20 New York Times observed that the Racak “massacre” followed “a well-established pattern: Albanian guerillas in the Kosovo Liberation Army kill a Serb policeman or two. Serb forces retaliate by flattening a village. This time they took the lives of more than 40 ethnic Albanians, including many elderly and one child.”
However, as the French newspaper Le Figaro reported on the same day, there was ample reason to believe that Walker’s assessment of the situation was made in “undue haste”. Walker, the US official who headed a 700-man OSCE “verification” team monitoring a ceasefire in Kosovo, accused Serbian police of conducting a massacre “in cold blood”. According to Le Figaro’s account, Serb policemen, after notifying both the media and OSCE officials, conducted a raid on a KLA stronghold. After several hours of combat, Serbian police announced that they had killed 10 KLA personnel and seized a large cache of weapons. Journalists observed several OSCE officials talking with ethnic Albanian villagers in an attempt to determine the casualty count.
“The scene of Albanian corpses in civilian clothes lined up in a ditch which would shock the whole world was not discovered until the next morning, around 9am,” reported the French newspaper. “At that time, the village was once again taken over by armed [KLA] soldiers who led the foreign visitors, as soon as they arrived, toward the supposed massacre site. Around noon, William Walker in person arrived and expressed his indignation.” All of the Albanian witnesses interviewed by the media and OSCE observers on January 16 related the same version of events: namely, that Serbian police had forced their way into homes, separated the women from the men, and dragged the men to the hilltops to be unceremoniously executed.
The chief difficulty with this account, according to Le Figaro, is that television footage taken during the January 15 battle in Racak “radically contradict[s] that version. It was in fact an empty village that the police entered in the morning ... The shooting was intense, as they were fired on from [KLA] trenches dug into the hillside. The fighting intensified sharply on the hilltops above the village.” Rather than a pitiless attack on helpless villagers, the unedited film depicts a firefight between police and encircled KLA guerillas, with the latter group getting by far the worst of the engagement. Further complicating things for the “official” account is the fact that “journalists found only very few cartridges around the ditch where the massacre supposedly took place”.
“What really happened?” asks Le Figaro. “During the night, could the [KLA] have gathered the bodies, in fact killed by Serb bullets, to set up a scene of cold-blooded massacre?” Similar skepticism was expressed by Le Monde, a publication whose editorial slant is decidedly antagonistic to the Serbian side in any Balkan conflict.
“Isn’t the Racak massacre just too perfect?” wondered Le Monde correspondent Christophe Chatelot in a January 21 dispatch from Kosovo. Eyewitness accounts collected by Chatelot contradicted the now official version of the “massacre”, describing instead a pitched battle between police and well-entrenched KLA fighters in a nearly abandoned village. “How could the Serb police have gathered a group of men and led them calmly toward the execution site while they were constantly under fire from [KLA] fighters?” wrote Chatelot. “How could the ditch located on the edge of Racak [where the massacre victims were later found] have escaped notice by local inhabitants familiar with the surroundings who were present before nightfall? Or by the observers who were present for over two hours in this tiny village? Why so few cartridges around the corpses, so little blood in the hollow road where 23 people are supposed to have been shot at close range with several bullets in the head? Rather, weren’t the bodies of the Albanians killed in combat by the Serb police gathered into the ditch to create a horror scene which was sure to have an appalling effect on public opinion?”