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The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA or UÇK; Albanian: Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës) was an ethnic Albanian guerrilla movement which fought for the secession of Kosovo from Serbia in the late 1990s.
Its campaign of attacking Serb security forces targets and Serb civilians precipitated a major Yugoslav military crackdown which led to the Kosovo War of 1999. Although it was seen as a successful movement of national liberation by many of Kosovo's Albanians, it was accused of killings of Serb civilians and Albanians who were perceived as being allied with Milosevic's regime and was widely regarded as being involved in postwar criminal activities and the destabilisation of neighboring states.
History
Emergence of the KLA (1995-1996)
In 1995, isolated attacks on Serbian police were carried out by unnamed parties in Kosovo, though it was not until February 1996 that the name "Kosovo Liberation Army" was used for the first time following a series of attacks against targets including police stations, Serb government officials and Serb refugee centres in western Kosovo.
Observers initially doubted the existence of the KLA. The moderate Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova attributed the attacks to Serbian agents provocateurs. However, it soon became clear that the KLA was genuine. The Serbian authorities denounced it as a terrorist organization and increased its security forces in the region. This had the counterproductive effect of boosting the credibility of the embryonic KLA among the Kosovo Albanian population.
The founders of the KLA were Kosovo Albanian radicals who were frustrated by the "passive resistance" strategy of the Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova. They sought to bring the issue of Kosovo's relations with Serbia to a head by provoking an open conflict, in which they believed the West would be forced to intervene.
Guerilla war to Kosovo War (1997-1999)
The KLA grew considerably in size between 1997-1999. It carried out numerous attacks on Serbian police and army and set up roadblocks in the countryside. By May 1998 it effectively controlled a quarter of the province, centered on the region of Drenica, its stronghold being around the village of Prekaz.
The Serbian government was initially uncertain about what to do about the KLA. The Ministry of the Interior (MUP) simply stopped patrolling large areas of Kosovo, while the Yugoslav Army (VJ) often ignored KLA activity. The "shadow government" of the moderate Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova also faced a dilemma, unwilling to endorse the KLA's violent tactics but wary of losing support to the radicals. Its situation was worsened by the assassination by the KLA of a number of Albanians who were regarded by the KLA as "collaborators" with the Serbian government.
The size of the KLA at this point was extremely uncertain. Its spokesman Jakup Krasniqi claimed 30,000 men under arms, while others estimated numbers to be 10,000 to 50,000. The Serbs, by contrast, claimed that the KLA comprised only a few hundred radicals. However many there really were, it was certainly apparent that the KLA was militarily weak. Its fighters were equipped with small arms such as AK-47 assault rifles and a few RPG-7 anti-tank weapons, but this was no match for the heavy weapons of the Serbian security forces.
This disparity became clear in the summer of 1998, when the Serbian government decided to act following a botched KLA attempt to seize the town of Orahovac. The state security forces launched an offensive against the KLA, crushed most of its organization, regained control over most of the province (save for a pocket around the border town of Junik). The Serbian offensive was accompanied by an indiscriminate use of force against Kosovo Albanian villages suspected of harbouring KLA rebels, forcing over 100,000 people to flee their homes and prompting an outcry from the European powers.
The KLA responded by reorganising itself with a central command structure and training organisation. It established a General Staff (Shtabi i Pergjithshem) of between 16-20 members and divided Kosovo into seven military operational zones, commanded semi-independently by local commanders operating under pseudonyms. The KLA also established a political arm, the Drejtoria Politike, led by the prominent Kosovo separatist activist Hashim Thaci. It created training camps and bases in the safe haven of north-eastern Albania, even establishing its own military academy (the Akademia e Ardhshme Ushtarake) where ethnic Albanian former Yugoslav Army officers trained new recruits. According to Serbian accounts, the primary KLA training camps in Albania were Labinot, near Tirana, Tropojë, Kukës and Bajram Curri near the Yugoslav-Albanian border.
The Serbian offensive was publicised throughout Europe and attracted an unprecedented response from the Albanian emigré community. Thousands of young emigré Albanians left their jobs and made their way to the training camps in such large numbers that the KLA was initially unable to cope. KLA fundraising was equally successful, raising millions of dollars in central Europe underworld, for the guerrilla army and permitting it to buy considerable amounts of weapons on the black market.
