A Fighting Chance

By Massimo Calabresi/Kosovo and James L. Graff/Bonn

Cross a mist-shrouded mountain pasture pitted with craters, past four dead horses eviscerated by scavengers, over a trampled barbed wire fence and you are in Kosovo. A thin trail leads down through light green scrub oak to a rutted dirt road, which in turn winds deeper into the cleft of a narrow valley. The mighty crash of 110-mm mortar rounds resounds from the hillsides, interspersed with the delicate crack of Kalashnikov rifles. Wisps of munitions smoke mix with the low mountain clouds spreading over the Dukadjin plains in the distance. About a mile and a half in stands a small, bullet-flecked barrack nestled in a hollow, surrounded by flower beds full of dead tulips. A flagpole bears the Albanian flag.

The building, near the village of Kosare, was once an isolated Serbian army barrack. Now it is the first outpost of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army as it tries to fight its way into the province. The army has a long way to go. NATO bombing has pushed Serbian armor and artillery back two miles, but ahead of the K.L.A. lies the rolling grassland known to the Serbs as Metohija. The flatlands there are tank territory, and with no armor of their own, the lightly armed rebels cannot take and hold it. Kosare, though, is a strategic high ground, and the rebels say they are ready to hold it and even forge ahead. "[The Serbs] try to fight back," says Agron Thaci, 24, taking a break from cleaning and greasing his AK-47. "But we beat them. We wait, they come, and after..." He makes a slow horizontal cutting motion with his hand.

But Thaci's AK-47 is one of the few weapons the rebels have. In other "battalions" as many as five K.L.A. soldiers will share a single weapon. It helps that when they took the barrack, the K.L.A. captured stores of ammunition, light and heavy mortars and Austrian-made trucks. But the rebel army is still struggling to get the basic supplies it needs to fight a war.

Some help is beginning to flow in from overseas Albanians. At the head of these multinational fund-raising networks are men such as Switzerland-based Jashar Salihu, a thickly mustached Albanian with a sharply dimpled smile that gives him the aura of a Balkan Tom Selleck. Salihu's Homeland Calling Fund, which has offices around the globe, often channels the money it raises--by courier, in cash--to K.L.A. field commanders, who use it to buy weapons and supplies. Sometimes the flow approaches several million dollars a month, he claims.

Another key fund raiser is Bujar Bukoshi. One of the two would-be Prime Ministers of a still nonexistent Republic of Kosova, the Bonn-based Bukoshi claims that his government-in-exile has spent more than $4 million on arms and supplies for the K.L.A. in the weeks since NATO bombings began. At Bukoshi's request his "finance minister"--extremely nervous and clearly on edge--presents a computer printout that he says documents part of the Republic of Kosova Fund's holdings in a bank in Tirana, Albania: more than $33 million.

Though each disparages the other's methods and motives, Bukoshi and Salihu say they are doing everything they can to get money out of the Albanian diaspora and into Kosovo. The contributions they elicit fund both humanitarian aid to Albanian civilians and, according to Homeland Calling's chief for Germany, military aid for the K.L.A.

The rebels need the help. The U.S. has considered using the small army as a kind of proxy ground force inside Kosovo. So far, no such move has been made, though ties to the group are growing: U.S. diplomats meet with K.L.A. leaders; K.L.A. commanders on the scene provide target information to NATO military planners; and the alliance has even made arrangements for the K.L.A. to help rescue downed pilots. In a tenuous first step toward direct backing of the K.L.A., the White House is considering sending nonlethal aid such as food, uniforms and communications equipment, Administration sources tell TIME. And while Washington is still shying away from directly arming the K.L.A., a senior Administration official admitted a fortnight ago for the first time that "we're in some respects now the K.L.A.'s air force."

Whether NATO will become the K.L.A.'s armorer remains to be seen. The K.L.A., as U.S. officials are quick to point out, is not going to become a 1990s version of the contras, the U.S.-backed insurgent group that fought to overthrow a communist regime in Nicaragua in the 1980s. For starters, no one wants to use the K.L.A. to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic. And no one wants the war to go on long enough for the K.L.A. to assume contra-like proportions. Most important, however, NATO officials are worried that a well-armed and well-trained K.L.A. would veer into radicalism. K.L.A. officials such as Salihu, for instance, unabashedly say the only route to Balkan stability is a "greater Albania" that would include huge swaths of Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania and Kosovo. That ambition is terrifying to NATO politicians, who simply want to return Kosovars to their homeland.

Overseas Albanian fund raising, on a much smaller scale, has been going on since the early part of the decade, when Milosevic began cracking down on the province. From 1991 onward Bukoshi's "government" was collecting a tax of 3% from most of the estimated 600,000 Kosovar Albanians who worked in Western Europe, especially Germany and Switzerland. (Patriotic Kosovars were encouraged to set up standing orders with their banks to pay the tax every month.)

Arming the group is an expensive business. K.L.A. purchasers are buying not factory direct but from shady middlemen who see the war as a perfect chance for price gouging. Says a spokesman: "An AK-47 normally costs $100, but we always end up paying at least double." That is nothing compared with the cost for mortars and other ammunition, let alone for the high-tech antitank weapons the K.L.A. at Kosare needs. New K.L.A. recruits are flea-market soldiers, carrying illegally acquired (or stolen) guns and identified by K.L.A. shoulder patches made in Germany. Heavier weapons come largely from East European countries--including the occasional Serbian commander willing to sell for cash.

It is hard to sort out how much of the millions of dollars raised overseas is spent for weapons and how much for humanitarian aid. K.L.A. fund raisers in the U.S. insist that the money they contribute to Homeland Calling is used for medical supplies and food. But last year the Swiss government froze one Homeland Calling bank account because Salihu refused to promise its funds would not be used to buy arms.

Whatever the ultimate destination of all this cash, the job of raising it has become increasingly important. In the U.S. fund raisers work from coast to coast, using any Albanian gathering as an excuse for inviting donations--$60,000 was raised at a Chicago funeral, for instance. But all kinds of Albanians are responding to the call. Avzi Bejadini, an ethnic Albanian peasant in western Macedonia, tells how he and others in his village have scraped together money that they pass along to the fund raisers who parade through the countryside. "We all have emptied our pockets because of the obligation we feel toward our ethnic Albanian brothers in Kosovo," he says. Indeed, just last month the farmer sank his entire life savings--$8--into an account to help collect food and supplies for Kosovo's refugees. In return, Bejadini was given a pistachio-colored receipt with no inscription of the collector's name or the purpose of the donation. The voucher--now neatly folded in four--holds pride of place in Bejadini's empty wallet, next to the picture of his wife.

--With reporting by Anthee Carassava/Skopje, Margot Hornblower/Las Vegas, Jan Stojaspal/Tirana and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by Anthee Carassava/Skopje, Margot Hornblower/Las Vegas, Jan Stojaspal/Tirana and Douglas Waller/Washington