[Marxism] KLA --> KPC

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Les E. wrote:
> The KLA does not exist since its suppresion and
> disbanding by the UN and possible bands of ex KLA
> members have nothing to do with what the KLA was
> during 1999 till the UN took over.

Yes, it was transformed into the Kosovo Protection Corps.

The Washington Post
July 29, 2001 Sunday

Rule of Law Is Elusive In Kosovo;
U.N., NATO Criticized For Inaction on Violence

BYLINE: R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post Foreign Service

DATELINE: PRISTINA, Yugoslavia

The aisles and seats on the five bright red buses leaving the Serbian city
of Nis overflowed with 250 nervously excited Serbs -- students, parents,
pensioners and children. Escorted by seven NATO armored vehicles, the
travelers were making a rare journey across the border into Kosovo to visit
friends and relatives on a religious holiday, the Serbian Orthodox Church's
annual Day of the Dead.

Ahead, a small group of ethnic Albanians lay in wait. In a drainpipe buried
under the main highway about half a mile inside Kosovo, near the village of
Merdare, they had deposited 200 pounds of TNT. They then strung a
detonation wire across nearby farmland to a hilltop a mile away where,
sitting on a tree stump, they smoked cigarettes and waited for the convoy.

At a signal, one of the Albanians touched the wire's strands to a car
battery, setting off the bomb just as the first bus drove over the pipe.
Eleven people died, including four women and a 2-year-old boy; 18 other
people were injured, some critically. The vehicle was blown high in the
air, landing 45 feet away; some passengers were rocketed through the roof.

(clip)

The bombing was carried out by three people to create "personal insecurity
in the Serb population," the report said. Intelligence reports state that
the group's leader and some of its members belong to the Kosovo Protection
Corps, successor to the Kosovo Liberation Army, the ethnic Albanian rebel
group that fought for Kosovo's independence from Serb-run Yugoslavia before
the arrival of NATO troops.

NATO shared this general information with U.N. police, leading them to
arrest four suspects in March with the help of several hundred NATO special
forces troops in well-coordinated raids. But NATO has refused to provide
more detailed information that would help in prosecutions.

U.N. police and officials of the court system complain that NATO and top
U.N. administrators have been slow to obtain critical support from abroad:
They want the suspects' cell phone calling records but are still waiting
for the information to arrive from Monaco, which maintains a clearinghouse
for cellular calls in Kosovo. Similarly, complete results of DNA lab tests
on bomb fragments and other evidence recovered at the scene have not yet
been returned by German forensic experts.

What was once a highly publicized international task force of 18
investigators on the case has dwindled to just two or three overworked
people who give it part-time attention.

The police also complain that they are hamstrung by U.N. rules that
prohibit the use of paid informers and by U.N. court rules that bar the use
of wiretapping evidence.

Today a conviction in the bus bombing looks increasingly unlikely,
according to six people involved in the case who spoke in recent interviews.

The man against whom police had developed the best case, Florim Ejupi,
escaped in May from a U.S. military prison in Kosovo, using a wire cutter
allegedly passed to him in a spinach pie baked by his family. And charges
against the three other suspects will be dropped if new evidence is not
produced within the next month, U.N. officials say. A three-judge
international panel has already called for their release on grounds of
insufficient evidence.

Officials say the bus case underlines one of the fundamental problems of
building a stable, law-abiding society in Kosovo: frequent criminal
activity by members of the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC). The group, made
up of former fighters in the Kosovo Liberation Army, is officially a civil
emergency service, but is widely seen among people here as the nucleus for
the future army of an independent Kosovo.

According to classified NATO reports, informers claim that KPC members not
only attack Serbs but are also involved in illegal trade in prostitutes,
cigarettes, fuel, weapons and appliances. "Many KPC members, in some cases
high-ranking KPC officials, have ties with criminal organizations," said
one classified NATO report prepared late last year.

The informants have alleged that commanders in the 5,000-member KPC have
profited personally, for example, by forcibly seizing vacant apartments and
reselling them or by extorting money from private companies, according to
Western intelligence officials.

Muharrem Mahmutaj, a spokesman for the KPC, said the group was unaware of
wrongdoing but welcomed investigation. He noted, moreover, that the KPC
itself "is not being accused."

The United States has become the protection corps' most important foreign
patron, providing at least $ 13 million in State Department and Pentagon
aid in the past two years, covering more than a third of the group's total
expenses. In May, when three officials of the KPC were arrested on charges
of killing another KPC official -- who was allegedly cooperating with NATO
to fight corruption -- the U.S. mission in Kosovo released a statement
saying that "these arrests do not in any way reflect badly on the KPC and
its important role in Kosovo."

President Bush, who visited Kosovo on Tuesday, took the first step in June
toward distancing Washington from the group. He signed an order banning
five of its leaders from entering the United States on grounds that they
had "undermined peace and stability." The five included two top commanders
of the KPC's six zones in Kosovo and the corps' chief of staff. Exactly
what they did has not been disclosed to U.N. police or prosecutors. NATO
officials have searched some of the men's homes and turned over "a large
quantity of documents," according to Brown, the spokesman for KFOR.

