BITER KOSOVO IS ERUPTING IN ANTI-SERB REVOLT

By Chris Hedges, (New York Times Service)

The International Herald Tribune, Tuesday February 18 1997

ORLLAN, Yugoslavia - Bajrain Pajaziti walked solemnly down the hillside from his brother's grave, past a line of silent, motionless mourners, and stopped at the door of his father's small, whitewashed home to pull off his shoes. It is a ritual he has repeated several times in this remote mountain village since his brother Zahir, 34, was killed on Jan. 31 with two other ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia. The men members of a guerrilla group colled the Kosovo Liberation Army, died in a gun battle that left several police officers wounded.

Chafing under Serbian domination and angered after their autonomy was stripped from them six years ago, many of the 2.2 million ethnic Albanians who make up 90 percent of Kosovo's population have mounted a long campaign of peaceful civil disobedience. But in recent weeks the confrontation with the authorities has turned violent, including a car bombing on Jan. 16 that severely wounded Radivoje Papovic, a hard-line Serb who is rector of the university in Pristina, the province's capital. So Mr. Pajaziti's visit to the cemetery was a ritual that many in Orllan expect to become familiar as the government, stubbornly insistent that force can blunt the independence movement in Kosovo, struggles to put down a growing insurrection. While the guerrilla movement remains embryonic, it appears to have wide support and poses an increasing threat to stability in Kosovo and to the security of its Serbian minority. The Kosovo Liberation Army, which surfaced last year, issued a statement a few days ago identifying Zahir Paj

aziti and his two colleagues as members. The group is fighting to create an independent state here and has claimed responsibility for about a dozen assassinations of Serbian officials and Al-banian "collaborators." As a result, the Yugoslav Army in Kosovo has been reinforced with anti-terrorist units, government officials said. The guerrilla group remains shadowy. State security officials say the core of the Kosovo Liberation Army and that of a smaller group, the National Movement for the Liberation of Kosovo, are made up of mercenaries who fought with Muslims against the Bosnian Serbs in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The ethnic Albanians here, as in Albania, are predominantly Muslim. Many of the insurgents, who have built an organized base of 40,000 supporters, have received training in Albania, Iran and Pakistan, the government officials say. The guerrillas, they assert, also receive money from militant Islamic groups in the Middle East. "These terrorist groups are

well trained and well equipped," said Milos Nesovic, the top government administrator in the region. "The police have just broken a terrorist cell with dozens of armed militants. They found automatic weapons, explosives and sophisticated communications equipment. "We know these terrorists have trained abroad and receive money from exile groups in Germany and Switzerland. They attack police and murder Albanians who areloyal to the state. But I warn the Albanians that if they support an armed rebellion, they will pay very dearly for their mistake." Western diplomats say President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia bears much of the blame for the crisis here. He used what he called the persecution of the roughly 200,000 Serbs here by the Albanians as a rallying cry to build a nationalist state a decade ago and touch off the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. In 1989 he stripped Kosovo of the autonomy that it had under the old Communist government of Yugoslavia and declared a state of emergency. Later he mounted an abortive

campaign to resettle ethnic Serbian war refugees in the region, and he has put Serbs in charge of all government offices, state factories and institutions in Kosovo. In the process, Mr. Milosevic has helped mold a militant Albanian ministate. AI-an independent state occupied by the Serbs. People pay "taxes" to the ',state" leadership, and all Serbian businesses and institutions are boycotted. A sea of satellite dishes in cities like Pristina pull government broadcasts from neighboring Albania into most living rooms. Serbo-Croatian is not spoken. Serbs in Kosovo am isolated from most Albanians. The special privileges, heavy protection from some 25,000 police officers and what is seen as cocky arrogance has made them detested by the Albanian majority. Many Serbs speak harshly of the Albanians, often using derogatory slang. "All these Albanian men have three or four wives and about 20 children," said Zoran Dime, 32, a Serb who works as an animal health inspector. "They make money running drug and prostitution r

ings, and none of them have proper state documents. At least 75 percent come from Albania or somewhere else, and the sooner we send them back the better." Six years of disciplined peaceful civil disobedience by the ethnic Albanians has frayed the patience of many. And the apparent success of the anti-government demonstrators in Yugoslavia in gaining reinstatement of opposition election victories has left many feeling that with Mr. Milosevic weakened, now is the time to begin to exert more pressure. An increasing number of Albanians have come to believe that as in other former parts of the old Yugoslavia, like Croatia and Bosnia, armed resistance is the only tool that will free them from Belgrade's grip. "There are Albanians who are ready to identify themselves as members of the Kosovo Liberation Army," said Veton Surroi, the editor of Koha, one of two independent Albanian newspapers. "The group probably does not have a widespread organizational structure, and I suspect it remains scattered. But what is worry

ing is that there is no antipathy by many Albanians to armed resistance or the use of violence." The birth rate for Albanians, 33 per 1,000, is one of the highest in the world, and most people have no work. Tens of thousands of bitter young men sit idle, willing recruits for militant movements. Families, packed into depressing concrete hovels, live off money sent home by Albanian guest workers in Europe. And many here, burdened by misery and repression, long for at least the excitement of struggle if not independence. Bajram Pajaziti said after he visited his brother's hilltop grave, "He never mentioned, his work. We often did not.