BETAWEEK, E

May 13

A CAREER: IBRAHIM RUGOVA

A Powerless Leader

The President of the Democratic Union of Kosovo, Ibrahim Rugova, thought of as the moderate leader of the Kosovar Albanians, has again come into the public spotlight after appearing on Serbian state television -- shaking hands with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic at the height of the NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia as a result of the situation in Kosovo.

Following the televised meeting with Milosevic on April 1, Rugova was in Belgrade on several occasions, with his last public appearance in Yugoslavia being a meeting with Serbian President Milan Milutinovic in Pristina on April 28. In an interview with the U.S. agency UPI, Milosevic said that he and Rugova had met five times during the month of April.

According to official Serbian accounts, during the meetings rugova had called for an end of the bombing and the start of political negotiations. He had also sought autonomy for Kosovo within Yugoslavia. His statements were met with grave doubts in the West. Being under Serbian police protection it was generally considered that he had been coerced into giving the statements in support of peace, and that he was actually under house arrest.

After repeated demands that he be allowed to leave the country, and frequent calls from Western European countries that he be allowed to do so, rugova suddenly appeared in Italy. He arrived in Rome on May 5, on board a special Italian air force aircraft, as a guest of the Italian government. Some Western media then speculated that his journey had been negotiated between Milosevic and the Italian government.

At a press conference following talks with Italian officials, Rugova announced that international military forces that would include NATO and Russia should be deployed in Kosovo. Western European diplomats assessed his arrival in Rome as "softening" of the stands of the Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in accepting the demands of the international community and a harmonization of options for resolving the crisis. At the same time Western media were questioning the "current" status of the Kosovo Albanian leader, considering the fact that the representatives of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had had the leading role in the peace negotiations on Kosovo at Rambouillet in France this past February and March, while Rugova had sat on the sidelines.

KLA spokesman Jakup Krasniqi at one point announced that Rugova did not have the mandate to negotiate in the name of Kosovo, while another representative of the organization accused the Democratic leader of being the emissary of Slobodan Milosevic.

The best known ethnic Albanian politician from Kosovo, for years Rugova enjoyed strong support from the West for his policy of passive resistance to the authorities in Belgrade. since the outbreak of the Kosovo crisis, in the middle of 1998, the yugoslav and Serb authorities, who had up to that point seen him as a nationalist and separatist, accepted Rugova under parallel pressure from the West, as the legitimate representative of the Kosovo Albanians.

Rugova was born in the village of Crnce, Istok Municipality, Kosovo on December 2, 1944. He went to university and earned a PhD in Albanian literature. He specialized in Paris, his doctoral thesis being: Directions and Premise of Albanian Literary Critique 1504-1983. Be was editor of the student newspapers Bore e Re (New World) and Ditura (Knowledge), a literary critic, an associate of the Albanological Institute in Pristina and a literature professor.

His entry into politics came by way of the Kosovo Literary Society, which gathered the Albanian movement in Kosovo, and he was a co-signer of the Appeal of 215 Kosovo Intellectuals, which opposed the 1989 amendments to the Serbian Constitution and stripped Kosovo of its autonomy. As a result he was expelled from the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and became a dissident in the former Yugoslavia. The international community accepted him as a dissident and fighter for the human and political rights of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

Rugova published a number of works in the field of literary critique, history and theory of critique. The Danish-based PL Fonden awarded him its 1995 Peace and Freedom Award.

He founded the first political party in Kosovo, the Democratic Alliance of Kosovo, during the earliest stages of party pluralism in the former Yugoslavia, at the beginning of December 1989. His Democratic Alliance of Kosovo Party was registered with the Federal Justice Secretariat office in Pristina. the party declared its orientation as being a civic political party, and was frequently portrayed as a Pan-Albanian movement. For a long time it was considered to be the most numerous and most influential political party in Kosovo.

The basic aim of the Democratic Alliance of Kosovo, as stated in its Program, was the establishment of the Republic of Kosovo -- a sovereign and independent state and the realization of political unity of the Albanians and the other peoples inhabiting Kosovo. Peace loving policy was one of the basic principles of the party in the realization of its goals.

Under rugova's leadership on July 2, 1990, the Albanian delegates in the Kosovo assembly adopted a constitutional declaration declaring Kosovo to be a republic. Three days later, the Serbian legislature dissolved the Kosovo assembly. The Albanians in Kosovo then opted to underground and form their own parallel institutions, which would operate independent of the authorities in Belgrade for the next several years.

