Joining the Kosovo Liberation Army: A continuist,process-based analysis

The genesis of armed resistance

To understand the dynamics of violence in Kosovo, we need to go back, not to 1989, but to 1981. Following the demonstrations and riots of that year, ⁵ any organizations or activities that did not take the official line of the League of Communists (the only officially sanctioned party) were viewed as secessionist and were actively fought and suppressed. This situation laid the foundations for clandestine activism, and this served as an initial framework for those who opposed the institutional changes of 1989. Initially, their activity consisted in developing and organizing clandestine networks of those who opposed the government. Some were interested in arming their groups. As we will see, however, at this stage, possessing weapons did not necessarily imply that these groups were involved in armed resistance.

These accounts do not just emphasize that such activity was clandestine. They also make it clear that these networks were heavily fragmented into groups based primarily on acquaintances between families, colleagues, and neighbors and on practices of co-optation. Adnan was introduced into the movement when he was a high school student by an uncle who had been closely monitored by the police since his imprisonment in 1981:

There were no forms to fill out to join the network. You didn’t have to apply. You joined if you were ready, and if someone on the inside had invited you. My uncle went to prison in 1981. When he came out, he went to Europe, and then he came back to Kosovo. He asked me for a favor: he wanted me to do something for my country. ⁶

The scale of the police presence after the 1981 demonstrations, which grew again after 1989, meant that security issues were high on the agenda. Activists had to guard against the danger of infiltration and identification by the police (Perritt, 2008: 46). Only “trustworthy” individuals were allowed into these networks—individuals whose trustworthiness was based in some cases on their patriotic allegiance, demonstrated by an oath taken before the “national” flag. ⁷ For instance, Femhi, who had been involved in illegal political action since the demonstrations of 1981 and who had been obliged to leave the Drenica region for Germany between 1992 and 1997, considered such an oath a stronger link than family ties:

I taught history, but I got fired after 1981 . . . I didn’t even dare tell my wife about what I was doing. I even hesitated to talk about it with my brother. ⁸ But I trusted the people who worked with me, because they had taken an oath in front of the national flag. You really trusted people you’d taken an oath with . . . Right hand raised in a fist: until the last moment, we’d carry out our work, and we’d tell no one about it. We got down on our knees in front of the flag and, at the end, we signed the text that had just been read out. It became a military organization in 1992. I don’t know who our leader was, but each Thursday we would meet, give a report on the week’s work, and plan the coming week . . . Our work was propaganda. ⁹

A first shift took place after the looting of Albanian barracks in 1997 during the financial crisis, which was also known as the Pyramid Crisis (Cabanes and Cabanes, 1999). This facilitated the transport of firearms toward Kosovo. ¹⁰ “Watchtowers” were now set up in villages, marking a change from the clandestine phase: resistance now took place in broad daylight. Now that some activists possessed weapons, a dynamic of territorial defense emerged, which we will return to later. These individuals, who we will call “armed activists,” ¹¹ implemented surveillance over their villages and established checkpoints, demonstrating their control of the region and allowing them to withstand police incursion.

In some of these “pockets of resistance”—which might be made up of just two or three men—the activity was not just defensive: guerrilla tactics were used, primarily involving quick-fire attacks against police stations and patrols (recall that the police were exclusively Serb). The militants exploited the element of surprise, the speed with which they could arrive and retreat, their excellent knowledge of the surrounding area, and support from the locals. ¹² As far as possible, their goal was to avoid any “real” armed confrontation, which the Serb forces—superior in numbers, firepower, and organization—would quickly dominate.

The groups were fragmented, and the weapons available to them were limited, although they arrived at an increasing rate after 1997. Guards and checkpoints were therefore the UÇK’s main repertoire of contention until June 1998, when it claimed to have “liberated” 40% of Kosovo. In reality, the armed militants had avoided combat almost completely, as most of their work had consisted of advertising their presence. The declarations that Kosovo had been liberated were a genuine symbolic coup.

