The New York Times

Wednesday, June 9, 1999

THE SECESSIONISTS

Aided by NATO Bombing, Rebels Position Themselves to Become Kosovo's New Army

By IAN FISHER

KUKES, Albania -- When the separatist rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army launched what they called a major offensive near here two weeks ago, the strategy was basic: to open a supply corridor from Albania into Kosovo and to cut off a highway so that Yugoslav troops could not move between two major cities in southern Kosovo.

But much has happened in those two weeks. NATO planes have apparently helped out in the rebels' effort around Mount Pastrik, which is on the border between Kosovo and Albania. Again on Tuesday, NATO dropped bombs of enormous power on the Yugoslav positions within sight of the Albanian border.

And a peace agreement is in the works that would require the Yugoslav troops to withdraw within days, making the fight for a supply corridor seem irrelevant.

But with the possibility that the Yugoslav troops will withdraw, the rebel force is positioning itself to be the province's new army -- and it seems to be working to prove that it deserves that role in what may be the conflict's final days.

"After the Serbs withdraw from Kosovo, it's not going to be the Kosovo Liberation Army," said Masar Shala, a spokesman for the rebel group here. "It will be the regular army. Maybe it won't be the same people. It can have a different name. But there must be an army."

By all accounts, the battles in recent days have been hard fought, with constant shelling by both sides as well as hand-to-hand fighting, said officials of the rebel group here. On any day in the last two weeks, it has been possible to stand at the Albanian border with Kosovo and to watch shells land, most of them on rebel positions, and more recently to see bombs from NATO fall, most of them on Yugoslav positions, except for a few mistakes.

On the Serbian side, too, the fighting has been fierce. The Yugoslav military has spent much of the last year -- as well as the last crumbs of its international respect -- trying to eradicate the rebels in the Kosovo province of Serbia, which is the major entity in Yugoslavia. Until a peace document is signed, the Serbs appear unwilling to let up.

The rebels say that they have a similar motive.

"We're going to continue our duty to liberate Kosovo," said a top rebel commander. "The KLA must continue its attacks on the Serbs and destroy as much as we can."

The rebels also appear to be fighting for respect. Their army is often derided by military analysts as disorganized and poorly trained, despite what the Pentagon says are improvements recently under a new field commander, Adem Ceku, who has experience fighting Serbs in the Croatian army. Even with NATO essentially bombing the way forward into Kosovo, the rebel offensive here has only pushed through a few miles in two weeks.

"In Mount Pastrik, the KLA failed to make significant inroads," Kenneth Bacon, a Pentagon spokesman, said in Washington on Tuesday. "They're in Kosovo, but they're pinned down."

The rebels have had more success, Bacon said, in intense fighting in northwestern Kosovo, in the Junik area, where 3,500 rebel fighters have been battling 2,500 Yugoslav forces over the last week to 10 days.

The Pentagon says its ambitions for the rebel group -- which American officials until recently called a terrorist group -- are not so high as those of the rebels. It would like the soldiers to become a police force. With a peace plan that requires the rebels to demilitarize, this issue may be only one of many on which the rebels and Western leaders find themselves at odds.

By fortunate timing for the rebels, the battle around Mount Pastrik does appear to put them in an ideal position to move into Kosovo rapidly when and if a peace deal is signed. The rebel group will not say how many soldiers it has in the area, but it probably has several thousand.

Many are fighting on the Kosovo side of the border, but there are also many more in Albania, in what rebel officials call "transit" areas and the Serbs call military camps. For the last two weeks, the Serbs have been shelling border towns in Albania, apparently trying to destroy the rebels' rear guard, the men who could follow the soldiers doing the actual fighting in Kosovo.