At a secret meeting held in Kacanik on Sept. 7, 1990, the Kosovo Albanians adopted the Constitution of the republic of Kosovo, and on Sept. 30, they held a referendum, at which they opted for a sovereign and independent state of Kosovo. Following the first underground election in May 1992, which the Democratic Alliance won convincingly, the Kosovo Albanians continued to consolidate their underground institutions of power in the province. The Serb and Yugoslav authorities never recognized the elections, and the Albanians continued to boycott all later elections in Yugoslavia and Serbia. According to the general consensus, the boycott benefited the authorities in Belgrade. The Serbian legislature, which has 250 seats, according to the then valid election laws, 10 percent of the seats were allocated to the Albanians. Had they run in the elections, the ruling Socialist Party of Serbia would not have been able to gain a majority. At the elections in 1994, the Socialists won a majority only because six members of t he New Democracy party switched sides from the DEPOS (Democratic Movement in Serbia) coalition. Had the Albanians participated in that and any of the later elections, the Socialists, and later the Left Block, would not have been able to muster a majority in the legislature. Thus the policies of the Kosovar albanians suited Milosevic, since the absence of the Albanians allowed him to gain as many as 30 seats from Kosovo in the Serbian legislature. It is obvious that the interest of the Albanians had been independence, rather than reform of the system from within by legal means.

During all of that time Rugova had expounded a policy of peaceful resistance and support for the parallel institutions. Following tenuous behind the scenes negotiations mediated by the Catholic Sant Egidio society, in September 1996, Rugova and the then Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic signed an agreement to normalize education in Kosovo, with the aim of bringing Albanian pupils and students back to the classrooms. That was the first time Belgrade accepted Rugova as the legal representative of the Kosovo Albanians. However, the agreement was never implemented, as classes continued at underground schools and universities in private Albanian homes in Kosovo. The validity of the agreement was extended on several occasions, but efforts to achieve the results envisaged in the agreement fell through with the breakout of armed conflict between the police and Kosovo Liberation Army at the beginning of 1989. Rugova's policy of non-violent resistance had become the subject of increasingly frequent criticism among Kosovo's Albanian politicians, as it had failed to achieve its main result -- the independence of Kosovo. In 1996 the appearance of the KLA, an organization of extremist Albanians, failed to change Rugova's stand of achieving independence without shedding blood, but his status as the undisputed leader of the Kosovar Albanians was considerably shaken. This was also seen at the underground elections held in March 1998, when Rugova was again elected president of the unrecognized Republic of Kosovo. Many Albanian political parties boycotted that election.

At the press conferences he regularly held at Democratic Alliance headquarters in Pristina, Rugova advocated for the independence of Kosovo and called on the international community and NATO to send troops to Kosovo to stop the repression of the ethnic Albanians.

In May 1998, following drawn-out negotiations between Pristina and Belgrade, U.S. special envoy for Yugoslavia Richard Holbrooke succeeded in setting-up direct talks between Milosevic and Rugova in Belgrade. In June of that year Holbrooke met with representatives of the KLA in Junik village, publicly demonstrating support for that armed organization. The gesture led to tension among the members of the Contact Group. Some time later, the U.S. called for KLA representatives to be included in the peace negotiations. U.S. acceptance of the KLA came as the result of the temporary military successes of that organization, which at one moment during the summer of 1998, had under its control half of the territory of Kosovo, and threatened to storm the capital of Pristina. already in August its power was considerably curbed by a strong military and police intervention, which ended in October of that year with an agreement between Milosevic and Holbrooke. But the KLA remained a major factor in all future international mediating efforts, while Rugova was pushed to the sidelines. Hasim Tachi, the militant leader of the KLA who head a criminal record and had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for terrorism, was chosen to head the Kosovar Albanian negotiating team in France, in place of the until then undisputed leader Rugova.

Following the meeting of the group of seven most developed countries and Russia in Bonn on May 6, Rugova supported their plan for resolving the Yugoslav crisis, while the KLA expressed restraint and announced that it will not allow itself to be disarmed. A short time later the U.S. ambassador to Skopje, Christopher Hill, was quoted by the Banjaluka based weekly Reporter as saying that the KLA should be disarmed and Kosovo demilitarized.

On May 7 the Washington Post called on NATO and the U.S. to support Rugova if they wish to help the Kosovo Albanians re-establish civilian political authority in Kosovo, assessing at the same time that the KLA leaders were pro-fascist, undemocratic and stalinist.

"For years the U.S. cooperated with the moderate and pacifist-minded Rugova, but at Rambouillet they weakened his position in an attempt to pacify the KLA. Now when Rugova and many of his associates are out of the country, the West would help them play the leading role in shaping the civilian authorities on a pluralistic and multi-partisan basis," assessed the Washington Post.

In an interview to the Barcelona based El Periodico on May 12, Rugova was quoted as saying that the members of the KOLA could be transformed into the future local police in Kosovo, if the province is demilitarized in accordance with the peace agreement. Rugova reiterated that international forces that would include NATO, Russia and other U.N. member states should be deployed in Kosovo to confirm the withdrawal of the Yugoslav army form the province. It remains completely uncertain whether Rugova will in future play any political role in Kosovo, now that he has left Pristina. Truth be told, it was said to him that he could return there when he wishes to do so. On May 12 it was announced in Bonn that Rugova had requested he temporarily remain in Germany with his family.

(Beta)