That ruthless tactic seems to be working. Thousands of moderate Albanians are abandoning their homes in Tetovo and fleeing in fear of their lives, despite appeals for calm from both Albanians and Slavs in Macedonia’s ruling coalition. Meanwhile, more and more young Albanians are talking about joining the “liberation” forces in the hills. In Macedonia the insurgents call themselves the National Liberation Army. But their uniforms look exactly like those of the old Kosovo Liberation Army, now supposedly disarmed, disbanded and living in peace under NATO protection, across the Serb border a few kilometers to the north. Even the two groups’ Albanian initials are the same: UCK.
Macedonia has been the only former Yugoslav Republic to escape the horror of ethnic war. Now it is on the verge of losing that distinction. For Europe and the United States the fear is that NATO may be dragged even deeper into the Balkan mess–or that the West would have to live with yet another abject failure to prevent a bloodbath. Although Western observers have praised the government’s coolheaded response to the crisis, a local police officer or an angry young Albanian could overreact at any moment, possibly setting off a disaster.
The conflict could ultimately be an even worse disaster for the West than Somalia was. If peacekeepers try to stop the new KLA, they will inevitably incur the Albanians’ wrath. Sooner or later that would mean a body count–and a very difficult political problem for George W. Bush. More than that, if NATO loses its will and pulls out, it could call into the question the alliance’s very legitimacy. Meanwhile, the new KLA seems intent on spreading the conflict across the region.
“Criminals and pseudopatriots,” Rauf Ramadani angrily calls the rebels. An ethnic Albanian himself (no relation to Sulejman), he is Tetovo’s chief of police. “For me the most disappointing thing is that a lot of people are running,” he says during an interview. The phone rings. Another relative is leaving town. “Don’t worry about me! Do what you want!” Ramadani barks into the receiver, then slams the phone down.
Kosovo’s UCK hard-liners have said they are fighting to create a Greater Albania–an objective that has been publicly repudiated even by the Albanian government–or a Greater Kosovo, a goal Kosovo’s own political leaders have renounced. Last week in Macedonia, the guerrillas claimed to be fighting for equal rights in the form of better schools and perhaps even a constitutional rewrite to establish an ethnic federation. But foreign and local officials on both sides of the Kosovo-Macedonia border say the conflict is largely about control of a growing Albanian-run criminal empire. This is a syndicate with a difference. Its kingpins are actively seeking to destabilize the entire region.
Few civilians dare to talk even anonymously about the rackets. The Balkans have always served as a back door to Europe. But the region’s fastest-growing industries–smuggling of prostitutes, drugs and other contraband of every description–have exploded since NATO drove the Yugoslav Army out of Kosovo in June 1999. The bosses are the enclave’s former “freedom fighters”: the KLA. In a sense they got into the business legitimately, at first creating covert networks that imported guns to fight the Serbs and exported refugees who were trying to escape Serb ethnic cleansing. Much of that traffic went through neighboring Albania, a nearly lawless place since the collapse of government authority in 1997 (next story).
Now the KLA has officially put down its guns and regrouped as the peacetime Kosovo Protection Force. But it’s supporting and fomenting insurgencies not only in neighboring Macedonia, but also in the Presevo Valley of southern Serbia. “Some of these folks started as thugs, became insurgents and now run both ‘businesses’,” says a senior Bush administration official. “They are profitable businesses. Clearly they [have fomented] an upsurge of activity in Macedonia.”
To the kingpins, peace is bad for business. “Once you establish the rule of law and start collecting taxes, or import duties, it threatens the smugglers,” says a top police official in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina. “So what do they do? They go out and kill Serbs. Stability isn’t profitable, conflict is.” Murders of minority Serbs and Gypsies in Kosovo are widespread, and draw scant condemnation even from moderate Albanians. Gunmen are increasingly fond of taking potshots at NATO’s Kosovo Protection Force (KFOR) peacekeepers as well. One such incident led to a shoot-out between KLA fighters and the U.S. Army’s 82d Airborne on March 8.
The crime lords have redrawn Kosovo’s internal map. Officials of the U.N. Mission in Kosovo say the enclave has been carved into seven mafia-style fiefdoms, roughly conforming to the KLA’s seven operational zones during the war, run mostly by former KLA commanders. Most of the bosses are now “generals” in the Kosovo Protection Corps, the supposedly weaponless militia created under the 1999 peace agreement. The lawlessness of Kosovo has allowed these former misfits to grow rich and powerful as never before in their communities. “This is a postwar or postconflict society with large population movements, a new political landscape, a cash economy and easy access to firearms,” says Christopher Albiston, the United Nations’ top law enforcer in Kosovo. “All that leads to a dangerous and unstable environment.”
Albiston heads a police force of roughly 8,000 officers. They have the assistance of some 38,000 KFOR troops who also perform many routine police duties. All told, that’s more peace officers than New York City has. Their job is to patrol an area whose population is roughly 1.6 million–about a fifth the size of New York. But Kosovo’s crime rate is as bad as any city’s in America, and the mob’s tentacles are spreading. Drug trafficking has become so prevalent that German and Scandinavian police now say Kosovo Albanians are their countries’ leading suppliers of heroin and other drugs. And in Italy, police there say, Albanian gangsters from both Albania and Kosovo are now the leading importers of prostitutes from Eastern Europe and Russia. Not surprisingly, no one knows when it will become possible for any of the KFOR troops or the U.N. police to go home again.
