Kosovo’s Dilemma
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3496
By Michael Levitin
Tensions are high, violence is flaring and bombs have exploded in the aftermath of http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3580’s declaration of independence. But as Kosovo leaders and NATO peacekeepers worry about the Serbs’ volatile short-term response to their historic province being stripped away, they are ignoring an even bigger security threat at stake in the region: what to do about the country’s 30,000 ex-KLA fighters, most of whom are jobless, poor, disillusioned–and armed to the teeth.
I have just returned from a reporting trip to Kosovo where I saw a “nation” not only unprepared to stand on its own two feet, but very far from such status. In environmental standards Kosovo is a disaster, choking on pollution levels 40 times above the European Union limit and an unrestrained housing boom (much of it carried out illegally on http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3489 lands) that is gobbling up precious agricultural space. Corruption is through the roof. Schools are overcrowded and in shambles (in a population where 70 per cent are under 30). Journalists and independent watchdog groups operate at great personal risk. Funny that a recent Gallup poll showed Kosovo Albanians to be the second most optimistic people in the world-mainly, it would seem, because the only direction they have to go is up.No less than 60 per cent of the country is unemployed, with special implications on the tens of thousands of dispirited guerilla fighters who still haven’t found their way back into society, and who have access to some 400,000 illegal guns that are reportedly still floating around the 2 million population. If the situation with Serbs in northern Kosovo worsens, or if Prime Minister Hashim Thaci’s government fails to enact policies that quickly improve living conditions at home, this could spell trouble. As Krenar Gashi, editor of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, told me: “There is a fear that at some point they’ll grab their weapons. The last thing these guys knew how to do was fight.”
It was a week before the Albanians in the province decared independence when I stepped into a third floor office overlooking the gray buildings and washed-out streets of downtown Pristina and shook hands with Faton Klinaku, secretary general of the Organization of KLA War Veterans. Like every interview it seemed in Kosovo, our conversation began with the customary offering of cigarettes and macchiato; and as the bare-walled room filled with smoke, Klinaku, who was dressed in a gray turtleneck and gray suit, sitting forward a bit anxiously on the sofa seat opposite me, laid out a scenario forecasting ominous times ahead.
Around 40 years old, with sleepy brown eyes and a long drawn face awash in gray-black stubble, Klinaku fought in the 1998-9 Kosovo Liberation Army insurgency against the Serb military-the last Balkan bloodbath of the 1990s. Some 2,300 of Klinaku’s comrades died in the fighting. Among those who survived, some ascended to power-like Thaci, and the supremely corrupt former PM Ramush Haradinaj, who’s now facing war crimes charges in the Hague. Some, on the other hand, committed suicide. About 2,500 got retrained and redeployed in the proto-military Kosovo Protection Corps.
http://www.counterpunch.org/levitin02212008.html