Tuesday, July 24, 2001

Accounts vary about Kosovo Protection Corps’ role as disaster relief group

By Terry Boyd and Scott Schonauer, Stars and Stripes

UROSEVAC, Kosovo — They wear military-style uniforms. Some carry automatic weapons.

Albanian flags fly outside their heavily guarded Kosovo compounds.

Ethnic Albanians say they’re Kosovo’s next army. The U.N. and NATO say they’re only a civilian disaster relief organization.

Critics just call them a disaster waiting to happen.

So, who are the 5,000 people who make up the Kosovo Protection Corps?

For starters, all the group’s leaders — and most members — are former guerrillas who fought Serb forces before NATO intervened in 1999.

The Kosovo Protection Corps is “a multiethnic, civilian emergency service agency training to assist [United Nations Mission in Kosovo] during natural disasters,” according to the U.N. resolution creating it.

But in more than a dozen interviews, some U.N. police and U.S. intelligence officers say that nearly everything bad that happens in Kosovo, Macedonia and southern Serbia connects back to the corps.

Army intelligence soldiers and U.N. police officers say a large core of its members is a well-organized group of former guerrillas with a Mafia-like grip on some Kosovo communities.

Privately, U.S. intelligence soldiers and U.N. police sources say that corps members fed guns and guerrilla know-how to the ethnic Albanian insurgency in southern Serbia that ended last May. Now, they say, the corps is a major contributor of arms and expertise to the four-month ethnic Albanian rebellion in Macedonia.

Manuel

Publicly, there is growing pressure on corps leaders and members, many of whom KFOR, international administrators and police have charged with murder, assault, extortion and torture during the corps’ two-year history.

Last week, German soldiers arrested a regional commander of the corps and charged him with being a “direct threat” to KFOR troops.

KFOR also is searching for another commander of the corps’ guard and rapid reaction group after finding weapons in his home.

Earlier this month, the corps’ former chief of staff, whom the U.N. had help organize the corps, was ejected after he surfaced in Macedonia as chief of staff of the National Liberation Army, said Michael McClellan, spokesman for the U.S. consulate in Kosovo.

The NLA is the principal separatist guerrilla force now fighting Macedonian forces.

This month, the corps appeared to plunge deeper into turmoil and controversy when the commander, Agim Ceku, offered to resign after the United Nations suspended five high-ranking members. His resignation was not accepted.

While many officials publicly blame the violations and misbehavior on individuals and not on the corps, U.S. soldiers say keeping an eye on members and helping make them a respectable, professional organization are among their biggest challenges.

“We want the bad guys out,” McClellan said, “but there are plenty of good guys. We’ve put pressure [on the corps] to clean up their act.”

Cleaning up the corps may start with figuring out what its role is in Kosovo.

“There is a basic discrepancy between what we say they are — and try to make them look like — and what they say they are,” said Susan Manuel, spokeswoman for the U.N. police.

Kosovar Albanians “think of [the TMK] as their army,” Manuel said.

Adding to the dilemma is confusion over who should police them: law enforcement or KFOR.

“I don’t know what they do over there,” one British U.N. police officer said, referring to the corps’ Vitina headquarters. “That’s not my job. That’s KFOR’s job.”

But KFOR only supervises the corps, a U.S. soldier said. When corps members break the law, it is up to the police to go after them.

“It’s not in our mandate,” the intelligence soldier said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

Depending on who you talk to, U.S. officers describe the corps as everything from a civil affairs organization to a multiethnic emergency response organization.

“Like FEMA,” said U.S. Army Maj. Mark Corson, a corps liaison in Gnjilane, about the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

KFOR allows corps officers to carry side arms, and to keep a limited number of AK-47 assault rifles for protection.

U.S. officers assigned to work in corps headquarters as liaisons contend that the majority of the corps leaders and rank-and-file members are serious about building a force for good.

The corps’ top leader has other ideas though.

“Nobody established [the corps] because we need an emergency service,” Ceku said. “Yes, of course, we need it. But it was not the real purpose.

“The real purpose was to bring former combatants together and to keep them organized, busy and to transform them,” Ceku said. “From one loosely established guerrilla army, to put all these fighters in one organization in a formal structure and to control and command them. It’s very difficult.”

A few troublemakers aside, the corps “is a great organization that’s going to make significant contributions to Kosovo society,” said Corson, a Task Force Falcon Joint Implementation Commission officer.

From his office in the corps’ Gnjilane headquarters, he helps train members and turn them into what he calls an “emergency services force.”

Gregory Piatt / Stars and Stripes Armed with an AK-47, a Kosovo Protection Corps member guards the corps headquarters' main gate in Pristina, Kosovo. While the corps is considered a disaster relief organization, some members carry weapons and some former members have said the corps training includes small arms training.

So far, Corson rates that effort a success, adding that after two years of trying to turn fighters into humanitarians, the corps is “not fully mature.”

Still, he describes their ability to learn firefighting and other emergency training as impressive.

To ingrain a sense of structure and discipline and to ensure corps leaders comply with KFOR rules, Corson said he and other U.S. implementation commission members also have periodic formal musters and bi-monthly inspections.

Corps leaders and members “want to be a modern organization,” he said, “and they’re trying to institute Western [organizational] models.”

Pressed about overall discipline, Corson said neither he nor any outsiders control the Corps. His job primarily is to teach, not to monitor members for violations, he said.

Corson admitted there are occasional problems.

One persistent problem is that corps members turn up at illegal guerrilla gatherings, and Corson said three Gnjilane members were suspended for 60 days after they attended a slain guerrilla leader’s funeral earlier this year.

“But for every bad guy, we’ve got three, four or five good guys who want to do the right thing,” he said.

Are all corps people corrupt?

No, said one Vitina-based U.S. intelligence officer on condition of anonymity. By KFOR mandate, the corps rotates zone commanders, the officer said.

One commander may cooperate with KFOR, “another guy comes in with a different philosophy, and the next thing you know, you have problems between KFOR and the [corps].”

But just keeping its members busy seems to be a major problem.

“There’s nothing much for them to do,” said Royal Air Force Squadron Leader Roy Brown, KFOR spokesman in Pristina.

Two years into the effort to rebuild Kosovo, corps officials “are very keen to have a more positive image, and we’re happy to promote that,” Brown said in an interview last month.

At the same time, there is an undertone of cynicism in the offices where U.N. and KFOR officials decide Kosovo’s fate, as if everyone knows the inside joke about the corps but won’t say what it is.

“No one in [the U.N. press center in Pristina] is going to give you anything other than the company line” on the corps, McNeill said.

But U.N. police spokesman Manuel called the international communities’ relationship with the corps “a dance with the devil.”

Ceku, however, has a different take on the corps he leads. He says the group wants to continue to grow and take on more responsibilities. It wants to begin guarding monuments, escorting convoys and welcoming refugees.

All it needs is the international community to start supporting it financially.

“Yes, I can do much more. Much more. I said KPC can be good example,” he said. “If you invest in KPC, you will have all the people respecting and looking and watching what we are doing.

“And we are setting examples,” Ceku said. “We are setting the standards here for this society.”

RELATED STORY: Members of protection corps run into problems prompting reprimand from U.S.

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