We can see that the increasing prominence of armed resistance was part of a nearly indiscernible, incremental transition: as fighters came to possess weapons, they moved away from a logic of building networks in order to “mobilize convictions” (Klandermans, 1984) toward one of territorial defense. This shift owes far more to the configuration of local interactions than to any central military coordination supposedly driven by a strategy (Perritt, 2008). According to Baton, who lives near Malishevo, the guards in his village were highly autonomous. They were organized on the basis of a distinctly local dynamic that relied on existing acquaintances and had little connection with other Kosovar resistance movements:

When we began in 1997, illegally, this house was a meeting-place. Before 1997 . . . there were only three of us. Soldiers and officers from every region came to us. The aim of these meetings was to form an army and, in particular, to get rid of the Serbs, who were attacking the people. We wanted to have a structure and groups in each region because we wanted to defend our people. Our weapons mostly came from Albania . . . Until May 1998, we had guards in the village [near Malishevo]. Our village is split into five parts, and there was someone in each of these. Most of those who joined our movement had already been members of the LDK [Ibrahim Rugova’s movement]. Most of them were fathers and teachers. We organized ourselves spontaneously. I had never heard of the Jashari family before the war, ¹³ until March 1998. ¹⁴

The highly local and decentralized nature of these mobilizations is demonstrated by how closely they were connected to the defense of individual villages: Baton may have lived in the same region as the Jasharis, but it was only a year after he had begun to construct his own network that he heard about Adem Jashari, the hero who had supposedly instigated the armed resistance! These observations support research that has emphasized the heterogeneity of the UÇK and the lack of coordination between the groups claiming to be part of it at any one time (Judah, 2000: 147). ¹⁵

Expanding Serb forces and increasingly militarized repression ¹⁶ —which gathered pace after 1998, especially in places considered centers of armed resistance—often made it impossible for guards in villages to carry out their work. The imbalance in forces meant that armed militants were effectively chased out of their own regions and were required to flee to the surrounding mountains where they set up long-term bases. The “military” advantage of the Serb forces produced a shift toward the next phase, one that was crucial for the construction of the social representation of the armed resistance. ¹⁷ The armed groups became militarized: as militants withdrew and gathered in the mountains, military camps and combat training became widespread. At the same time, however, it remained important to defend civilians and families. In some cases, civilians were even invited to join the armed militants in the mountains. Faton, who claims to have fought in Drenica “from the very beginning,” explains how it unfolded:

We brought our families with us at first. We set up tents and came to visit them. All the houses in Drenica were burned in September 1998. We couldn’t leave our families at home—they were massacring people, raping them. When the Serb soldiers arrived, we went to defend our families. It took two or three hours to lead the families to another area, and each time we moved, several fighters were killed. ¹⁸

Disparate groups coalesced in “camps,” which were militarized to varying degrees, as not all of the fighters had weapons. For those involved, this situation undoubtedly helped construct the social representation of a “Kosovo liberation army”: the movement was now organized into military unity, and an imaginary of the coming fight had developed, one that they had to prepare for both mentally and militarily. As Faton’s account shows, this imaginary was fueled by the question of the first “martyrs”—which, although some had died without a fight, encouraged polarization with the enemy (Della Porta, 2013: 284) and incited an armed resistance movement as a response.

