An armed volunteer of the Kosovo Liberation Army prepares to board a bus for the frontline in northern Albania. (AP)

By James Rupert
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, April 26, 1999; Page A14

KUKES, Albania, April 25 – While the Kosovo Liberation Army recently has swelled with volunteers, the guerrilla group also has forcibly recruited some refugees in northern Albania, according to refugees and foreign workers based here.

KLA fighters maintain roadblocks and halt traffic on main roads used by arriving Kosovo refugees. They have pulled an unknown number of men out of their cars or farm wagons as conscripts, according to refugees and foreigners.

An official of the KLA's political wing said Saturday that force had been used only in isolated cases, and that an order had been issued to halt the practice.

Nevertheless, the forced recruitments have aroused concern among international organizations caring for refugees here. Reports of conscription also risk adding to NATO's doubts about aligning itself more closely with the KLA.

The KLA leadership last month launched what it called a voluntary mobilization of men aged 18 to 50 to fight the Serb-led Yugoslav forces. In part, the KLA was taking advantage of a surge of volunteers who want to strike back at the forces that have killed civilians, burned villages and driven almost 600,000 ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo in the past month. Nearly 8,000 new recruits, including Albanian Americans, have been taken to training camps in northern Albania in recent weeks.

Not all the new fighters are volunteers, though. Several miles west of Kukes, on the only road connecting this town to the capital, Tirana, and other cities of the Adriatic plains, the KLA maintains a permanent roadblock. Today, fighters there searched the cars of those leaving or entering the Kukes region, including that of a pair of American journalists. Sometimes, the fighters have conscripted refugee men, said two Western aid workers in separate interviews.

KLA fighters recently harassed a translator for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and threatened to conscript him and confiscate the OSCE vehicle in which he was riding, a Western observer here said last week.

An OSCE monitor also told of seeing a group of exhausted refugees from a Kosovo village reach the Albanian border in horse-drawn farm wagons, then watching KLA fighters stationed at the border crossing confiscate their horses, leaving the refugees stranded 10 miles from Kukes.

"We are concerned about the reports of conscription of refugees" and the danger of refugee camps becoming too closely linked to the KLA, said Jacques Franquin, a spokesman here for the U.N. refugee agency . "We don't see evidence that KLA is recruiting in camps [but] the refugee population and KLA are closely linked," with many refugee families having members in the KLA, he said.

"We fear one day the Serbs may target the refugee camps because they regard them as KLA bases," Franquin said. He said that is one reason the U.N. refugee agency is pressing refugees in the Kukes area to move to southern Albania, away from the border with Kosovo.

The Albanian government "is doing little, and probably can do little, to control the KLA" in much of northeastern Albania, a Western relief worker said. "It is basically letting [the KLA] do what they want."

KLA sources in Kukes said the group's mobilization campaign would end by May 1, saying the KLA now had enough volunteers for its immediate needs.

Sabri Kicmari, an official of the KLA's political wing, told the Reuters news agency Saturday that only "one or two cases" of forced recruitment had occurred. He said the practice is "against democratic principles" and "there is now a directive not to use press-gangs."

The KLA has maintained secrecy about its recruitment and training of new fighters, turning journalists away from its recruitment center in Kukes. Press reports and Western military sources in the region have said the KLA is giving little training to its recruits, and has been suffering heavy casualties in the fight against Yugoslav and Serbian forces.

Kicmari denied such accounts, saying the KLA's recruits "are not sent to battle if they are not prepared."

Nasim Haradinaj, a KLA field commander, said those recruits who previously served in the Yugoslav army are getting about a week's training at KLA camps in Albania, while raw recruits with no previous military service are being trained for about 45 days.