The tanks never came. Instead, the Yugoslavs hit a KLA outpost on the outskirts of Oshlan. The fire fight raged for more than three hours, but forces from the village did succeed in rescuing their besieged comrades. It was an exhausting day–and Rahman expects no rest soon. He says the fighting will keep on no matter what peace terms may be signed in France this week with the Serbs who rule what’s left of Yugoslavia. “We don’t believe in their words,” he told NEWSWEEK. “We believe in our guns.” His remarks were almost drowned out by the boom of an incoming shell.
That’s a lot of faith to invest in a tiny arsenal. In the past year the KLA has grown from almost nothing to a fighting strength in the tens of thousands. Their weapons are no better than you’d expect from a makeshift army of farmers, teachers and other civilians. Still, the KLA easily matches the Serbs for raw stubbornness. Russia and the West are pushing a plan to make the breakaway Serb province an autonomous region and deploy 28,000 NATO peacekeepers there. Last month the outsiders spent two weeks at the table trying to force the deal on the warring parties. The Serbs said no; the KLA said they’d think about it. Talks resume this week. Many KLA members still refuse to accept less than full independence. And the Serbs reject any plans to put foreign troops on their soil. U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke flew home from Belgrade last Wednesday, saying his latest visit to Slobodan Milosevic had been a failure.
The Yugoslav president saw no reason to endorse the Americans’ deal. The U.S. Congress was preparing to vote on Bill Clinton’s plan to send 4,000 U.S. peacekeepers to Kosovo–and almost no one thought the White House would win. But Madeleine Albright personally telephoned 40 or so congressmen to ask for their support. Bob Dole, just back from the war zone, testified on the potential hazards of letting the Balkans burn out of control. The secretary of State and the former Republican presidential nominee carried the day: if the deal is signed, U.S. troops will go in.
The first move belongs to the KLA. Last month’s talks ran aground in part because of the Kosovars’ disdain for mere autonomy. Hoping to avoid a repetition of that disappointment, Dole–a longtime supporter of Kosovo’s Albanians–appeared on Albanian-language TV last week in Kosovo. He excoriated the KLA’s top officials for their reluctance to compromise. He particularly singled out the group’s political head, Hashim Thaci, denouncing him as “an invisible leader who never appears and provides no leadership.” If Thaci does finally sign on to a peace pact, as widely expected, the pressure will be on Milosevic. NATO jets are primed to bomb if the Serb boss fails to join in.
By now Milosevic should know better than to sell the KLA short. The Serbs insist that Kosovo is an integral part of their territory. But roughly 90 percent of its inhabitants are Albanian–and they seem firmly behind the armed rebels. Scarcely a year ago the KLA was an obscure separatist group with no more than a few hundred members. Then the Serbs brutally massacred a KLA founder and his family, setting off an Albanian uprising provincewide. More Kosovars joined the rebels after a Serb crackdown last fall displaced some 300,000 Kosovars.
Even as the KLA expanded, it reconfigured its ranks from a ragtag assemblage of village militias into a structured fighting force. The rebels divided the province into six geographic zones, each fielding several brigades of up to 1,000 troops. Lately politics has engaged most of the central leadership’s attention. Military strategy has increasingly been left to field commanders with professional military backgrounds, primarily veterans of the Yugoslav army.
Most of the new commanders joined only in the last year. Negi, a wiry 27-year-old, fought the Serbs in both Croatia and Bosnia before enlisting in the KLA last April. He brought along some new ideas he had picked up from a private American company, Military Professional Resources Inc., which trained the Bosnian army. Now he’s working to organize his troops into small, mobile units, Western style. “We are attempting to make this a more professional army,” he says, “not just a group of village patriots.”
An all-out offensive would still probably crush them. Most of Kosovo is too flat and open to support a guerrilla war. And the KLA is hopelessly outgunned. Still, the rebels can boast at least one advantage: a sense of total commitment. “I gave my 1-month-old son my name in case I’m killed,” says Enver Rusteni, a for-ward observer on the front lines, east of Oshlan. The former construction worker crouches low to avoid a burst of machine-gun fire from a Yugoslav tank some 500 yards away. “That’s the difference between the Serbs and us,” he continues. “We’re willing to die.”
Many of them may have to. As the army moved closer to Oshlan last Saturday, Rahman’s deputy, Enver Orucaj, was reached on his mobile phone. “We’ll fight to the last bullet,” he vowed as shells exploded in the background. Later, journalists traveling the main road to the north passed jubilant Serbian troops high-fiving each other by the roadside. Behind them, smoke rose from Oshlan and two neighboring villages. That evening another call was made to Orucaj’s phone. It was answered by a Serb.