Increasing prominence and credibility for the armed resistance movement

The mediatization and internationalization of the conflict resulting from the militarization of the repression completed the social construction of the “Kosovo Liberation Army.” Almost 94% of combatants joined the UÇK in 1998–1999, with 57% joining in 1998. ¹⁹ This influx came on the heels of two massacres that gained substantial media attention: in Likoshane and Qirez at the end of February 1998, and in Prekaz in March 1998, when the Jashari family was targeted. ²⁰ There was significant international media attention around these events, especially Prekaz, and foreign powers and human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) lodged official protests. These factors, along with the conditions in which the attack took place, allowed the armed resistance movement to emerge from the localized, rural pockets it had largely been confined to until that point. The violent clashes with the Jashari family, which had lasted several days, gave the representation of an armed resistance organization a sense of reality, credibility, and substance, among those who had never encountered it or considered it as tangible. The conditions in which Adem Jashari died encouraged the construction of a myth of resistance situated in a national heroic genealogy going back to Skanderbeg, the ex-Janissary who opposed the Ottoman conquest in the Middle Ages: Jashari had died in battle, supposedly sacrificing himself and his family for the nation (Di Lellio and Schwandner-Sievers, 2006: 45).

These events marked a threshold and a turning point for many individuals who joined the UÇK, cementing the idea of an armed resistance movement definitively in people’s minds. This was a new shift. For those who then joined the UÇK, the idea was no longer to defend one’s territory, but to fight. Furthermore, from that moment, recruitment ceased to be merely local. City-dwellers and expatriates ²¹ joined the UÇK. Bekim, who runs a cafe in Pristina, describes how his youthful, carefree life in the city stopped abruptly:

When they killed Jashari, I was in a nightclub [in Pristina], and I had no idea what was going on. In June 1998, I went to Drenica to see how the land lay, and I decided to join the UÇK. ²²

Similarly, Flamour became involved in the events after having fled to Europe, where he was working in the building industry:

I was living in the Netherlands. After the first massacre in Prekaz, I came back to Kosovo to protect my country and my family. I had heard about the UÇK . . . in 1991. After Prekaz [in March 1998], I told myself that I had to do more. ²³ Everyone has a duty to protect their country. ²⁴

Such accounts emphasize the degree to which these events “functioned as moments of rupture, realigning identities, brutally closing off past possibilities, reforming ways of behaving and of thinking—and thinking about oneself” (Collovald and Gaïti, 2006: 37). The influx of new recruits came as a surprise to the leaders of the UÇK, who had only planned substantial military actions in 1999 (Judah, 2000: 141). This demonstrates that the UÇK’s organizational efforts were not decisive in the onset of armed resistance, which had mostly passed the “strategists” by.

Once our subjects had become aware of these massacres, they put an end to what had been their world and their daily existence up to that moment: their work, their studies, their life abroad, their leisure. In many cases, they did so regardless of the financial and affective toll such a rupture would have on their personal trajectory. The interviews make it clear that the events that led them to join the UÇK served as moments of rupture. To some extent, of course, this is a post facto reconstruction. We here encounter the difficulty of interpreting the effect of an event on the decision to join a movement (Latté, 2012). There is no doubt that the event marked a threshold, one of “moral shock,” in Jasper’s sense: people apparently found their existing rationalities and projections interrupted and replaced by an engagement in armed resistance. ²⁵ A moral shock is provoked by “an unexpected event or piece of information [that] raises such a sense of outrage in a person that she becomes inclined towards political action, whether or not she has acquaintances in the movement” (Goodwin et al., 2001: 16). ²⁶ This perception—of an affront and a moral obligation to fight (Sommier, 2012: 22)—was rooted in our subjects’ strong sense of national identity, which caused them to see injury done to others as injury to themselves (“my land,” “my family,” “our people”), and in a gendered conception of their roles (protecting their country and people, protecting women).

The circumstances of the increase in volunteers for the UÇK show that the move toward armed conflict was due primarily to interactions with the Serbian state and its excessive use of coercive force.

Perceptions of threat and dynamics of self-defense

As we saw, after the clandestine phase of the 1980s, a new logic of territorial defense emerged around 1997: the territory was conceived both as a space to be protected and as a nation to be preserved in the face of coercion. This was the same dynamic of self-defense that took hold in Côte d’Ivoire, where the decision to join an armed group “responded to a potential threat,” felt to be increasingly tangible, and subsequently became a “means of protection” (Chelpi Den Hamer, 2012). Similarly, when our subjects recalled the context in which they joined the resistance, almost all of them mention the alleged abuses committed by the Serbian police, against themselves or against their families. If we are to understand why people join clandestine networks, we must examine local configurations and everyday life.

