Kosovo Liberation Army: The Inside Story of an Insurgency

1. Faces of the KLA and Its Kosovar Antagonists

13 1 Faces of the KLA and Its Kosovar Antagonists Over the centuries, we struggled against occupation, and a couple of times we managed to come close to winning. Now, a few things were different. One was that Russia lost its power and now would not back up Serbia, and so for once the world would not close its eyes and do what Serbia says. Second, other peoples in the former Yugoslavia like the Croats would not support Serbia this time. Now, it was not too much of a stretch: a few million Albanians against a few million Serbs. Everything was more in our favor than it was in previous generations. The communications were different; now the patriots knew what was going on. The geostrategic possibilities were different because the internationals had already set a precedent, in Croatia and Bosnia. —Ramush Haradinaj The Kosovo Liberation Army fought a paradigmatic Fourth Generation War. “Fourth Generation War” is a term coined by some of the more perceptive military theorists in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps communities. “Fourth-generation warfare (4GW), unlike previous generations of warfare, does not attempt to win by defeating the enemy’s military forces. Instead, it directly attacks the minds of enemy decision makers to destroy the enemy’s political will. Fourth generation wars are lengthy— measured in decades rather than months or years.”1 Fourth generation warfare requires that fighters—and leaders of fighters—be astute about politics, which is often characterized as the art of the possible and the science of timing. What was possible in Kosovo was determined by geopolitical and 14 kosovo liberation army demographic phenomena beyond the control of the KLA that shaped both attitudes within Kosovo and attitudes of the world toward Kosovo. Two of these phenomena—Great-Power geopolitical adjustment and Albanian nationalism—were at work long before 1995. Three others— the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, international sensitivity to Slobodan Milosevic’s human rights violations, and an astutely led, awakened youth—intersected in the late 1980s and early 1990s to set the stage for an armed revolt in Kosovo. The KLA might have been successful anyway, but it would have taken ten or twenty years, and Kosovo might have had an experience similar to that suffered by Northern Ireland or Lebanon. Its quick success was fortuitous. The phenomena making early success possible were not simple in their composition, and their interaction surely was not. Some of the phenomena had been at work for centuries or decades ; some were like shooting stars. Faces of the Struggle The KLA’s struggle, like most struggles, is the story of singular combinations of circumstances creating windows of opportunity. It is also the story, however, of strong personalities who saw opportunity—and frequently battled over how to seize it. Three relevant leadership groups within Kosovar Albanian society defined the KLA and its path to success : the Peaceful Path Institutionalists, the Planners in Exile, and the Defenders at Home. Ibrahim Rugova, who died in January 2006, symbolized the Peaceful Path Institutionalists. He hid behind the trappings of power. An eccentric and remote man, his advocacy of passive resistance and opposition to violence may have saved Kosovo from a bloodbath. He infuriated not only those who opposed his methods but some of his closest associates. But fury or not, Rugova was the man who carried the Kosovar Albanian torch for a long time. When Rugova could no longer deny the KLA, he then tried to outflank it. But he never let the flame go out. Rugova was formally schooled in France and always—always—wore a mottled maroon and indigo scarf. He was president of Kosovo’s Government in Exile and also president of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), the dominant Albanian political party. Rugova’s campaign of passive resistance and creation of a Kosovar Government in Exile fed Albanian desires to resist Serb oppression at low cost, while also allowing Milosevic to deploy his military forces elsewhere, in Croatia and Bosnia. Rugova became the face of Kosovo politics, and largely dominated it even after the war was over. He is loved by those who watched him hold Faces of the KLA and Its Antagonists 15 the flame for so long. But the images of Rugova also are the images of a slight, enigmatic man, with his strange silk scarf, standing outside the fence at Dayton Air Force base, looking in and largely...