KLA trains refugees to recapture border territory
By Chris Stephen, in Kukes
The Serb attack is encouraging thousands of recruits to join the
KLA and launch an offensive. Thousands of Kosovo refugees
fleeing Serbian forces are being trained and equipped for war
by the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army at bases along the
mountainous Albanian-Yugoslav border.
While the ranks of this new army are filled by young men and
women, truckloads of new uniforms, machine-guns and rocket
launchers are arriving in northern Albania for a planned
offensive.
"The Serbs thought that by clearing the terrain they would also
be pushing back the Kosovo Liberation Army - but the
opposite is happening," said the commander of one base high
in the snow-covered Prjokletiie mountains.
With the rebels worried that these bases, some less than a mile
from the frontier, will be shelled, we were not allowed to know
the camp's location or the commander's name. But this
makeshift base - little more than a wide group of converted
farm houses and tents - was a hive of activity.
Young recruits in new uniforms - mostly US or German
camouflage pattern imported from Europe - clustered around
demonstrators, brandishing machine-guns and anti-tank rocket
launchers. During the afternoon loud detonations echoed from
surrounding hills as recruits practised firing the rockets and
mortars.
Many of them appeared stunned by the continuing ethnic
cleansing which they have just seen.
"I ran from my house a week ago. I was working for an aid
agency, I was a target," said Ms Giylinaze Sylia, from the
northern Kosovo town of Pec. "I saw the police. They put
masks over their faces; they went out and stole everything."
Ms Sylia has no news of her 74-year-old mother and younger
sister who lived with her in the town, one of the first from
which the population was expelled.
"I am very angry, very frustrated and very sad," she said.
"Now I am a doctor, I trained originally as a pharmacist. I look
after the soldiers when they are on the firing range in the
afternoons, in case they get hurt. I prefer to train with a gun
because then maybe I can fight."
More recruits arrive all the time along the dirt road that leads to
the base, some from across western Europe, after last week's
call to arms in which the KLA urged some of the 300,000
ethnic Albanian men among Europe's emigre population to
return home to fight.
"Thousands of men are coming from everywhere," said the
KLA's British spokesman, Mr Pleurat Sejdru. "We hope to
launch a new offensive."
The hope of unit commanders is that this offensive will break
through Serb lines to link up with at least one of five enclaves
still being held by the guerrillas inside Kosovo. KLA officials
say these enclaves are cut off, with thousands of civilians in
each running out of food and medical supplies.
The KLA has urged the West to air drop supplies to prevent
mass starvation. "We can fight, but we also have to look after
our civilians," said a spokesman at its office in the Albanian
capital, Tirana.
The new recruits are young, cheerful and inexperienced. The
more seasoned units remain out of sight, on the border itself,
where they fight daily duels with Serb forces.
Leading the recruits yesterday in weapons training was a man
in his mid-30s called "Cowboy Jim", because his uniform is
American. He also wears a camouflaged stetson hat.
Recruits are easy to find, with tens of thousands of Kosovans
still streaming across the border in the most systematic
campaign of ethnic deportation seen in Europe since the
second World War.
"Volunteers are no problem, we have about 1,000 a day
wanting to join," said the base commander. A thick-set man in
his early 40s, he is a former officer of the Communist-era
Yugoslav army - before it was purged of non-Serbs. He said
he also fought for the mainly-Muslim Bosnian government
forces in the war against Bosnian Serbs.
"We are training hard at all these camps. We are getting the
force ready to make the punch," he said. Whether that punch
will work is another matter.
Western military experts say the KLA remains short of
experienced soldiers and the fire-power needed to take on the
Yugoslav army.
"Tanks, artillery, that's the problem," said the commander. But
he said the KLA was full of confidence following NATO air
strikes and the impending US deployment of 24 of their most
modern attack helicopter, the Apache, to Albania.
Albania is keeping its own threadbare forces carefully out of
the way of the impending battle, and much of the border area is
now, in effect, garrisoned by the KLA.
The West, meanwhile, has been turning a blind eye. At a
second hilltop base yesterday a lone white jeep carrying
monitors of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in
Europe rumbled up the winding mountain road as explosions
rocked an adjacent hillside.
But the monitors did not stop to talk to the KLA or even get
out of their jeep, merely turning around and going home.
The United States is considering supporting the KLA. A
private company, Military Personnel Resources Incorporated
(MPRI), made up of former US forces personnel, is ready to
provide training to the guerrillas if Washington agrees.
MPRI made its name by providing the planning expertise in
1995 which led Croatia to clear Serbs from their province of
Krajina.
If Kosovo is to be retaken, NATO would prefer to see KLA
lives expended rather than its own. But undertaking direct
training of the rebels would be politically risky, with Russia
likely to demand the right to send Serbia compensatory military
aid.
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