These violent interactions mostly explain the increase in the dynamic of armed territorial defense in rural areas, primarily because the state exclusively manifested itself in those areas through violent coercion. Once parallel institutions were set up in the late 1980s, and particularly after the teachers were fired, the police became the only representatives of the state in the countryside—which, even during the Yugoslav period, was characterized by its remoteness and neglected by redistributive public policies.

The process of acquiring a weapon was heavily linked to the personal experiences of police violence. Some individuals owned a weapon in view of joining the resistance, but this was not the only motive: above all, they were seeking resources with which to defend themselves against excessive coercion. Weapons provided reassurance. This was the case for Blerim, the only one of his family to remain in Drenica after his parents, his sister, and his three brothers went abroad. He obtained a firearm after being investigated by the police—without being identified—who were looking for him because one of his brothers had been involved in the events of 1989:

I hid with my neighbors, with some uncles who lived in my village. I didn’t dare remain at home. I had been arrested by the police, but I hadn’t given my identity. They had beaten me but let me go. I bought a weapon to protect myself with, with money that my father had sent me [from abroad]. I bought it to protect myself, but I had also heard of an armed organization. The first time that I heard about the UÇK was in 1997. ²⁷

Thus, obtaining a weapon is a way of asserting oneself by rejecting a posture of victimhood. We should relate this key moment to the symbolism attached to Kosovar weapons, which is inherited from Albanian customary law, the Kanun. This was appealed “to support an armed response to Serb repression” and “was based on the concept of ‘honor’ and on the centrality and highly symbolic content of firearms possession as a way of defending the integrity and reputation of the family” (Schwandner-Sievers and Cattaneo, 2005: 210–211). Historically, weapons were viewed in gendered terms in rural areas. This was particularly visible in rites of passage, like the transmission of a weapon from the father (or the head of the extended family) to the child, who was thereby transformed into “an ‘honorable” man who had the right to property and who could become involved in bloody vendettas. Without a weapon, “a man was considered a woman” (Schwandner-Sievers and Cattaneo, 2005: 211). In the modern world, and especially in cities, this initiatory rite has lost much of its power. Working from observations and interviews with UÇK fighters, the anthropologist Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers remarked, however, that an individual who had “the will” to use a weapon was viewed as a “man,” and that being “ready to sacrifice his own life” made him a “hero” (Schwandner-Sievers and Cattaneo, 2005: 219).

Gradually, obtaining a weapon was not just seen as a matter of self-defense, but as a way of joining the fight. It was not just a material or practical concern, but played a decisive role as a rite of passage. This rite took two forms: individuals could find a weapon in the family, ²⁸ or go by foot to Albania, where those we interviewed were able to acquire Kalashnikovs (AK-47s):

I joined the UÇK after Prekaz. Officially, we knew that the UÇK existed. So I joined up. I had friends in the UÇK. My brother was part of it. I went to Albania to get myself a gun. That was the hardest part, going there and back on foot. The journey took six days. ²⁹

On rare occasions, weapons would have been bought from Serb civilians. The journey by foot to Albania, which often lasted 5 or 6 days, resembled a rite of institution in that it transformed the civilian into a fighter, marking their entrance into a new period in their personal trajectory. This was related to the historical meaning of weapons in the lives of young Albanians: possessing one weapon marked their passage to adulthood.

