”CRISIS IN THE BALKANS: THE SEPARATISTS; Leaders of Kosovo Rebels Tied to Deadly Power Play
By CHRIS HEDGES
Published: June 25, 1999
The senior commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which signed a disarmament agreement with NATO, carried out assassinations, arrests and purges within their ranks to thwart potential rivals, say current and former commanders in the rebel army and some Western diplomats, report The New York Times, trasnmete the National Information Agency “Presheva Jonë” in Presevo.
The campaign, in which as many as half a dozen top rebel commanders were shot dead, was directed by Hashim Thaci and two of his lieutenants, Azem Syla and Xhavit Haliti, these officials said. Mr. Thaci denied through a spokesman that he had been responsible for any such killings.
Although the United States has long been wary of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the rebel group has become the main ethnic Albanian power in Kosovo. Rebel commanders supplied NATO with target information during the bombing campaign.
Now, after the war, the United States and other NATO powers have effectively made Mr. Thaci and the rebel force partners in rebuilding Kosovo. The agreement NATO signed with Mr. Thaci, for example, envisions turning the rebel group into a civilian police force and leaves open the possibility that the Kosovo Liberation Army could become a provisional army modeled on the United States National Guard.
While none of the rebel officials interviewed saw Mr. Thaci or his aides execute anyone, they recounted — and in some cases said they had witnessed — incidents in which Mr. Thaci’s rivals had been killed shortly after he or one of his aides had threatened them with death.
Remembering the beginning of fighting more than a year ago, Rifat Haxhijaj, 30, a former lieutenant in the Yugoslav Army who left the rebel movement last September and now lives in Switzerland, said: ”When the war started, everyone wanted to be the chief. For the leadership this was never just a war against Serbs — it was also a struggle for power.”
Mr. Thaci’s representative in Switzerland, Jashae Salihu, denied accounts of assassinations. ”These kind of reports are untrue,” he said. ”Neither Mr. Thaci nor anyone else from the K.L.A. is involved in this kind of activity. Our goal has been to establish a free Kosovo and nothing more.”
The charges of assassinations and purges were made in interviews with about a dozen former and current Kosovo Liberation Army officials, two of whom said they had witnessed executions of Mr. Thaci’s rivals; a former senior diplomat for the Albanian Government; a former police official in the Albanian Government who worked with the rebel group, and several Western diplomats.
But the State Department yesterday challenged some aspects of these accounts. ”We simply don’t have information to substantiate allegations that there was a K.L.A. leadership-directed program of assassinations or executions,” James P. Rubin, the State Department spokesman, said.
Mr. Rubin said he could not rule out the possibility that the rebel leaders were somehow tied to the killings. But he said department officials had checked a wide range of sources and could not confirm the accusations.
A senior State Department official and a Western diplomat in the Balkans, citing intelligence reports and extensive contacts with rebel officials inside and outside Kosovo, said they were aware of executions of middle-grade officers suspected of collaborating with the Serbs, but said they had no evidence to link those killings with Mr. Thaci.
A Reputation For Rough Intimidation
The Western diplomat in the Balkans said, however, that Mr. Thaci’s ruthless tactics are legendary in the region.
”Thaci has engaged in some pretty rough intimidation” of officials in a political party at odds with the rebels, the diplomat said, ”but none of them have been killed.” He added: ”There have been detentions, and the victims allege beatings. We cannot prove that. Thaci, according to them, was in charge of the team that detained them and was in charge of the interrogation and personally threatened them.
”Thaci has a reputation for being pretty tough,” the diplomat continued. ”Haliti and Syla are not known for their sweet tempers. This is a rough neighborhood, and intimidation and assassinations happen.”
Former and current rebel officials also charge that a campaign of assassinations was carried out in close cooperation with the Albanian Government, which often placed agents from the Albanian secret police at the disposal of the rebel commanders.
Mr. Rubin said the State Department did not have any information to suggest that the rebel leadership directed an execution program in conjunction with the Albanian security services.
The Western diplomat in the Balkans said he knew of at least two Albanian secret police officers who were fighting with the guerrillas. ”The two officers are brigade or battalion commanders, and they’ve been in the field fighting,” the diplomat said. ”They’re volunteers from Albania.”
Albania has long waged a campaign to unite with Kosovo, a Serbian province where Albanians are in the majority. Such unification was briefly achieved during Fascist occupation in World War II and was held out as a goal by radical groups financed and backed by Tirana in the later part of the century.
