-Caveat Lector-
Vol. 15, No. 18 -- May 17, 1999 . . . . www.insightmag.com
Flirting With KLA Terrorists
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By J. Michael Waller
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Support is building to arm the KLA to fight against the Serbs in Kosovo,
though evidence suggests it is a drug-smuggling, leftist terrorist group
with plans of conquest.
anctions failed. Diplomacy failed. Even massive air attacks by
nuclear-capable strategic bombers failed. As the Clinton administration's
drive to force Yugoslavia to grant autonomy to Kosovar Albanians crumbled
amid the bombed-out hulks of government buildings, bridges and factories,
Washington seemed primed to try yet another weapon: waging a ground war by
arming what a former U.S. special envoy to Kosovo called a "terrorist
group." It's an option that, if implemented, will further complicate
Operation Allied Force, will risk throwing a monkey wrench into U.S.
counterterrorism and counternarcotics policy and could further complicate
relations with NATO allies.
. . . . With dashed hopes for the Yugoslavian regime's quick surrender, the
administration and Congress are considering an initiative to build up a
small guerrilla force, the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, into an effective
fighting machine. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright openly flirts
with the KLA, other officials say the United States wants closer relations
with the group. Some Capitol Hill staff following Kosovo are asking if,
despite NATO's open nonsupport, the United States already may be providing
covert assistance to the KLA.
. . . . Bipartisan initiatives in the House and Senate, meanwhile, openly
would fund the arming and training of the KLA into a full-scale irregular
army. Arming the KLA is attracting an unlikely coalition of Democratic and
Republican lawmakers with ethnic Albanian constituencies; politicians
squeamish about using U.S. and NATO ground forces but wanting some sort of
on-the-ground military presence against Yugoslavian forces in Kosovo; a
smattering of conservative armchair insurgency "experts" who invoke the
Reagan Doctrine of supporting anticommunist resistance movements; and
Marxist radicals who find the KLA's ideology compatible with their own.
. . . . Among the most prominent politicians favoring this scheme are polar
opposites, Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes and House Minority
Whip David Bonior of Michigan. While Forbes was hastening the collapse of
the Soviet empire in the 1980s as head of the board supervising Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty in the effort to undermine communist rule, critics say
Bonior was so friendly to the comrades that he became a cheerleader for the
Marxist-Leninist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and a leading foe of
democratic resistance there.
. . . . On April 14, six congressmen led by Rep. Eliot Engel, a New York
Democrat, introduced the Kosova Self-Defense Act to allocate $25 million to
train and arm the KLA. (The name of the Yugoslavian province itself is in
dispute. Kosovo is the Serbian-language name, while Albanians use the term
Kosova.) "The KLA is on the ground in Kosova now and, with proper weapons,
could defend innocent Kosovars against Serb predation," the hawkish Engel
reasons. "When Serb forces do leave, the KLA can serve as a peacekeeping and
police force until a government is organized. This would mean fewer NATO
troops, including U.S. forces, would be needed in the area." Sponsors
include Republican Mark Sanford of South Carolina and William Goodling of
Pennsylvania, as well as Bonior. Sens. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut
Democrat, and Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, have prepared similar
legislation, now under State Department review.
. . . . Veteran Reagan Doctrine proponents who have studied the KLA think
the proposal is a dangerous idea. "Some politicians have apparently confused
the KLA with the Nicaraguan Contras or the Afghan mujahideen of the 1980s,"
says Michael Radu of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.
In a memo circulating on Capitol Hill, Radu argues that arming the KLA
"would display both American ignorance of the true nature of the KLA and
despair at the failure of the NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia."
. . . . Not only does the KLA stake territorial claims on other countries,
including NATO ally Greece, but Insight's sources say it has roots in the
Sigurimi secret police of Albania's late Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha, who
had designs on a Greater Albania carved from Greece and countries that made
up Yugoslavia. "Some of its founders and leading cadres were associated with
the Yugoslavian Communist secret police or even . . . Sigurimi," according
to Radu. Even more disturbing are reports that the KLA has received military
support from Iran and from fugitive Saudi terrorist financier Osama bin
Laden, who is wanted for a spate of mass killings, including the 1998
bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. President Clinton
ordered cruise-missile attacks on alleged bin Laden targets in Sudan and
Afghanistan.
