By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 29, 1998; Page A10

BAJRAM CURRI, Albania—Gunfire crackles often in the hills near this destitute mountain town 20 miles south of the strife-torn Serbian province of Kosovo. Each night, the sound of AK-47 assault rifle shots by exuberant or tipsy local citizens prompts spirited debate among patrons at the Ermal Hotel: Were the bullets fired from guns pointed vertically -- in revelry -- or horizontally -- in anger?

The loud crash heard one afternoon last week was anything but routine, however, because it came after an immense roar of rocket fire. One of the Western officials stationed here monitoring the growing conflict in Kosovo between Serbs and ethnic Albanians swiftly concluded that something important had occurred when residents of nearby Tropoje, a staging ground for guerrilla attacks in Kosovo, all said they had heard nothing.

Further investigation revealed that ethnic Albanian guerrillas had tested a newly acquired antitank weapon, a recoilless system with a five-foot-long, 75mm cannon -- more powerful than the rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s that compose the bulk of their arsenal. The guerrillas, known as the Kosovo Liberation Army, say they urgently need such arms to combat Serbian tanks besieging towns in southern Kosovo.

Not only did the projectile miss the target by far, according to three local sources, but the hapless soldier who fired it was badly burned when he failed to get out of the way of gases escaping from the back -- offering fresh evidence that the rebels here are still struggling to master the arts of modern guerrilla warfare. A half-dozen guerrillas interviewed in Tropoje at the local bar or lounging under trees not far from the small central square all said, for example, they would receive no special training before crossing the border into Kosovo to fight the Serbs.

As they spoke, several teenage boys nearby fiddled with newly acquired AK-47s; a group of villagers crowded around a submachine gun set up beneath the eaves of one building that was pointed toward a cluster of cars and people in the square; a middle-aged, uniformed fighter packed rocket-propelled grenades into a green rucksack; and another boy toyed with a small mortar.

The presence in Tropoje and nearby villages of scores of uniformed rebel "soldiers" is but one of the strange features of this generally lawless region of northern Albania. The Albanian government, many Western officials say, is not keen to promote the insurrection in Kosovo. But its local representatives seem powerless to prevent the infiltration of arms and insurgents into Kosovo, a province of Serbia that is 90 percent ethnic Albanian.

The border on the Albanian side is demarcated by mountains as high as 7,400 feet, with a handful of well-established passes and many less obvious transit points that a sizable contingent of foreign troops would be needed to patrol. The Albanian army, which consists of just 5,000 troops, has no major logistics depots in the area, and local police have poor communications gear and aged vehicles.

More importantly, by all accounts the police and the army are unlikely to challenge the guerrillas, who enjoy the active political and financial support of virtually all residents of this region, including the family and friends of former Albanian president Sali Berisha, a Tropoje native who lives nearby.

The police are powerless to prevent brazen daylight crimes by local criminal gangs, much less arms smuggling by an energetic militia. For example, William Foxton, chief local officer of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), was held up at gunpoint June 14 just outside Tropoje. Shortly before that, masked gunmen stole a four-wheel-drive car used by humanitarian workers from Doctors Without Borders. Reporters with the Agence France-Presse news service lost a large amount of cash and computer equipment to local thieves here last week.

In the Albanian version of cruising the main drag in a small American town, a half-dozen local residents spent each afternoon last week driving late-model Mercedes-Benzes with foreign plates around Bajram Curri's town square, honking horns and yelling at friends strolling on the sidewalk, and laughing and waving to the sole policeman on patrol. Uniformed, armed guerrillas rode in the cars, which several residents said were stolen.

After years of such lawlessness, no one in the region is without his own gun, either an automatic rifle slung over the shoulder or a pistol jammed in a belt. Ermal Hotel innkeeper Halil Gjongecaj posts a sleepy guard with an AK-47 at the door after dusk. But the guard did not allay Gjongecaj's anxieties last weekend when guerrillas turned over two defectors from the Yugoslav army to journalists and OSCE officials at the hotel.

Neither Gjongecaj nor the police chief wanted the two to stay the night because they feared local citizens might try to kill them. But traveling after dark is considered foolhardy here, and in the end the men were allowed to stay for part of the night.

An hour or so later, two well-armed local men indeed showed up, looking for them.