Kosovo Liberation Army: The Inside Story of an Insurgency

12. Conclusion

181 12 Conclusion As this story of the Kosovo Liberation Army concludes and the international community works with Kosovar Albanian political leaders to chart Kosovo’s entry into the community as an independent state, the KLA insurgency invites reconsideration of the realities of insurgency in the twenty-first century, including careful reflection on the context for the KLA’s success. One reality that is often ignored after the attacks of September 11, 2001, is that nationalism is a more powerful engine of insurgency than religion. Long-standing foreign occupation creates a spirit of defiance and strengthens cultures of resistance, which provide a local political context for an insurgency to take root. Religious difference between insurgent and occupier can magnify the will to resist, as it did in Ireland in the early part of the twentieth century. But nationalism was the fundamental engine driving Irish calls for independence from British rule, as it was for those of the Kosovar Albanians who supported the KLA. The KLA demonstrated that an insurgency can get started and solidly implanted on a shoestring with only a hundred or so active fighters. While it is hard for a completely decentralized insurgency to make progress, it is also almost impossible to stamp out altogether when it has local popular support. The KLA withstood repeated attempts by a sophisticated regime that used all the tools of a police state toward its annihilation. Though it did not flourish until external events such as the collapse of the Albanian state and the Holbrooke-Milosevic cease fire gave it breathing space, the KLA would have continued no matter what Milosevic did. 182 kosovo liberation army Counterinsurgency efforts fuel insurgency unless a regime is both adroit and lucky. If the experience in Kosovo shows anything, it shows how counterinsurgency efforts may and do backfire. But for the Jashari Massacre, the KLA would have remained small. The massacre electrified the youth of Kosovo and the Diaspora and flooded the small, fledgling organization with recruits. Attacks on the civilian population, morphing into comprehensive ethnic cleansing, reinforced the KLA’s consistent message that the Kosovar Albanians had to fight back. Milosevic made it impossible for the mass of Kosovar Albanians to sit on the fence. Every war is now a world war. No more can a regime snuff out political insurgents or argue that suppressing “bandits” and “terrorists” is a purely local matter. Milosevic consistently invoked his sovereign prerogatives to deal with the KLA insurgency in his own way. He could not, however, hide the brutality of his methods, which further inflamed mass opinion in western Europe and North America, which had already tilted against him because of what he had done in Croatia and Bosnia. At the same time, every insurgency must win a global war for hearts and minds if it is to succeed locally. The KLA was careful to avoid conduct that would reinforce accusations that it was a terrorist group or a Muslim fundamentalist vanguard. It worked tirelessly to expose the Milosevic regime’s human rights abuses in a way that resonated with influential human rights advocates . Counterinsurgency excesses and insurgent moderation together strengthened both domestic and international support for the KLA. If Milosevic had just left the KLA alone he probably would have been better off. He could have continued to pick off commanders and organizers when he had the opportunity, and deepened his penetration of an expanding KLA with minimum fuss. The reality was that Milosevic had more on his mind than counterinsurgency—he wanted a Kosovo free of Albanians, and not only free of the KLA. Ethnic cleansing was his overarching strategic goal, and the world community was right to stop it. International intervention in Kosovo made success possible for the KLA decades sooner than early KLA organizers had initially expected. Peacekeepers (civilian monitors) in 1998 gave the KLA breathing space to organize and then recover from damage inflicted by Serb forces. Without NATO intervention, the KLA would not have won in a military sense, and it would have taken years—maybe decades—to wear down Serbia’s will to continue its occupation. Terrorism directed at civilian targets might have developed as a KLA weapon of last resort; in any event, the KLA was not going to go away. Whether the world stands with or against future insurgencies will depend upon the adroitness of the insurgency and the dexterity of the Conclusion 183 regime in shaping...