Ironically, many of the KLA's weapons reportedly came from the Kosovo Serbs – the Serbian government had issued thousands of rifles to their compatriots in Kosovo, but many Kosovo Serbs sold their weapons to the Albanians. The KLA continued to rely principally on small arms but expanded its arsenal to include SA-7 and Stinger shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles as well as light artillery such as mortars.
As late as 1997, the KLA had been recognized by the U.S. as a terrorist organisation supported in part by heroin trafficking. United States President Bill Clinton's special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, described once the KLA as, "without any questions, a terrorist group.". Nevertheless, by February 1998 the KLA was removed from the United States State Department's terrorism list . According to reliable sources, KLA representatives had already met with American, British, and Swiss intelligence agencies in 1996, and possibly "several years earlier". In the same year, a British weekly newspaper, The European, stated that "German civil and military intelligence services have been involved in training and equipping the rebels with the aim of cementing German influence in the Balkan area." Former senior advisor to the German parliament, Matthias Küntzel proved later on that his country secret diplomacy had been instrumental in helping the KLA since its creation. According to the Sunday Times, "American intelligence agents have admitted they helped to train the Kosovo Liberation Army before NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia".
The new Albanian government disclaimed any support for the KLA but did not close the border with Kosovo or the camps. It was probably not in a position to do so in any case, as the north-east of the country was in a state of anarchy at the time. In Kosovo, the KLA learned from its earlier mistakes, avoiding concentrating its strength in villages (so presenting the Serbs with easy targets) and instead mounting hit-and-run attacks from the hills and forests of western Kosovo. KLA fighters attacked Serbian military and sometimes civilian targets, while Serbian forces retaliated with overwhelming and often indiscriminate force which resulted in mass killings such as the Racak incident in January 1999. The violence prompted more refugees to flee and increased the pressure on Western powers to intervene.
The Kosovo War and aftermath (1999-)
Full-scale war broke out in Kosovo in March 1999. The Serbian and Yugoslav forces launched a ferocious offensive against the KLA and the Albanian population in general, deporting or displacing most of the Albanian population of Kosovo in an apparent attempt to ethnically cleanse the province and deprive the KLA of support.
The KLA initially suffered heavy losses and was driven back into Albania, with only a few thousand fighters remaining in Kosovo itself. Its commander, Sylejman Selimi, a political appointee with no formal military training, was removed in May 1999 and replaced with Agim Çeku, a former Croatian Army brigadier-general.
Although it had little direct military impact on the much stronger Serbian forces, the KLA did play one vital role in the war – after Ceku's appointment, it began to take a much more aggressive stance by attacking security force units and forcing them into the open, where NATO aircraft were able to attack them.
When the war ended, NATO and Serbian leaders agreed to a peace settlement that would see Kosovo governed by the United Nations with the KLA being disarmed. The KLA was, however, not a signatory to the peace accords. In agreement with NATO, KLA agreed to be transformed and demilitarized. NATO sought to bring the KLA into the peace process with a promise to establish a 3,000-strong Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC, TMK in Albanian) drawn from KLA ranks and charged with disaster response capability, search and rescue, assistance with de-mining, providing humanitarian assistance, and helping to rebuild infrastructure and communities. The KPC's operational sectors were very similar to those established by the KLA, illustrating the continuity between the two organisations. The KPC took over the former Yugoslav Army barracks, and now each zone has its battalions established there.
The establishment of the KPC did not prove wholly successful, as many ex-KLA members resented losing their role as the army of Kosovo. For some time after the end of the war, numerous Serbs and some moderate Albanians were murdered. Many of the killings were blamed on KLA members and intimidation by the KLA was also blamed for the flight of thousands of Serbs from Kosovo after the war.
Ex-KLA members also made efforts to spread insurgency into neighboring regions. A new guerrilla group called the Liberation Army of Preševo, Medveđa and Bujanovac, consisting of KLA veterans and local ethnic Albanians, began operating in the Preševo region of southern Serbia in 2000-2001. In the Republic of Macedonia, a new organization also named UÇK (this time standing for "National Liberation Army" in Albanian) took up arms against the Slav-dominated government.
The KLA legacy remains powerful within Kosovo. Its former members still play a major role in Kosovar politics; its former political head Hashim Thaci is now the leader of the Democratic Party of Kosova, one of the province's leading political parties. Ramush Haradinaj, a former KLA regional leader, served briefly as Prime Minister of Kosovo before he turned himself in to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague to stand trial on war crimes charges. The KLA's former military head, Agim Çeku, is now the Prime Minister of Kosovo. This has caused some controversy in Serbia, as Belgrade regards him as a war criminal, though he was never indicted by the Hague tribunal .
