By James Rupert
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 10, 1999; Page A19

KUKES, Albania – At a secret military camp in the craggy mountains of northern Albania, Shefki Mati, 44, finds himself a long way from his life as a Long Island home builder and father. Mati is one of thousands of ethnic Albanians – from Kosovo and from a global diaspora – who have abandoned jobs and family lives to join the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Ethnic Albanian professionals, laborers and hotel workers from the Balkans, Western Europe and the United States have flooded into Albania in the past six weeks, vowing to help the rebel army liberate Kosovo, a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic.

The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) does not divulge numbers, but one of its officials said last week that about 13,000 people have been recruited since late March, when NATO launched airstrikes against Yugoslavia and Serbian-led Yugoslav forces began an offensive in Kosovo that drove the secessionist guerrillas from their major strongholds. Although many rebels retreated to Albania, the guerrillas still hold small pockets in Kosovo.

The recruits are driven by their ethnic and cultural identities as Albanians and inflamed by the televised images of Serbia's destruction of the Kosovo Albanian community. Many have no direct family links to Kosovo but say they must join this fight to protect the broader rights and place of ethnic Albanians in the Balkans.

"For the first time in history, the Albanians have got the rest of the world on their side," Mati said.

At bases near this town just across the border from Kosovo and elsewhere in Albania, the KLA is racing to forge an army from disparate recruits lacking military expertise and experience. "We're a young army, going through a process of building," Mati said.

Mati and others said morale is high despite the complications of building an army from men of varied backgrounds. "In my platoon, we have guys from England, Israel and France," he said. English-speaking and German-speaking units have been formed for recruits who failed to learn Albanian as emigre children, he said.

The KLA's most visible image here has been the arrival of its recruits from abroad, often in chanting, singing groups. Mati and about 100 other Albanian Americans landed about three weeks ago on a charter flight from New York.

Thousands from Germany, France and elsewhere have crossed the Adriatic Sea on daily ferries from Bari, Italy. On one such passage, "it looked like half the waiters and busboys of Europe were coming," said Joanne Mariner, a researcher for the New York-based Human Rights Watch, who arrived on the ferry.

The recruits boarded the ship in civilian clothes, hauling duffel bags and backpacks. After it sailed, they changed into combat fatigues and, as the ship approached the Albanian coast, assembled on deck for a military pep rally, Mariner said.

Albanians in the United States are more scattered and less visible as an ethnic group than in Western Europe but retain a strong identity with Kosovo, said Mati and Vasel Pjeter Lulgjaraj, both U.S. citizens, who spoke in an interview arranged by KLA press officials.

Growing up in the Bronx after his family emigrated from Kosovo, Lulgjaraj's father insisted that the family speak Albanian at home and retain the old country's traditions. "I'm grateful to my father that he kept that order in the house, and I'm proud to be Albanian," Lulgjaraj, 33, said.

A few weeks ago, he quit his job as a maintenance worker and his studies at New York University, and signed the KLA enlistment papers that he said require that "either we liberate that land or I don't go home alive."

Some of the recruits have roots not in Kosovo but in Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro or other parts of the Balkans. "This is a fight for all Albanians, wherever we're from," said Mati, a recruit from Croatia who did not give his family name because, he said, he was speaking without permission of his commander.

Mati grew up in a Kosovo village and served in the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, where "I was treated as a second-class citizen. . . . All along was in my mind that we were occupied" by the Serbs, he said. He moved to New York in 1976 and built a small construction firm.

As the Kosovo conflict advanced toward war, he sent money to the KLA's Swiss-based funding arm, Homeland Calling. Six months ago he brought his 74-year-old mother from their family village to join him, his wife and their two children in Hampton Bays, N.Y.

He became a news junkie, "watching every day . . . watching," torn between staying with his family and joining the fight, he said. Finally, after Serbian gunmen massacred 45 ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo village of Racak on Jan. 15, "I knew I had to go."

Mati said he spent $700 on a camouflage uniform and accessories. He sewed an orange and black KLA patch on his left shoulder and a U.S. flag on his right.

Mati said he had lost eight pounds in two weeks of physical conditioning, hand-to-hand combat and small arms training. "We're pushing hard," he said. "We know our brothers and sisters are dying every day in Kosovo. Every day's delay means more die."

"I agree 100 percent [that] we're not ready yet" to launch an offensive against the Serbs. But "I think we're gonna get an order pretty soon" to go, he said.