. . . . Last month, the Times of London reported that the KLA is involved in
the heroin trade and that Germany, Sweden and Switzerland, in conjunction
with the European police authority Europol, are probing "growing evidence
that drug money is funding the KLA's leap from obscurity to power." Italian
and Czech authorities also report KLA connections to weapons and narcotics
trafficking. If proved, allegations of terrorism and drug smuggling would
blow up in the face of Washington as it armed and equipped the KLA and would
drive a stake through U.S. antiterrorism and antinarcotics policy.
. . . . As it is, say Insight sources who specialize in this region,
Washington has undermined its own goal of supporting democracy there. U.S.
diplomacy has subverted more moderate, Western-oriented Kosovar Albanian
groups. The U.S. government "has seemingly undermined the anti-Marxist
faction" in Kosovo, says Daniel McAdams, a Budapest-based human-rights
worker and Phillips Foundation Balkan analyst who has visited Albania 15
times and is writing a study of the Albanian secret police. "The KLA has
politically ascended at the expense of the democratically elected [Kosovar
Albanian leader Ibrahim] Rugova and with the full support of the U.S.,"
McAdams tells Insight. "This shift in the power axis is most significant
when considering events which were to take place subsequently, as the KLA
had shown no hesitation to dispose of those Kosovar Albanians politically
opposed to its hybrid ideology of Maoism, Swiss banks, Chinese guns and
heroin."
. . . . "This month the KLA decided on its own government, overthrowing
Rugova after boycotting last year's election" that made Rugova the
first-ever democratically elected Kosovar Albanian leader, according to
McAdams. After Belgrade's crackdown, Rugova appointed an exile government in
Germany. But the KLA clamored for a more "broad-based" government on
KLA-controlled territory inside Kosovo.
. . . . The $25 million in the House legislation to back irregular forces,
according to a news release from Engel, "would be made available only for
grants to the interim government of Kosova and be used for training and
support for established self-defense forces -- the KLA." That would
effectively bar funds from going to any non-Marxist Kosovar resistance
forces. Right now, no such force exists; the KLA has made sure it would have
no competition.
. . . . "When the Kosovo Democratic League of Ibrahim Rugova," according to
Radu, "tried to establish its own armed branch, the armed forces of the
Kosovo Republic, with bases in Albania, the KLA promptly killed its leader."
The KLA also murdered other moderate Kosovar Albanian leaders allied with
Rugova. The goal, Radu says, is "to eliminate competitors from power."
. . . . The KLA alleges that Rugova is a sellout to Belgrade. That line is
consistent with what other extremist movements, from the Palestine
Liberation Organization and the Irish Republican Army to the Sandinistas,
have done to discredit rival leaders who don't share their ideology or brand
of violent revolution. Human-rights worker McAdams believes that Rugova, a
key to any peaceful settlement, initially fled to Belgrade to hide from KLA
assassins. No one outside the region knows for sure; Rugova is not free to
leave Yugoslavian custody or communicate freely with the outside world.
. . . . For the moment, Clinton administration officials only speak openly
of training KLA leaders to help them transition from an insurgency to a
political entity or standing constabulary force. "We want to develop a good
relationship as they transform themselves into a politically oriented
organization," says State Department spokesman James Foley. "We want to
develop closer and better ties with this organization." The models, in the
administration's view, are the Provisional Irish Republican Army and the
Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO. That line may be bending. On
April 16, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea acknowledged that NATO air attacks were
making the KLA "more effective" and seemed to hold out the possibility of
coordination in the future.
. . . . KLA supporters brush off the terrorist label as Serbian propaganda.