Christer Karphammar, a Swedish jurist who was first a prosecutor and then
Kosovo's first Western judge, said he directly knows of several cases in
which U.N. and KFOR senior officials opposed or blocked prosecution of
former Kosovo Liberation Army members, including some now in the KPC. "That
means some of the former 'KLA' had an immunity. The investigations were
stopped on a high level," he said. Karphammar, who left the United Nations
in April, said that throughout his 18-month tenure there, "the judiciary
was not allowed to work independently."

The reason, he said, was that NATO and U.N. officials feared they "would
put their lives at risk" by acting against former members of the rebel group.

Several sources cited the example of an alleged assault in the fall by Sami
Lushtaku, a former KLA commander who became a regional commander of the
KPC. According to police reports, Lushtaku and his bodyguard pistol-whipped
an ethnic Albanian doctor sitting near them at a soccer game, fracturing
the man's skull.

NATO forces, including helicopters, were mobilized to arrest Lushtaku after
a witness came forward, but at the last moment the arrest was halted at the
insistence of high-ranking U.N. and NATO officials, according to three
sources with knowledge of the incident.

Jock Covey, a U.S. diplomat serving as deputy head of the U.N. mission in
Kosovo, was instrumental in blocking Lushtaku's arrest on at least two
occasions, the sources said. He told colleagues that if Lushtaku, who is
popular in Kosovo, were jailed, it could destabilize the province on the
eve of municipal elections and bolster hard-liners in Serbian parliamentary
elections in December. Covey, who has left the United Nations for private
industry, declined to comment.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe cited the example
in a report last month -- without identifying Lushtaku -- alleging "unequal
treatment" of those accused of criminal activity.

Karphammar, the former U.N. judge, said NATO and U.N. officials also
intervened in February 2000 to force the release of more than a dozen
former members of the rebel army, including a man who was wanted by
Interpol. The ethnic Albanians had been detained by French forces for
organizing a riot in the northern city of Mitrovica. But French
intelligence officers refused to give a local court information they
collected in interviews. All the suspects were released "before the real
court investigation started, because of a threat by rebel leaders that if
they were not released, KFOR soldiers would come under threat," Karphammar
said.

Tensions between police and NATO often surface in criminal investigations,
sources say. Several police officers have reported being shooed away from
crime scenes by NATO intelligence officers who insist on conducting the
first interviews with key witnesses and then withhold the results.

After the bus bombing, NATO paved over the crater on the Nis highway within
hours, an act that several police officers said destroyed potential evidence.

Sometime before the blast, NATO officials received intelligence information
about a threat to movements of Serbs, two sources said. The day the buses
set out, soldiers were assigned to check the road for explosives, but they
were distracted by the presence of two men on a nearby hilltop and did not
complete the task; their radio malfunctioned when they tried to ask the
convoy to wait.

Gorica Scepanovic, a passenger that day, still finds it difficult to talk
about what followed. "It all happened within a few seconds -- panic, shock,
and when we opened our eyes, smoke and blood everywhere. It was dripping
from all over the bus, and at that moment, you were not sure if it is yours
or someone else's. . . . The first thing I saw on my way to the door was
someone's leg hanging from the ceiling."

Two of the four men who were later arrested worked at the Pristina
headquarters of the KPC. Family members of Jusuf Veliu, a KPC captain, deny
the charges but say that he was traumatized by Serb atrocities against
Albanians during the war. "He saw bad things during the war, including dead
kids," a relative said.

The families of the others arrested, KPC Col. Cele Gashi and shopkeeper
Avdi Behluli, also asserted that they are innocent. Behluli's family said
he was arrested and beaten by Serbs before the war, and display pictures
showing he is now friendly with top KPC officials and Pristina's Albanian
police chief.

All three men in custody have denied knowing Ejupi, the 23-year-old who
escaped from the U.S. military prison. Ejupi had been arrested twice in
Germany, once for stealing gasoline and once for beating another ethnic
Albanian. But police say that Ejupi's cell phone, seized during his arrest,
indicates he spoke to one of the other men around the time of the bombing.

When he was arrested, Ejupi told police, "I don't want to say anything and
I don't know what to say," according to documents provided by his lawyer.
But even without his testimony, police found interesting evidence. On a
cigarette butt discarded at the tree stump, they found DNA that matched the
sample in his German arrest file.

U.S. Army officials say Ejupi's escape on May 14 from Camp Bondsteel
involved about 10 minutes' work of cutting through two wire fences. The
breakout was hardly a novel event in Kosovo. More than 30 defendants,
including many indicted for ethnic crimes, freed themselves from other
prisons last year.

Since then, the Bondsteel prison has added more guard towers and lights; no
one has been disciplined for the escape.

Baton Haxhiu, editor of the ethnic Albanian newspaper Koha Ditore, called
the bombing "the worst crime of postwar Kosovo" and said it has aroused
widespread disgust. Albanians and Serbs alike want rule of law, he said. In
an editorial, he said the police had been "castrated" and blamed ethnic
Albanian political leaders for imposing a "code of silence" about the crime.

But there are no signs that violence is waning. A month after the bus was
destroyed, NATO troops found a similar device along a road south of
Pristina, near an area inhabited by Ashkalis, another ethnic group that
Albanian nationalists would like to expel.

That the bomb was not aimed at Serbs gave little comfort to that community.
Bishop Artemije, head of the Serb National Council in Kosovo, said recently
that his people still have "neither the right to life, nor to work, and
freedom of movement."



Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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