– James Pettifer –
“The Voice of Albania” is publishing the following article from the newspaper “Telegrafi” about research by the bourgeois historian James Pettifer to inform readers of little-known information about Albania and Kosova, and so that one can draw their own lessons and conclusions from the material.
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Historian and publicist James Pettifer reveals previously unknown details extracted from the Russian, American, Serbian and Swiss archives about the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA). He details the initial models by Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu for creating a resistance group in Kosova, the meetings of successor Ramiz Alia with Kosovar communists, and the training of insurgent recruits from Kosova at the Military Academy in Tirana.
“The first seed for this book was sown by the current Prime Minister of Kosova, Hashim Thaçi, who tried, unsuccessfully, a few years ago, to convince me to write a biography of the founding father of the KLA, Adem Jashari. After considering it, I didn’t think this was the correct way to write the history of the war,” says James Pettifer, author of the book The Kosova Liberation Army.
This is the first history of the Kosova Liberation Army, with its roots traced back by the author to 1948, during a secret war that later turned into an uprising in the heart of the Balkans. Writing this book took James Pettifer many years. The author conducted extensive research, held meetings with numerous participants in the war at all levels in Kosova, Serbia, Macedonia and Albania. He toured battle sites in Dukagjin with Ramush Haradinaj, spoke and learned much about the role of Great Britain from Generals Sir Mike Jackson and John Crossland. In Prishtina and Tirana, he conducted interviews with war protagonists such as Valon Murati, Adem Demaçi, Xhevdet Shehu, General Agim Çeku and others. He met and spoke with many civilians from all ethnic groups who lived in the conflict zone for part or all of the war. “I also benefited from reading many memoirs from the war by both Albanian and Serbian participants, and although I may not agree with the content or analysis of a particular work, studying them has still been useful and enlightening,” says Pettifer.
Regarding the Serbian side, he has tried to consult and study all available material, both official and unofficial. “But it must be said that contemporary history has not been an easy field in the last generation in Belgrade and continues to be so even after the fall of the Milošević regime. Many of the Serbs’ accounts of the war and related issues are based on denying many fundamental truths and contain, in my opinion, many deep errors in the presentation and interpretation of facts,” the author explains, believing that in the future these untruths will soon be replaced, hopefully, by sincere personal memories based on subjective experience, which will then be supported by professional historical writings.
The author has also utilized the minutes from trials held at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. According to him, most of the ICTY material focuses on the war in Drenica, while many fundamental events involving the KLA and the Yugoslav People’s Army are not mentioned.
He reached this conclusion after confronting the minutes of the Prishtina court from the Yugoslav period, which he found very useful, as well as archival materials from the secret police and studies published in recent years about illegal Albanian political and military organizations and the illegal press under Tito’s regime. In short, the author has tried to find the beginnings of the Kosova Liberation Army in these archives, the role played by the communist government of Albania with Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu, and later Ramiz Alia, starting from 1948. During this process, he reveals previously unknown details extracted from the Russian, American, Serbian and Swiss archives about the history of the creation of the Kosova Liberation Army, which transformed from a secret political group into a military force that brought independence to Kosova.
Hoxha and Shehu’s Projects for a Resistance Army in Kosova
In Albania, after the break with Tito and the international communist movement of 1948, Enver Hoxha did not completely abandon the Kosovars to their fate, as his critics in the Albanian world have often claimed. For him, the issue of Kosova was a way to begin defining the new Albania against Yugoslavia and its slide into capitalist theory and practice. Subversive activities led by secret services were his preferred tactic, through which most, if not all, of the activities supported by Tirana were deniable, and Hoxha could begin to exert at least a small amount of pressure on Belgrade using Albania’s very limited resources. Regarding this, after 1948, it is very likely that he at least consulted with Soviet sources. Hoxha had a close relationship with the Soviet ambassador to Albania, Dimitri Chuvakhin, who was one of the main figures of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, experienced in secret services and had the possibility of meeting directly with Stalin. In 1949, Enver Hoxha and the military commander Mehmet Shehu had communicated with Stalin about the possibility of creating an armed force to overthrow Tito’s government in Belgrade, starting with an armed uprising in Kosova. In his diary entry of July 5, 1949, Chuvakhin mentions a discussion he had with Shehu about the military possibilities of fighting against the “revisionist” regime within southern Yugoslavia, even though he did not have a clear picture of Moscow’s strategy.