Even so, some foreign observers are refusing to despair. “Over time we’ve created basic security here,” insists one Western diplomat in Pristina. “Now comes the hard part–organized crime. For NATO, the key to an exit strategy is getting the law-and-order part right. And organized crime poses a threat to institutions of statehood. They’re a kind of antistate.” They have made violence the rule, not the exception. Few Serbs remain anywhere in Kosovo, except a few pockets under 24-hour KFOR guard. NATO even runs a special train, guarded by troops and escorted by helicopter gunships, to transport besieged Serbs from one enclave to another.
Last year KLA fighters started fomenting trouble in the neighboring Presevo Valley, along Kosovo’s eastern border with Yugoslavia. NATO had declared a ground safety zone (GSZ) there, off-limits to Yugoslav troops. Although the area was inside Serbia, it had a majority of Albanians, many of them complaining that Serb authorities had mistreated them. But many of the valley’s rebels were actually KLA hard-liners imported from inside Kosovo to fight under the name of a local Albanian group. By this year, the Presevo insurgency had grown to 2,000 fighters. Efforts by moderate Kosovo leaders to restrain the KLA’s forays were futile, and American KFOR troops, whose first priority was officially their own “force protection,” refrained from trying very hard to stop the traffic of troops and arms across the border. Last week, spurred by the fighting in Macedonia, NATO finally agreed to let Yugoslav troops occupy a small slice of the GSZ on the Macedonian border.
U.S. officials say the insurgents in Macedonia are clearly neither raw farm boys nor ill-disciplined street-corner toughs. There’s no doubt they have been soldiering a lot longer than a few weeks. “These boys were not your average locals,” says a Western official. “[They] were organized as a unit. They tried to conduct a flanking maneuver. They had sufficient training to be at least militarily capable.” After two weeks of border skirmishes, members of the U.S. 82d Airborne moved up to block the Kosovo border, and Yugoslav forces regained control of their Macedonian frontier. Macedonia-bound groups of insurgents kept their cool and quietly backed off without panicking. “They left in an orderly way,” says the official. Meanwhile, their comrades inside Macedonia launched a provocative attack on Tetovo, after local Albanian radicals organized an emphatically pro-guerrilla demonstration, with young men shouting “U-C-K! U-C-K!”
Macedonian police didn’t overreact, even when KLA snipers in the hills around town opened fire. “They did everything right,” says an approving Western diplomat. But many locals are rooting for the other side. A 19-year-old Tetovo Albanian proudly says: “People were really surprised at how well-planned the KLA action was.” The diplomat agrees it was all carefully calculated. “Clearly, the objective is to make the police break, and overreact. So far they haven’t.” After three days of inconclusive fighting, one civilian had been killed and 15 policemen wounded in Tetovo alone. Six other policemen and troops have been killed in border violence since January.
To some Albanians it’s all one big war. NEWSWEEK journalists traveling with the rebels have seen many of the same faces under more than one banner. Some of the Albanians in Tanusevci, the Macedonian mountain village where the fighting started in February, were locals–but others were Kosovars who were seen only a few weeks earlier fighting beside the Presevo Valley insurgents. “When we’re finished with Macedonia,” they like to promise, “Montenegro will be next.” That Yugoslav province, preparing for a vote on independence soon, has its own sizable Albanian minority.
It’s no accident that Macedonia’s fighting began in Tanusevci, a high mountain village on an old road that for years has been used to smuggle contraband to and from Kosovo. One of the town’s native sons is Xhavit Hasani, who claims to have been a founding member of the KLA and is wanted in Macedonia for shooting a policeman and a civilian in a property dispute in 1998. American KFOR troops arrested him on suspicion of murdering ethnic Serbs in Vitina, Kosovo, where he had been the local KLA commander. He was extradited to Skopje and then released on bail. Macedonian officials accuse him of being a main orchestrator of the recent fighting. “A normal border regime threatened their smuggling interests,” says Nikola Dimitrov, national-security adviser to Macedonia’s president, Boris Trajkovski. “Kosovo has become the combined Afghanistan and Colombia of the Balkans.”
NATO officials are alarmed. “This is really dangerous stuff,” says one U.S. official. Macedonia has been offered new Western military advisers, and the Americans have set up a military-liaison office to coordinate patrols on the troubled border. U.S. officials have also made a concerted effort to disavow any support for the KLA or its aims. No one is quite sure the message is getting through. The rebels have been featuring American flags on their posters to create the illusion that Washington supports them.
For Albanian moderates, the prospects are glum. They dominated the polls in Kosovo last October when municipal elections were held under international supervision. Moderate politicians trounced the hard-line nationalists. But the defeat only strengthened the extremists’ resolve–and nothing can stop them from stirring up violence and unrest at home and outside their borders. “The danger is that the extremists will delegitimize moderate Albanian leaders,” warns a U.N. official in Skopje. “And that could bring down the government.”
A lot of Macedonians aren’t waiting to see what will happen next. Thousands of Albanians and Slavs have already fled Tetovo. Passport offices across the country are mobbed. “The situation itself isn’t really all that bad,” insists Chief Ramadani. “But the panic is. Albanians are leaving because they’re afraid they have no protection from the police, and Macedonians are leaving because they’re afraid they have no protection from the Albanians. This is a collective madness, and I don’t know how to stop it.”
In the end the biggest loser will almost surely be Kosovo. No one wants the thankless job of redrawing the borders. And NATO and the United States has been reluctant to support independence for Kosovo. Now the insurgents in Macedonia are squandering international support for the Albanians in Kosovo. “Milosevic lost his legitimacy in Kosovo, but now his victims have lost their legitimacy,” says Dimitrov. “There’s no rule of law, no ethnic tolerance, no human rights. Not even an economy, except foreign aid and organized crime.” A year ago, that sweeping denunciation would have been easy to dismiss as Slav rhetoric. Now it has begun to sound plausible.
