As Kosovo Burns

Kosovo is not a place preparing for peace. Every day the province is filled with awful violence. NATO warplanes are slamming Serbian troops with tons of munitions, guided by tiny drones that hum overhead. Deep in the Kosovo hills, the Kosovo Liberation Army is fighting defensive battles, trying to conserve its resources. And in the middle of all this, NATO now says that up to 700,000 refugees are wandering homeless, brutalized by Serbian forces and desperately seeking a way out. Slobodan Milosevic has tried to put a lid on the province--limiting media access and stemming the outflow of refugees--but tales of horror continue to escape. And with K.L.A. troops busily rearming and Serbian forces mining, entrenching and leveling the province, much more violence probably lies ahead before Kosovo has its first hint of peace.

The roots of Kosovo's continuing chaos are, of course, strategic. They arise from Milosevic's aims and the long, bitter history of the Balkans. But in a practical sense, they also have to do with the very specific problem of fighting a day-to-day guerrilla war in a hilly country, where camouflage is easy and offensive operation hard. Kosovo's mountains stretch up nearly 9,000 ft., and the snow-clogged highlands are almost completely underdeveloped, with few four-wheel-drive tracks and no roads. The only modes of transport are donkeys and feet--a kind of primitiveness that serves as a leveller between the ammo-starved K.L.A. and the powerfully armed Serbs.

The rebel army is already preparing for its next offensive, tapping support from a widely dispersed Albanian diaspora that reaches as far as New Jersey, where last week K.L.A. representatives held an event. And in the regions around Kosovo, the K.L.A. is sharpening its rudimentary training and logistics network. The key element of that web is a recruiting operation that may have pulled in thousands of battle-age men. In Albania, near the town of Durres, unarmed ethnic Albanian volunteers from Western Europe (countries like Switzerland and Germany are a particular source) head toward the border with supplies for the war. There, K.L.A. and refugees say, they join other young men for two weeks of training.

Not everyone in the training camps is a volunteer, however. The K.L.A. is stopping some vehicles heading south from the Kosovo border and demanding recruits from among the refugees or, alternatively, as much as $300--a kind of weapons tax or service exemption.

Inside Kosovo, the K.L.A. is surviving better than expected. The CIA initially feared that thousands of Kosovar men had been massacred, but it now believes many have actually slipped off to join the K.L.A. in the hills, in some cases helping guide NATO warplanes in for attacks. The K.L.A. is husbanding what few resources it has and is avoiding offensive operations "so it can fight another day," says a senior U.S. intelligence official. "Reports of their demise are premature," he explains, "They have been badly hampered but not wiped out."