Fateful Arrogance

Two and a half months ago, a reporter of a prominent US newspaper was given the assignment to make a story on the structure and strength of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). At that time, his editor-in-chief thought that the KLA was the fastest growing guerrilla organization in the world. Several weeks later, after an arduous adventure that took him from Brooklyn to Zurich and to the impassable terrain of Junik and northern Albania, the reporter produced the story, only to be told that it wouldn't be published. During those several weeks, the KLA virtually ceased to exist and became the most unsuccessful modern guerrilla movement of our time.

It doesn't take too much thinking to figure out why it failed. However, the story about an armed organization which claimed to control more than  half of Kosovo's territory in June and then lost it all in such a short period of time deserves an explanation. The errors made by the KLA can be classified into three categories - military, political and moral. The price of those errors is now being paid by thousands of ethnic Albanian civilians who lost their homes during the Serb offensive in Kosovo.

FATAL ERRORS: The KLA's military errors resulted from its fast and premature growth. From 1996 to last March, the KLA carried out more than 100 attacks on Serb police troops with minimum casualties. All that time the KLA was a small group of armed fighters employing hit and run tactics, which made things very difficult for Serb troops. However, the situation changed in March after many ethnic Albanian civilians were killed during a Serb police intervention in Drenica. Thousands of young volunteers joined the UCK seeking revenge. Apart from the burning desire to fight the Serbs, these young men had no skills required for modern warfare. They were undisciplined and untrained, and the sheer size of this unprofessional army ultimately led to the collapse of the KLA's chain of command. Rifts within the organization also played a significant part, although they weren't always visible - especially not when "liberation" was "within reach". The Serbian regime's weak and indecisive response to the KLA's rapid expansion incited unrealistic optimism among the organization's military staff and political leadership alike. Exalted by their unexpected success, the KLA leaders refused to face the obvious problem. The few individuals who dared mention it were qualified as defeatists and infiltrated Serb agents. Apart from all that, the KLA had no choice but to rely on a very traditional social and economic structure, which is why wealthy but uneducated "local chiefs" soon gained the power to make military decisions.

Quite according to their mental structure, these men were basically interested in the safety of their own villages but paid hardly any attention to what went on ten miles down the road. The few KLA officers with a military education were unable to resist them and the organization therefore lost its ability to move around quickly, which is the basic prerequisite for success in any guerrilla warfare. This proved fatal during the latest and most punishing Serb offensive. Instead of stretching the Serb troops along the supply lines by creating diversions, the KLA commanders decided that each village should be defended separately. Hence the KLA always dug trenches and took positions when it should have retreated and consequently retreated when it should have fought. The KLA's local structure often depended on the structure of the nearest village, meaning that entire populations often abandoned their villages after being defeated by Serb troops. The organization suddenly faced another heavy burden - an army of hungry civilians crawling behind its troops, desperate for food, shelter and protection the KLA was unable to provide.

The key political mistakes were made when the KLA's leadership was taken over by foreign-based Marxists and Leninists, semi-educated and ignorant men who became influential by sending money, arms and other "humanitarian aid" to ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. These people took some socialist theories too seriously, especially the one that quantity must always result in quality. They kept insisting that the KLA should organize itself as a proper army in a few weeks, although this was clearly an impossible task. They also ordered military operations which, quite simply, had to end in defeat.

"We have calculated that we could lose up to 300,000 people in the quest for Kosovo's independence, but we decided that it's an acceptable loss", said Bardi Mahmuti, the KLA representative for foreign-based ethnic Albanians. Mahmuti's statement is perhaps the best illustration of what he and his likes were capable of.

What’s more, these people issued a number of frivolous statements and threats to peace and stability in the Balkans and lost the sympathy of the major powers. A statement by Jakup Krasniqi, the KLA spokesman, that the organization's intention was to "liberate all the occupied territories until final unification" meant forming Greater Albania. No one else, including Albania, had the slightest interest in pursuing that goal.  Finally, the KLA's frequent flirtations with Islamic radicals in Teheran and Kabul discouraged the major powers from any kind of cooperation with the organization.

The final set of errors concerns ethics and wartime conventions. In the early stages of the conflict, the KLA picked its targets carefully and avoided civilians apart from those believed to be informants. However, the KLA fighters stopped being choosers as time went on, probably because of the organization's growing arrogance and lack of discipline. They started executing mailmen, cashier clerks and Serb peasants, who had nothing to do with the police and army troops. Apart from being hideous to the public, war crimes also have a devastating effect on the troops that commit them, as atrocities in Croatia and Bosnia clearly showed. It is fair to say that the KLA adopted and applied the very same idiotic strategy exercised in Croatia and Bosnia mainly by the Serbs (occupying undefendable territories, undefined war objectives and a confusing foreign policy). By doing that, the KLA proved that Serbs and Albanians are perhaps not as different as they want to be.

At this time, it is clear that the KLA is no longer a homogenous organization no matter how hard its spokesmen and political leaders try to keep it together. Things have became even more complicated with the emerging of a faction called itself FARK (an abbreviation of Armed Forces of the Kosovo Republic), comprising former police and JNA officers. The faction is linked to Bujar Bukosi, Kosovo's exiled "Prime Minister" whose relations with foreign-based Marxists and Leninists were always tense to say the least. FARK has a training camp in the northern Albanian town of Tropoja. It is believed that the organization's hard-line nucleus comprises several hundred individuals with a military education. However, it is apparent that FARK's existence concerns Krasniqi and the ethnic Albanian Marxists in Switzerland, who keep saying that the faction is undermining the ethnic Albanian cause by working for the Serbs undercover.

If FARK proves to be a relevant factor, and the Swiss-based Marxists and Leninists manage to reorganize themselves into small radical groups, the situation in Kosovo will become so complicated that even God almighty will be unable to resolve it. However, the Serbian regime is wrong in thinking that rifts among the ethnic Albanians alone will enable it to keep its southern province. The rifts could play into Serbia's hands to push forward its position in the peace talks - if Serbia only had one.