Kosovo Liberation Army: The Inside Story of an Insurgency

2. Building and Maintaining Public Support

25 2 Building and Maintaining Public Support Valon Murati slipped out of his apartment door and into the cool Prishtina night. He moved quickly and deliberately down the street and effortlessly avoided two Serbian police patrols. The pamphlets taped to his body that called for revolution meant a quick arrest and imprisonment—or worse—if he got caught. Valon, just nineteen years old, still struggled to get his elders to take his ideas seriously, but his natural athleticism and wits were enough to have avoided detection thus far. Before long he would hold a gun and participate in the violence on the horizon. For the time being he contented himself to make these nightly treks across Prishtina distributing his leaflets from door to door as he crawled through apartment complexes and neighborhoods. The leaflets themselves looked innocent. They had been printed off his computer and folded in half to display the name “LKÇK.” The content was more damning. They argued that violence would be the only way that Albanian Kosovars could shake free from Serb control. Most of the intended audience needed considerable persuasion. No one thought the KLA could win. Everyone knew that Yugoslavia had the third strongest army in the world. If we were patient, most Kosovars thought, the Serbs would eventually come to their senses and let up on the repression . Occasionally, there were rumors of an organization called the KLA, but Serb television rarely reported on KLA activities, and word of mouth was filtered through LDK adherents. The KLA seemed to be only one of a number of historical dissident groups resisting the LDK “government.” It was made up of a handful of bandits, sociopaths, and Marxists from a few villages. If it had any 26 kosovo liberation army effect, it would make things worse by justifying greater Serb repression. Its founders, who were in Switzerland or Germany, were always more militant than those who still were in Kosovo; they had less to lose by an insurgency, and probably more to gain. So recalls Liridon Lidifi. He was fourteen in 1997, when the Kosovo Liberation Army first went public, and sixteen when he and his family were driven out of their village into a Macedonian refugee camp by Serb forces. He was never tempted to join the KLA. Revolution does not succeed without popular support. “Without a political goal,” said Mao Tse-Tung, “guerrilla warfare must fail, as it must if its political objectives do not coincide with the aspirations of the people and their sympathy, cooperation, and assistance cannot be gained.”1 Che Guevara agreed: “The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition.”2 Popular support is necessary to provide both a pool of fighters and a matrix within which the fighters can operate and hide. Supportive communities give psychological encouragement for sons, daughters, nephews, and nieces who fight. They supply food, shelter, clothing, and vehicles. They provide places where guerrillas can hide after attacks. When popular support is lacking, insurgents are deprived of all these necessities and are more vulnerable to regime efforts to crush the insurgency, because then civilians are as likely to cooperate with the regime’s police and intelligence agencies as with the insurgents. An insurgency can succeed, however, without universal popular support . All that is necessary is for a critical mass of support to exist in the right places, geographically and within identifiable segments of political opinion. As this chapter explains, for example, support for the KLA never was strong in Prishtina, in such municipalities in the South and East as Gjilan and Ferizaj, or among urban elites in other cities such as Prizren and Mitrovica. The effort to win the hearts and minds of the Kosovar population involved three competing visions. The KLA thought the best way to win over the population was to start fighting to show that it was possible. Other groups, such as Murati’s LKÇK (National Movement for the Liberation of Kosovo), thought fighting should be deferred until after the population had been conditioned to accept violence. The Peaceful Path Institutionalists thought Kosovar Albanian goals could be achieved without fighting. Building and Maintaining Public Support 27 The KLA understood what theory teaches: Successful insurgencies build popular support in several ways. They harness the spirit of defiance, mobilize ideology, create a “consciousness of potentiality,” undermine support for the regime by key elites by...