June 25, 1999
Kosovo Rebels Accused of Executions in the Ranks
By CHRIS HEDGES
he 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.
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. 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
Thaci and the rebel force
partners in rebuilding Kosovo.
The agreement NATO signed
with 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 Thaci or his
aides execute anyone, they recounted -- and in some cases said
they had witnessed -- incidents in
which 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."
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
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.
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
Thaci.
A Reputation
For Rough Intimidation
The Western diplomat in the Balkans
said, however, that 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.
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
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 Haliti, who is officially
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.
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.
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 Syla, whom Thaci appointed his defense minister, and Haliti,
have become the core of the leadership that
dominates the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Violence has long swirled around
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
Thaci.
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, 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.
Thaci was involved, along with
Haliti, in arms smuggling from Switzerland
in the years before the 1998 uprising, say
current and former senior rebel commanders.
Thaci and Haliti both have wives
and children in Switzerland, although
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,
Thaci and 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 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
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 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 Rugova's
administration, which is often at odds with
the rebel force. One Western diplomat, citing intelligence reports, said that Thaci
planned the assassination attempt on
Bukoshi last May. The plot failed. "Thaci
has a single goal and that is to promote
himself, to be No. 1," 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.
Krasniqi had surrendered his garrison
in Gospic, Croatia, in 1991 rather than defend Slobodan Milosevic's Government in
Belgrade.
Krasniqi had the blessing of 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. 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.
Thaci and Haliti accepted the
money and the trained volunteers, integrating them into their own units, but began to
thwart 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.
Albanian Authorities
Accused of Collusion
As tensions rose, Thaci and the Albanian authorities decided to eliminate
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 Krasniqi
and several aides and confiscated their
weapons. 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, Krasniqi ran into a police checkpoint about 300 yards from his office on
Dibra Street, according to a former rebel
commander who was with Krasniqi.
Krasniqi and his two companions were
again frisked for weapons and their vehicle
was searched. The two cars behind
Krasniqi, which carried aides, were not allowed through the checkpoint.
When 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 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 Krasniqi's head, fired a shot. He
then fired two more shots into Krasniqi's head once he fell onto the pavement.
American officials also had reports that
the rebel army had killed Krasniqi, but
said there were also subsequent, conflicting
reports from the region that he was killed by
disaffected members of his own unit.
After 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
Thaci. Many of these people were beaten.
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 Thaci was responsible,
a Western diplomat contends that Ceku
was killed by a Serbian sniper. The diplomat
said that his contacts indicated that
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 Ceku that he
and his lieutenant, Tahir Zemaj, should
leave the movement, but the stubborn
Ceku had refused to depart. Zemaj,
however, fled to Germany. "Tahir knew
they were serious and he got out," the
officer said. "Sali stayed and he was killed."