The intergenerational embeddedness of resistance

Through our interviews, we can identify two categories of persecution: instances that targeted families who were identified as “nationalists” and “terrorists”; and more random, everyday instances, which reveal that it was customary for the police to practice discriminatory coercion against Albanians. Human rights NGOs protested against such police brutality, and almost all of our interviewees mentioned it, demonstrating that their national imaginary was constructed within the framework of these violent interactions with the custodians of power. Recurring accounts of police violence, often involving a perception of “Serb domination” as “oppressive,” encouraged a discourse about the need for Albanians to free themselves. Engagement in the armed resistance was, indeed, the result of “grievances” (Cederman et al., 2013). We find resemblances here to the logic of engagement in guerrillas in Colombia, where ex-combatants “come from highly victimized families and networks . . . [and] areas that are, on average, more violent than national averages” (Arjona and Kalyvas, 2012: 164).

The targeted form of police repression was, in many ways, historically continuous with the mobilizations of 1981 and 1989. More rarely, some of our subjects mentioned an earlier period, lasting until the mid-1960s, when Ranković, the interior minister of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, strictly monitored supposed Albanian nationalists (Roux, 1992). Hashim, for instance, whose family had faced three generations of persecution before him, tells us:

Like most, my family was oppressed, with no right to work or receive education. Between 1957 and 1960, my grandfather’s brother and father were killed. From that moment, my family was pushed aside. That was the Ranković system, which eliminated people who represented a threat.

Q: Did you belong to a militant family?

My grandfather’s father had been the leader of his village, and had spoken out against the Yugoslavian system. My father had been imprisoned for ten years, on the pretext that he represented a threat and might organize something against the state. That was because he was my grandfather’s son. When he got out, he couldn’t find work. My father began telling me these stories when I was fourteen or fifteen. He explained to me that the Serbian state was a threat, and that the schools were closed. My father knew that there would be problems, and maybe even a war. That’s why he had six children! I was the last of six. My older brother began taking part in student demonstrations in 1981. After that, they stopped him from studying, and he had to go overseas. ³⁰

State repression was one driver for engagement in the UÇK. The targeted, multifaceted repression of families who had been identified as “enemies of the state” because of their nationalist activism—which was treated as terrorism from the 1990s onward—gave a distinctive identitarian character to this armed mobilization. As our interviews show, the young men who took up arms in the 1990s almost all had a parent, grandparent, uncle, or brother who had been arrested, imprisoned, and fired from their job as an official or had themselves been imprisoned after the mobilizations of 1981 and 1989. Joining the armed resistance often took place against a family backdrop. We should understand this as the effect of an early socialization into a family history of militancy and, inevitably, of repression, producing “militant capital.”

But Hashim’s case also demonstrates the importance of the intergenerational transfer of a narrative of familial repression, which for Hashim encouraged the perception that his family had been destined since the 1960s to fight Yugoslavian rule. The trajectories of the family’s six brothers were apparently determined by this family history: three of them took refuge abroad, and the three others fought for the UÇK. Several of our subjects described a sort of embedded family activism, as though earlier persecution created a dynamic of honor among the young, requiring a family solidarity that was manifested in resistance. Joining the UÇK was often a family experience, and in many cases involved groups of brothers. ³¹

Repressive practices often seem to have contributed to the construction of a family memory of resistance (Gensburger and Lavabre, 2005), fueling a sense of obligation that persisted from one generation to another, with a decisively gendered dimension. This family memory of resistance may have its source in the events of the early 20th century: the Kaçak rebellion against the Young Turk policy of disarming Albanians. ³² The UÇK was born “in the very villages in which the violent oppression of the Kaçaks and the atrocities committed against civilians represented a fundamental part of family history”; many UÇK fighters identified with this insurrectional tradition (Schwandner-Sievers and Cattaneo, 2005: 210).

