Serb forces emptied village after village of their inhabitants,
the houses were then looted and burnt and in many cases livestock were killed
and crops destroyed in the fields. Over a period of six months,
from April to Septemember 1998, more than 300 Albanian villages were
devastated in this way; aid agencies estimated that between
250,000 and 300,000 people were driven from their homes.
What had caused that crisis was a huge escalation in the use
of military force and other targets had continued during the winter
of 1997-98, but on a very limited scale: in the two years up to mid-January
1998, the KLA claimed to have killed five policemen, five other
Serbian officials and eleven Albanian 'collaborators' with the
Serbian regime.
Other European countries had experienced similar small scale campaigns
of politically motivated violence and had dealt with them using
normal police methods. But the response of the Serbian authorities
in this case was hugely disproportionate: and it was the nature
of this response which more than anything else pushed Kosovo into war.
On 28 February 1998, after a fire fight between Kosovar rebels
and Serb police in which four policemen had been shot dead, the
Serbian authorities launched an attack on two Albanian villages, using
military helicopters and armoured personnel carriers. In one
village, Likoshani, sixteen Albanians were killed; the police also looted
the houses they raided there. A few days later a similar military
assault against the village of Prekaz left fifty-one people dead:
the main target of this attack was the family house of Adem Jashari,
a local strongman who was said to be a commander of the KLA in that
region. The Serbian forces killed not only Jashari but also most of his
family: nearly half the victims were women, children and old men.
This action turned Adem Jashari into a hero and martyr in the eyes
of the local Albanians and encouragd large numbers of them to join
the KLA.
Further attacks on other villages in the Drenica region of central
Kosovo during the next few weeks had a similar effect, while also
creating a flood of refugees. The process by which Milosevic's
policy acted as the recruiting master for the KLA was now fully
under way.
Western governments reacted hesitantly and ineptly to these events.
Many observers believed indeed that Milosevic had actually been encouraged
to launch this campaign by the comments of an American diplomat,
Robert Gelbard, who had denounced the KLA as a terrorist group
on 23 february. On 9 March the contact group (USA, Russia, Britain,
France, Germany and Italy) threatened a limited package of sanctions,
such as visa restrictions and the blocking of investment
credits . If Milosevic did not change his policy within two weeks when
that deadline was reached, they then extended it by another month.
Milosevics only response was to widen the attacks on Albanian villages
and increase his military build up in the region.
The Threatened sanctions were eventually intoduced at the end of April.
Meanwhile a resolution of the UN Security council had imposed
an arms embargo, aimed at cutting off supplies to both
yugoslavia and the KLA. (Yugoslavia was however, a major arms producer
and had recently made a large purchase of arms from Russia;
the KLA was equipped mainly with small arms acquired from people who had
stolem them from weapon stores in Albania in 1997)
While the Western politicians debated these measures, Milosevic
was strengthening his own political position inside
Yugoslavia. In March he invited the radical nationalist politician
Vojuslav Seselj to join his government; Seselj was known for his extreme
views on the Kosovo question, having publicly advocated a policy
of infecting Kosovo Albanians with the Aids virus.
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