Games Without Frontiers

It has been no secret for months that weapons from China and other former Warsaw pact countries find their way to Serbia's troubled province of Kosovo. Police at first confiscated mainly Yugoslav-made weapons, which - according to ethnic Albanians based in Western Europe - is being bought on Yugoslavia's black market rich with all kinds of armament. Bardli Mahmuti, a Switzerland-based Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) activist collecting financial aid for the UCK cause, told the Christian Science Monitors periodical that the economic crisis in Serbia allows his compatriots to buy all the weapons they need in Belgrade. He claims that ethnic Albanians have donated large amounts of money since last winter's clashes in Likosani and Prekaz. "We don't intend to buy tanks, but we need anti-aircraft missiles. We do not have our own airforce, but we are trying to get anti-aircraft weapons. When we do, Serbia will ask for truce", Mahmuti aid.

The UCK arsenal changed early this year. Yugoslav-made weapons have been replaced with Chinese automatic rifles, semi-automatic rifles, hand grenades, RPG-7 rocket launchers and other weapons. Soviet World War II hardware was infiltrated from neighbouring Albania and bought on Yugoslavia's black market. In 1991, thousands of Soviet-made rifles were handed out in Eastern Slavonia and other Croatian regions which became battlefronts soon afterwards.

Albania, however, remains Kosovoñs largest weapons supplier. During the 1997 riots, the Albanian army fell apart and over 1.5 million weapons were looted from its depots. Around 600,000 pieces are still missing in spite of the government's effort to retrieve them through a kind of an auction. AK-47 rifles sold for 15 German marks in Albania last summer. This enticed various "enterprisers" to start a little business of their own. They bought truckloads and sold them for 200 marks on the world's black market. It is believed that Saddam Hussein alone bought anything that shoots in the past few years and paid whatever it cost.

Arms are smuggled from Albania by road, sea and air. It is transported in trucks, boats, ships and carried by mules. Greeks, Italians, Macedonians and Yugoslavs seized quite a few weapons at their borders and even elsewhere.

It seems that foreign-based ethnic Albanian immigrants needed time to raise cash and organize contraband routes to Kosovo. However, they faced a few obvious problems.  Contrary to the widespread belief, Albanians are not too sentimental about their Kosovo compatriots and their primary motive for doing business with them is profit. On the other hand, contraband was made easier by the fact that the Albanian army is in tatters and quite incapable of guarding its borders, which is probably why a team of NATO border patrol instructors recently visited Albania. The The landscape of Albania's border with Yugoslavia and Macedonia is made of impassable mountains and it is virtually impossible to guard it in whole as none of the three countries have the financial means to deploy as many troops and weapons as necessary.

Albanian foreign-based organizations and local UCK activists raise money through donations and taxes to buy weapons and finance their connections in Albania. The arms are collected and a caravan of mules creep through the night with their guides towards Kosovo. The routes were frequently used to contraband fuel, liquor and cigarettes during the UN-imposed sanctions against Yugoslavia, so the mules can almost get to the destination with their eyes closed. The idea is to cross the border while the patrols are at other end, unload the cargo and get lost as quickly as possible.

Albanian border patrols are few and far between and hardly try to get in the way. Most of the border outposts are deserted and the guards might well be bribed to turn a blind eye when they do see a caravan. Northern Albania is not fully controlled by the government in any case because it is populated by the followers of opposition leader Salli Berisa.
Yugoslav border guards are stretched across a long border in the highlands and do not control it fully all the time. Nevertheless, contraband routes can be detected and cut off with wise tactics and smart intelligence work.

That's exactly what happened on April 16 and 19. A Yugoslav border patrol ambushed a caravan of fifty with 12 mules and took it apart. The smugglers opened fire at the border guards and had five of their mules killed in the resulting conflict. The Yugoslav patrol sustained no losses and seized 156 semi-automatic rifles, 61 automatic rifles, four machine guns, seven hand grenades, 251 semi-automatic rifle clips, 10,484 rounds, uniforms and some plain clothes. Albanian sources in Kosovo said two days later that two young men from the nearby village of Ponosevac were wounded that night in a border incident.

On the morning of April 19, a border patrol intercepted a group of five who attacked them with automatic weapons and a hand grenade. The assailants backed off after a crossfire and left behind three automatic rifles, two semi-automatic rifles, 16 hand grenades , seven clips, 388 rounds and three backpacks with clothes. The border patrol had no losses.

An attempt by a joint Yugoslav-Albanian team to open an investigation itno the incident failed. The Yugoslav Army Headquarters said a group of ten people opened fire at the team when they tried to collect evidence, in the presence of two Albanian border guards. The Yugoslav border guards did not return fire and asked an Albanian member of the delegation, Selim Demusi, to speak with the assailants. He returned saying he could neither persuade them to stop shooting nor guarantee safety to his Serbian collegaues. He then contacted his superiors and asked for an Albanian military intervention to get rid of the assailants. The ten armed civilians withdrew after a while.
The same day, Macedonian police said it had detected a route for smuggling arms from Albania to Macedonia. Ten automatic rifles, 11 clips, 14 hand grenades, 4,700 rounds, all Chinese-made, were detected in a warehouse near the town of Struga.