Several former KLA members have been indicted on war crimes charges. Fatmir Limaj, one of the senior commanders of the KLA to have gone through a trial process in The Hague, was acquitted of all charges in November 2005. He is now a key member of the opposition. Another KLA member, Haradin Bala, was also indicted by the ICTY at the same time for having participated in the enforcement of the detention of Serb civilians and perceived Albanian collaborators at the Lapusnik Prison Camp, where he was a prison guard commander. He was then found guilty of torture, cruel treatment and murder and sentenced to 13 years imprisonment. His appeal against the verdict is still pending.
References
- "KLA Action Fuelled NATO Victory", Jane's Defence Weekly, 16 June 1999
- "The KLA: Braced to Defend and Control", Jane's Intelligence Review, 1 April 1999
- "Kosovo's Ceasefire Crumbles As Serb Military Retaliates", Jane's Intelligence Review, 1 February 1999
- "Another Balkan Bloodbath? Part Two", Jane's Intelligence Review, 1 March 1998
- "Albanians Attack Serb Targets", Jane's Defence Weekly, 4 September 1996
- "The Kosovo Liberation Army and the Future of Kosovo," James H. Anderson and James Phillips, 05/13/1999, Heritage Foundation, Heritage Foundation (Washington, USA)
- "Unknown Albanian 'liberation army' claims attacks", Agence France Presse, February 17, 1996
- "The Albanian Cartel: Filling the Crime Void," Jane's Intelligence Review, November 1995
- "Drugs Money Linked to the Kosovo Rebels," The Times, London, 24 March 19999
- SCOTT, Peter Dale (2003): Drugs, Oil and War. Rowman & Littlefield. Lanham, USA. page 29
- http://www.cfr.org/publication/10159/ Moran, M. (ed.) (2006): Terrorist Groups and Political Legitimacy. Report published by the Council on Foreign Relations
- "Al Qaeda's Balkan Links", The Wall Street Journal Europe, 1 November 2001
- JUDAH, Tim (2002): Kosovo: War and Revenge. Yale University Press. New Haven, USA. Page 120
- FALLGOT, Roger (1998): "How Germany Backed KLA", in The European, 21-27 September. pp 21-27.
- KUNTZEL, Matthias (2002): Der Weg in den Krieg. Deutschland, die Nato und das Kosovo (The Road to War. Germany, Nato and Kosovo). Elefanten Press. Berlin, Germany. pp. 59-64.
- http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/kosovo1/ksv17.htm Tom WALKER and Aiden LAVERTY (2000): "CIA Aided Kosovo Guerrilla Army" in the Sunday Times, 12 March
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3551571.stm
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4337085.stm "Kosovo's Ex-PM War Charges Revealed", BBC World, March 10, 2005
- http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/total_coverage/kosovo/ceku.html
- http://www.trial-ch.org/trialwatch/profiles/en/legalprocedures/p145.html Trial Watch article on Fatmir Limaj (Çeliku)
- http://www.trial-ch.org/trialwatch/profiles/en/facts/p143.html Trial Watch article on Haradin Bala (Shala)
- http://www.un.org/icty/limaj/lim-sumj051130-e.htm Limaj et al. Case: Judgement Summary (ICTY)
- http://iwpr.net/?p=tri&s=f&o=259099&apc_state=henitri2006 Appeal Against KLA Verdicts
External links
- CRIGHTON, A (ed) (2003): Macedonia: The Conflict and the Media. Macedonian Institute for Media. Skopje. (also covering Southern Central Serbia)
- FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS Intelligence Resources page on KLA
- BBC: UN court acquits top Kosovo rebel
- GOVERNMENT OF SERBIA (2003): White Book on KLA (Part 1, Part 2)
- INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES: "The Kosovo Liberation Army" - Volume 4, Issue 7 - August 1998
- INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES: "The Kosovo Liberation Army" - Volume 4, Issue 7 - August 1998
- KLA-NATO Demilitarization and transformation agreement.
- KOSOVAPRESS News agency organized by then KLA, and now close to the Democratic Party of Kosovo
- MIPT Knowledge Base. Entry about KLA
- SOCIALISM TODAY: "The KLA and the struggle for Kosovar self-determination"
- KLA and War on Terror