Indeed, the close relationship between Mr. Thaci and the Tirana Government, which has a reputation for corruption and has been linked by Western diplomats to drug trafficking, is one of the factors that disillusioned many former fighters who were interviewed in Germany, Switzerland and Albania. The fighters said they had fought to create a more Western, democratic state, free from Albanian influence and control.
The Albanian Minister of Information, Musa Ulqini, said that there was ”never any violation of our Constitutional law.” He added, ”The Albanian government has relations with all of the political and military forces in Kosovo, but it insists that these forces unite and speak with one voice.”
Two former rebel leaders and a former Albanian police official, interviewed in Tirana, said that Mr. Haliti, who is officially Mr. Thaci’s ambassador to Albania, was working in Kosovo with 10 secret police agents from Albania to form an internal security network that would be used to silence dissenters in Kosovo.
Mr. Thaci, 30, has named a government, with himself as prime minister, and denounced Ibrahim Rugova, who for nearly a decade was the self-styled president of Kosovo and ran a successful campaign of nonviolent protest after the Serbs stripped Kosovo of its autonomy in 1989.
Mr. Thaci has long had ties to radical groups that called for the violent overthrow of the Government in Belgrade. He joined a clandestine organization known as the Kosovo Popular Movement that existed on the fringes of Pristina University.
The group was financed and backed by the Stalinist dictator of Albania, Enver Hoxha, until his death in 1985. Its members, including Mr. Syla, whom Mr. Thaci appointed his defense minister, and Mr. Haliti, have become the core of the leadership that dominates the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Violence has long swirled around Mr. Thaci, whose nom de guerre was Snake. In June 1997, in an incident that many in the underground guerrilla movement found ominous, a Kosovo Albanian reporter who had close links with the movement was found dead in his apartment in Tirana, his face disfigured by repeated stabbings with a screwdriver and the jagged edge of a broken bottle.
The reporter, Ali Uka, was supportive of the rebel movement, but also independent enough to criticize it. At the time of his death he was sharing his apartment with Mr. Thaci.
Mr. Thaci inspired fear and respect in his home base of the central Drenica region in Kosovo as he organized armed units and carried out ambushes against Serbian policemen. In the early days of the rebel uprising, in March 1998, Mr. Thaci moved about from his hometown of Broje in a small compact car with a few bodyguards and wore an unadorned camouflage uniform.
No Witnesses to Killings, But Many Reports
There were persistent reports at the time that he personally carried out executions of Kosovo Albanians whom he had branded as traitors or collaborators, but no witnesses have surfaced.
Mr. Thaci was involved, along with Mr. Haliti, in arms smuggling from Switzerland in the years before the 1998 uprising, say current and former senior rebel commanders.
Mr. Thaci and Mr. Haliti both have wives and children in Switzerland, although Mr. Haliti has formed a new family in Tirana, where he has a large villa and close links with senior Government leaders, say former and current rebel officials in Albania.
When the uprising began, and money and volunteers flooded into Albania from the 700,000 Kosovo Albanians living in Europe, Mr. Thaci and Mr. Haliti found themselves in charge of thousands of fighters and tens of millions of dollars.
The arms smuggling mushroomed into a huge operation that saw trucks loaded with weapons, most bought from Albanian officials, headed for rebel camps on the border. By the war’s end, former and current rebel officials estimate, the guerrilla force paid $50 million to Albanian officials for weapons and ammunition.
In April 1998, a rebel commander who transported many of the weapons, Ilir Konushevci, accused Mr. Haliti of profiting from arms transactions, according to commanders present at the heated meeting. A few days later, he was ambushed and killed on the road outside Tropoja in northern Albania.
The commander had charged that Mr. Haliti was buying boxes of grenades at $2 apiece and charging the movement $7 for each grenade. The killing, although it took place in a rebel-controlled region in northern Albania, was blamed on the Serbs.
Other killings of rebel commanders and political rivals ascribed to Mr. Thaci are attributed to a struggle to consolidate control and eliminate potential challengers.
”Cadavers have never been an obstacle to Thaci’s career,” said Bujar Bukoshi, the prime minister in exile in Mr. Rugova’s administration, which is often at odds with the rebel force. One Western diplomat, citing intelligence reports, said that Mr. Thaci planned the assassination attempt on Mr. Bukoshi last May. The plot failed. ”Thaci has a single goal and that is to promote himself, to be No. 1,” Mr. Bukoshi said.
As the rebels suffered reverses on the battlefield in the summer and fall of 1998, in large part due to inexperience and a lack of central command, they turned to Kosovo Albanians who had served in the former Yugoslav Army.