It seems that repressive police practices, which did not only punish individuals in response to particular actions but systematically targeted entire families, contributed heavily to individual engagement in the resistance and, ultimately, to their commitment to armed conflict. This is true for Blerim, who followed his older brother, whom he admired, in taking up arms. His whole family was being sought by the police for his brother’s participation in the demonstrations of 1989:

My father and mother went abroad. So did the rest of my family, three brothers and a sister. I stayed in the village. One of my brothers stayed, but he had to leave. They were looking for me because of my brother. My brother had studied at Mitrovicë. He had been active in the 1990s, and had taken part in the demonstrations in 1989. Two or three weeks afterward, he was imprisoned for a month. When he was released, he stayed in Kosovo for two months, and then he went to Switzerland. ³³

What those involved see as the stigmatization of their family has the effect of determining and categorizing them as “rebels,” inciting them toward violence. The extension of police repression to the family, on the pretext of the supposed Albanian clan solidarity, thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

War as a continuum

Finally, these accounts of targeted and untargeted repression by the Serb police demonstrate that the period from 1998 to 1999 did not fundamentally differ from that which followed the events of 1981 and 1989. The perception of a rapid descent into violence in 1998–1999 is that of an external perspective, unrelated to that of the actors involved. For many Albanians in Kosovo, and particularly in rural areas, daily life from the 1980s onward was marked by a generalized violence that arose from the repression they faced: arrests, imprisonment, firings of officials, harassment, official summons, torture, assault by the police, and so on. As Roland Marchal (2003) remarks, periods prior to civil wars are often characterized by intense violence (p. 589).

We should instead consider the phase of armed conflict in 1998–1999 as part of a continuum with this earlier situation of “neither peace nor war” (Linhardt and Moreau de Bellaing, 2013; Richards, 2005). A number of ex-combatants described the phase in which they procured a weapon and/or became involved in armed resistance as safer than the earlier period—the inverse of the common-sense understanding of the pre-war and wartime situations. Dardan joined the UÇK after being beaten, an event that reminded him just how vulnerable he and his fellow citizens were. He felt that he would be safer in the resistance:

I was in Pristina, waiting at a bus stop. I heard someone whistle, and I prepared myself for a beating. Two Serb policemen asked me for my identity card. In my hands, I was holding a newspaper from the Union of Students, ³⁴ as well as a map of Kosovo. The [policemen] took me to a basement, beat me, and left me [senseless]. A woman threw some water in my face and helped me get on a bus. When I saw that they were beating Albanians at a checkpoint simply because they were Albanians, I decided to go back home via the mountains . . . It was better to be armed. It was safer. I had three cousins. That night, we decided to go join the UÇK together. ³⁵

Emrush Xhemajli, born in 1959, was one of the founding members of the main clandestine party involved in organizing the armed resistance. He operated from Switzerland, where he had fled after the riots of 1981. The commander of the UÇK’s third zone during the war, he felt that he had been in greater danger as an exiled political activist than during the war itself:

The real confrontation between Kosova ³⁶ and Serbia began in 1981. The period after 1981 was very difficult for us as activists. When the war started [in 1998], as a militant, it was like a cocktail, some sort of cheerful protest. Before the war, though, that was a hard time. For instance: you’re here, ³⁷ you’re surrounded, and the police start shooting. There was a chance you’d be killed. It was more dangerous. ³⁸

There is no doubt that this perception of the actual military phase as, paradoxically, less dangerous led to a gendered conception of the militants’ social role, particularly regarding their families and, especially, regarding women. Our subjects displayed a sense of honor, valuing virile, active participation, and bravura. By contrast, the early period and the non-violent posture encouraged by Rugova more generally were viewed negatively as the expression of a humiliating passivity. For instance, Ferit told me that he had constantly been seeing Albanians being arrested and beaten from the window of his home near Fushë Kosovo (not far from Pristina, the capital), which looks onto a police station. He concluded bluntly:

It’s better to die during a war than to die in prison or as the result of mistreatment. ³⁹

Of course, this perception is related to the fact that once “armed militants” had “joined the resistance,” they typically took part only rarely in armed confrontation, and these rarely lasted long. Alongside an epic vision of the fighter as a “hero,” defender of his family, this contributed to a euphemization of armed violence.