[ALBSA-Info] {QIKSH =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=AB?=ALBEUROPA=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=BB?=} Kosovo Guerrillas Return To Stronghold For Nostalgic Election Rally

[Nikoll A Mirakaj]

Kosovo Guerrillas Return To Stronghold For Nostalgic Election Rally 

GLOGOVAC, Oct 19, 2000 -- (Agence France Presse) The red and black Albanian banner was flying above every shop in Glogovac Wednesday, as supporters of the political movement which sprung out of the Kosovo Liberation Army converged on one of their last strongholds.

"Here, it's 100 percent PDK," a UN police officer surveying the 6,000 strong crowd at the election rally of the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) said. "If the PDK don't win here, they won't win anywhere."

Despite its association with the heroes of Kosovo's unfinished battle for independence, the PDK is expected to do badly in next week's municipal election -- except perhaps here in the Drenica valley, the movement's home base.

In Glogovac the PDK wheeled out its big guns: party leader and former KLA political chief Hashim Thaci, his deputy Bardhyl Mahmuti, and Jakup Krasniqi, who heads the candidate list in the municipality.

Activists from neighboring municipalities had been bussed in for the event, a show of force, with so many crowding onto a section of waste ground near the town that some were forced to scramble onto half-finished buildings to catch a glimpse of their heroes.

A minute of silence was held for the martyrs of the KLA's armed struggle against Yugoslav rule, which ended last year with the arrival of a NATO peacekeeping force and the imposition of a United Nations mandate.

Then the speeches started, and there was only one theme: the KLA. Many Kosovo Albanian parties include former guerrillas in their ranks, and all want independence, but the PDK has worked throughout the campaign to associate itself and itself alone with the fighters.

"The liberation struggle started here, and it's here that the Serb police suffered their first blow," Thaci declared, to wild cheers.

"You always helped the KLA, and you, with the KLA, liberated Kosovo. Our candidates are those who will never allow the Serb police and army to come back. A vote for the PDK is a vote for independence," he continued.

Mahmuti worked the crowd with a hymn of praise to their region's role as the KLA's symbolic heartland: "Drenica gave us two of the most important figures in our history: Hashim Thaci and Adem Jashari."

Jashari, whose bearded features loom out of posters and monuments across UN-run Kosovo, became the KLA's most famous martyr when, along with most of his clan, he was killed by Serb police at his home in northern Drenica in the first months of the conflict in 1998.

The rally's speeches barely touched on the PDK's program should they succeed in protecting in a democratic vote the stranglehold on Kosovo's municipal councils they won by virtue of the guerrillas' military might.

The speakers preferred to appeal more to their supporters' patriotism than to their civic concerns.

"We knew how to make war, we will know how to build Kosovo's local institutions," was the best promise Krasniqi could come up with.

And so to the obligatory celebration of Albanian folklore -- a culture which suffered greatly during the 10 years of Serb repression which preceded the KLA's revolution -- as Thaci saluted the crowd and gave his place to a dancing troupe which was to celebrate "The Albanian victory over the Serbs." ((c) 2000 Agence France Presse) 

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