No one is certain exactly how many weapons cross the border and how many are confiscated, which is only more reason for concern. A police assessment placed the figure at 200,000, including anti-tank RPG 7 and RPG 8 missiles. The UCK also managed to purchase a large number of sophisticated radio-stations, hard to detect or neutralize.
More manpower, weapons and hardware has made the UCK considerably stronger than it was a few months ago. The UCK can no longer be described as a group of armed peasants defending their villages. Reporters who spent some time in the border region lying between Djakovica and Prizren say that armed UCK members can be seen in every village in broad daylight, very close to army barracks and police outposts. A foreign reporter who spoke to them said they looked trained, disciplined and well-armed. According to him, they have Chinese rifles, and U.S. revolvers, hand grenades and uniforms.

The March incidents caused revolt among many ethnic Albanians, who believe that the time for an armed uprising has come. The situation is especially tense in the Decani region. The village of Babaloc, full of Serb refugees from Albania, has been attacked by the UCK for days. Police and the army have deployed troops to protect the population and there are reports that the village has been shelled by the UCK.

Police say that most of the attacks come from the nearby village of Glodjani. Vremeñs reporter on the scene was told that trenches had been dug in Glodjani earlier this month. It seems the UCK wants to provoke a military intervention in Glodjani and invoke the effects of the incidents in Donji Prekaz. If that happens, there will be dead women and children along with UCK members and the world will once again be told that Serbs are invading ethnic Albanian villages in Kosovo to kill innocent civilians.

The most worrying thing is that neither side has the intention of resolving the conflict peacefully. The peace talks have become ever so uncertain since the leading party rallying ethnic Albanians, the Democratic Alliance of Kosovo (LDK), split into two factions. One of them stayed loyal to its president Ibrahim Rugova, while the other went to the party's deposed vice-president Hidayet Hisseni. Both factions have claimed legitimacy over  the party, which is important because this party was officially registerted with the federal authorities back in 1991. Whoever loses the battle for legitimacy must ask Milosevic for a new registration or face a ban, either of which could have undesired consequences. Ethnic Albanians have no confidence in Rugova's new presidency so he stands alone. Hisseni has been joined by Redzep Cosja and a number of officials representing the Union of Political Prisoners. The Union of ethnic Albanian students and Adem Demaci's Parliamentary Party no longer have any influence on the Albanian political scene.
The Serbian state-controlled media rethoric bear a ghastly resemblence to the 1991-93 period and reflect the regime's determination to add more fuel to the fire in Kosovo. "It seems that Milosevic can't wait for the situation in Kosovo to get out of control and blame the international community for it. He used the same method to convince his people that the international community was to blame for what happened in Bosnia and Krajina", a foreign diplomat said.

The UCK took full advantage of the political stalemate in Kosovo brought  by Milosevic and Rugova. Even if the two were to agree on something, it is very uncertain whether the ethnic Albanians would accept any of it. "The education agreement was signed two and a half years ago. So far, we had to go out of our way to get the Albanian institute building and two gyms. We have no reason to believe that these two will actually implement any kind of agreement", Hisseni told the weekly Vreme.

He said the accusations that his LDK faction is extremist do not stand. "Being radical in a non-violent movement is not being an extremist. We only want to exploit the possibilities Rugova hasn't. It is the only way to push back the real extremists and avert war.

That may well be true, but it may well be too late for this kind of approach. The "real extremists" have put on their uniforms and taken matters as well as weapons into their own hands. According to unofficial but reliable reports and quite visible developments on the ground, the UCK controls much of the border region lying between Pec and Prizren, whose link with Drenica is the Klina corridor. Police and the army control roads and some villages in this area during the day, but only their outposts and barracks during the night. The situation is very much the same as in Algeria in the fifties, Vietnam in the sixties and Afghanistan in the eighties. The inability of the troops to control what is supposedly their territory is less of a problem for the Serbian regime than the fact that it has nothing to offer the ethnic Albanians as an alternative for what the LDK and UCK are offering. There is only one way to prevent the uprisng in Kosovo from becoming a full scale liberation war. The Serbian authorities need to convince the ethnic Albanians that they are better off staying in Serbia. That can't be accomplished by issuing statements such as "Kosovo has autonomy" and "ethnic Albanians enjoy the broadest rights possible". The only two options the Serbian regime has offered the ethnic Albanians is that they should either become Serbs or take Seselj's advice and run for their lives across the Prokletije mountains.

The ethnic Albanians have a clearly defined goal, a national concensus and a strategy how to achieve it. Serbia has none of the three. All it has is the determination to defy the international community, as shown by the referendum. One should not go to war without a defined goal, a concensus and a strategy, for war is only an extended hand of politics. Serbia's policy in Kosovo shows that its regime has learned nothing from the wars in Croatia and Bosnia.