The most experienced was a former colonel named Ahmet Krasniqi who had organized some 600 former officers, most living in Switzerland and Germany, to join the fight. Mr. Krasniqi had surrendered his garrison in Gospic, Croatia, in 1991 rather than defend Slobodan Milosevic’s Government in Belgrade.
Mr. Krasniqi had the blessing of Mr. Bukoshi, who allowed him to pass on $4.5 million to the rebels from funds raised by Mr. Rugova’s administration. He swiftly set up training camps in the border region and formed special units. Mr. Bukoshi named him commander of a rival military structure known as the Armed Forces of the Kosovo Republic. The effort to join the armed struggle was a belated attempt by the Rugova administration to regain credibility by playing a role in the ”liberation” of the Serbian province.
Mr. Thaci and Mr. Haliti accepted the money and the trained volunteers, integrating them into their own units, but began to thwart Mr. Krasniqi’s attempt to build an independent military force. In June 1998 the Kosovo Liberation Army, which controlled the border, began to divert or block arms being taken over the mountain to these rival units fighting around Pec and Decani.
As tensions rose, Mr. Thaci and the Albanian authorities decided to eliminate Mr. Krasniqi, according to former rebel commanders and two former Albanian officials interviewed in Tirana.
They said that in the middle of September 1998, Albanian police stopped Mr. Krasniqi and several aides and confiscated their weapons. Mr. Krasniqi’s office in Tirana was raided by about 50 policemen and emptied of guns and munitions. On Sept. 21 at 11 P.M. on the way back from a restaurant in Tirana, Mr. Krasniqi ran into a police checkpoint about 300 yards from his office on Dibra Street, according to a former rebel commander who was with Mr. Krasniqi. Mr. Krasniqi and his two companions were again frisked for weapons and their vehicle was searched. The two cars behind Mr. Krasniqi, which carried aides, were not allowed through the checkpoint.
When Mr. Krasniqi and his two companions got out of their gray Opal jeep they saw three men emerge from the shadows with black hoods over their faces. The men, speaking with an Albanian accent that distinguished them from Kosovo Albanians, ordered the two men with Mr. Krasniqi to get down on the ground.
”Which one is it?” asked one of the gunmen, according to one of the commanders who was prone on the asphalt.
”The one in the middle,” said another. The gunmen, who held a pistol a few inches from Mr. Krasniqi’s head, fired a shot. He then fired two more shots into Mr. Krasniqi’s head once he fell onto the pavement.
American officials also had reports that the rebel army had killed Mr. Krasniqi, but said there were also subsequent, conflicting reports from the region that he was killed by disaffected members of his own unit.
After Mr. Krasniqi’s death, former rebel commanders said, the killings, purges and arrests accelerated. Rebel police, dressed in distinctive black fatigues, threw into detention anyone who appeared hostile to Mr. Thaci. Many of these people were beaten.
Hauled to Court As a Collaborator
One commander, Blerim Kuci, was taken away in October 1998 to a rebel army jail and hauled before a revolutionary court, rebel commanders said. He was held for weeks on charges that he collaborated with the Serbs , and then was suddenly released in the face of a large Serbian offensive and allowed to rejoin the fight.
”I saw an accused collaborator tried before a revolutionary court and then tied to the back of a car in Glodjane and dragged through the streets until he died,” said a former rebel officer in Albania. A senior State Department official and a Western diplomat in the Balkans confirmed this account.
As NATO bombs fell on Kosovo this April, two more outspoken commanders, Agim Ramadani, a captain in the former Yugoslav Army, and Sali Ceku, were killed, each in an alleged Serbian ambush.
Although a former senior rebel officer in Tirana said that Mr. Thaci was responsible, a Western diplomat contends that Mr. Ceku was killed by a Serbian sniper. The diplomat said that his contacts indicated that Mr. Ramadani was killed in battle, but those contacts did not mention an ambush, or politically related killing, in either case.
The former rebel officer said, however, that rebel officials had told Mr. Ceku that he and his lieutenant, Tahir Zemaj, should leave the movement, but the stubborn Mr. Ceku had refused to depart. Mr. Zemaj, however, fled to Germany. ”Tahir knew they were serious and he got out,” the officer said. ”Sali stayed and he was killed.”
Photos: NATO has effectively made Hashim Thaci and his rebel force partners in Kosovo. (Reuters)(pg. A1); Hashim Thaci, the political leader of the Kosovo rebels, with a child before his meeting with NATO foreign ministers. Now he is accused of killing his group’s own members. (Agence France-Presse)(pg. A14) “”