He writes: “Among us, the issue has been raised about how to organize the fight against the Titoites in Yugoslavia. We do not know which way is better, for each republic in the Yugoslav Federation to fight against Tito’s clique independently, and in such a case, the fight can be designated in the autonomous province of Kosova and the Dukagjin Plateau, or for the fight against Yugoslav Trotskyists from Tito’s clique to be conducted from a single centre…”
Considering the damage caused by the Stalinist military command to the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, which Mehmet Shehu had seen personally, it is understood that the second option did not appeal to him much, and he opposed the idea, replying, according to Chuvakhin: “For me personally, this issue is very clear, in the sense that Tito’s clique can only be overthrown through an armed struggle against it, and this armed struggle must begin in Kosova and the Dukagjin Plateau, where it is easier to incite the population against Tito’s clique.” For Chuvakhin, this meant that Shehu was in favour of uniting Kosova with Albania, and he notes:
“With this, M. Shehu made me understand that for the Albanian population of Kosova and the Dukagjin Plateau, the issue of whether the region should unite with Albania or not is decided, meaning, Kosova and the Dukagjin Plateau must unite with Albania at any cost. The only question that arises is when it will be most appropriate to engage with this slogan among the Albanian population of Kosova and the Dukagjin Plateau: after the end of the war with Tito’s clique or during the course of the war…”
In this atmosphere, Hoxha began organizing the infiltration of Kosova with trained militants, whose task was to create secret cells of “sleeper agents” to be ready to fight against Belgrade’s control in the long term and to provide secret information for Tirana and Moscow in the short term. Often, these resulted in contradictory objectives… Over the years, the emphasis changed, with Tirana’s espionage priorities on behalf of Moscow spoiling all efforts to build a resistance army. However, the ideal of a Kosovar army never faded. The 1956 espionage trial in Prishtina fits this paradigm, although it is doubtful if Noel Malcolm is right when he says there was little evidence of Hoxhaist activity in this event.
How Kosovar Recruits Were Trained at Tirana’s Defence Academy
Kosova was beginning to appear on the political agenda in Tirana after the death of Enver Hoxha in 1985. His successor, Ramiz Alia, had been a young political commissar in Kosova for a short time during the Second World War, and although he had a weak history of political cooperation with Yugoslav partisans at that time, he at least had practical personal knowledge of Kosova and an interest in Kosova’s conditions, unlike most of Tirana’s communist leadership. Developments in the Yugoslav party were being watched with growing international concern, although at this stage it is very likely that only the American secret service was aware of the threat of Milošević taking control of the entire party apparatus. It is likely that during this period, some informal links began to be created between Tirana’s secret service, which was free to travel to Switzerland because most of the finances and foreign trade payments were conducted there, and the leadership of the People’s Movement of Kosova (PMK) around Zurich and Geneva.
A good part of this business was already in the hands of Sigurimi agents and practically under the personal control of Ramiz Alia. Alia claims that he foresaw the possibility of a new revolutionary situation in Kosova and certainly deserves some credit for allowing the first military training for Kosovars at the Tirana Defence Academy for a three-year period. It is also quite clear that Alia considered the Irish Republican Army as a possible model for a Kosovar insurgent army…
When his interest became known to Western governments through their spies in Tirana, they were concerned that soon a “Greater Albania” might emerge if the old barriers between Tirana and Prishtina were removed… The PMK and other radical Kosovars had always had contacts with the Albanian army at the border and with the Albanian government through the secret service, the Sigurimi. With the overthrow of communism, Western secret services infiltrated the Sigurimi on a large scale. As president of Albania, Ramiz Alia had met in Tirana with PMK leaders Xhavit Haliti, Xhavit Haziri and Ahmet Haxhiu shortly before losing power in 1991. This was an open meeting for which Western secret services were prepared, although the details are still unclear. This was an open meeting, about which Western secret service agents in Tirana would soon be informed.
Alia had promised moral support to the leaders of the PMK, but it is clear that the Western supporters of his political opponent, Sali Berisha, might have understood that this could soon be followed by material assistance, and this was one more action that would hasten the political end of Ramiz Alia. It is unclear to what extent Alia promised to go in helping the Kosovars… At the end of the spring of 1990, with the approval and knowledge of the Tirana government, the farmer from Prekaz, Adem Jashari, led a group of recruits through the dense forests above the Koshare Pass to Albania, to begin training at the Military Academy in Tirana and in local military camps in the Albanian hills. The Yugoslav secret service must have had some idea of what was happening, through its information networks and, on December 30, 1990, his village of Prekaz was surrounded by military and police vehicles and by helicopters flying low over the farmers’ houses. This would be a prelude to the dramatic events that would occur eight years later, in March 1998, when he died there… During Berisha’s government, after 1992, other groups (always composed of ten people), such as, for example, the recruits sent to Albania in 1993, followed. Although these trainings had been declared illegal by the ‘Berisha’ government, in practice little or nothing had been done to stop them…
(Translated from the Albanian original, first published in “Telegrafi”)
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