But before its military action against Belgrade's forces, the Clinton
administration used the same language, citing the KLA's strategy of
murdering people to provoke a Serbian crackdown that the KLA would use as a
pretext to wage more violence. In early 1998, State Department officials
belittled the KLA's name, known in Albanian as the UCK, and repeatedly
condemned what they called "terrorist action by the so-called Kosovar
Liberation Army." Ambassador Robert Gelbard, then a top policymaker on the
Balkans and the administration's special envoy to Kosovo, told reporters in
February 1998 that the State Department deplored violence "by terrorist
groups in Kosovo and particularly the UCK -- the Kosovar Liberation Army.
This is, without any question, a terrorist group."
. . . . The views of Gelbard, who is one of the government's top experts on
terrorism and international organized crime, should have carried a lot of
weight. Later, however, Gelbard retreated in Clintonian fashion, telling a
House panel that the KLA was not "classified legally by the U.S. government
as a terrorist organization."
. . . . Support for the KLA has become a political issue in states which
have sizable Albanian-American constituencies, including New York,
Connecticut and Massachusetts, and that might account for the parsing of
terrorist definitions in Washington. Engel, who sponsored the bill to aid
the KLA, is a seasoned veteran of ethnic politics. He boasts on his Website
that he is a leader of the Congressional Ad Hoc Committee on Irish Affairs,
was "the prime sponsor of the [nonbinding] congressional resolution
recognizing Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel" and was author of
"the bill designating October as Italian-American Cultural and Heritage
Month." As author of the KLA-support bill, Engel is wearing his hat as a
leader of the Congressional Albanian Issues Task Force.
. . . . Is arming the KLA just another throwaway campaign issue? Engel,
whose district in the Bronx is one of the most ethnically diverse in the
country, was a member of the House International Relations Committee and
warned early of an impending Yugoslavian crackdown on Kosovar Albanians.
However, the Almanac of American Politics observed in 1996 that he used his
committee seat not to further the na-tion's interest but instead "signed on
to the various foreign-policy causes of his district's European ethnics." He
promoted foreign-policy initiatives "almost as a type of constituent
service."
. . . . Other politicians also are likely to milk the KLA issue for
electoral gain. First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, for instance, has just
discovered Kosovo as she mulls a run for the Senate from New York. Though
she has not yet declared support for the KLA, she already champions Yasser
Arafat's PLO and Palestinian statehood. On a visit to New York on April 18,
she declared her intention to visit Kosovo as early as possible. "I've
expressed my very strong interest in going," she told refugee-relief groups,
"and as soon as I'm given the green light to go, I intend to go."
. . . . Support for the KLA by mainstream politicians is only weeks old, say
staffers on the Hill, and follows on the heels of hard-core sandal-wearing
groupies of Central American Marxists whose heroes petered out with the Cold
War. "Not since the Nicaraguan Sandinistas embodied anti-American Marxist
chic have the 'Sandalistas' of North America had such excitement for a
guerrilla group as the KLA," says professor Mark Almond of Oxford
University. A revolutionary-warfare expert, Almond last year chronicled KLA
agitprop from San Francisco to Switzerland and reported on an Internet-based
solidarity network that includes Fidel Castro-backed Latin American
guerrilla movements. That network has disappeared from Internet as the KLA
has gone more mainstream.
. . . . Almond tells Insight, "It is odd how links and sites which existed
in 1997 have been purged." He says, "Already similar myths are being created
to explain their struggle as the ones which made the Viet Cong so cozy in
the 1960s to readers of the New York Review of Books and draft dodgers
distant from the action," according to Almond. "Anyone who points out the
KLA's shadowy past and links to Marxist-Leninist groups is usually told (via
Internet abuse) that the KLA is based on local clan structures among the
Albanian peasantry." KLA supporters in the United States aren't too anxious
to shatter the images.
. . . . While acknowledging that the KLA has its share of unsavory figures,
Joseph O'Brien of Engel's district office in the Bronx shrugs, "It's a work
in progress." Asked about reports of heroin smuggling, ties to the communist
secret police and connections with Middle Eastern terrorists, O'Brien can
only say, "It's tough to tell where it's all coming from."
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