After KFOR and the so-called International Community took control of Kosovo from June 12 1999, we allowed and supported Albanian guerrillas, call them terrorists if you like, to destabilize Serbia. In this article, I will take you on a journey through my personal experiences and encounters with these rebels as a journalist.
It is also likely that the rebel movement UÇPMB, the so-called Liberation Army of Preševo, Medveđa and Bujanova, received US-style infantry training to fight the Serbs after June 12, 1999 when hostilities between NATO and Yugoslavia should have seized according to the Military Technical Agreement.
Together with my old colleague John Phillips, the former Balkan correspondent for The Times of London, we had many interesting experiences together covering the conflict in South Serbia and Macedonia in 2001. In his book Macedonia warlords and rebels in the Balkans, he wrote the following on page 2:
“American intelligence was active in Serbia and Kosovo but its operatives were evidently struggling to come to terms with the new era ushered in by the demise of Milošević’s brutal regime. An ethnic Albanian arrested by British troops for a bomb attack on a busload of Serb civilians in northern Kosovo, Florim Ejupi, was identified credibly as a CIA-trained agent months later after he vanished from American custody, for example.“
In his book, Phillips also mentions the British officer Bob Churcher of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst who observed in his paper Kosovo Lindore Preshevo 1991-2002 & The FYROM Conflict that the UÇPMB:
“also seem to have received training assistance from someone or some organisation training in an American military style. This became apparent both from the style of marching, complete with US-type marching songs, and the infantry tactics used. (The effectiveness of this was seen in November 2000 when a series of well coordinated infantry attacks demonstrated the UÇPMB’s ability to coordinate the use of 82mm mortars and to effectively “re-organise on the objective” -something that the Bosnian army never learnt in three years.)“
Whether the US support for the UÇPMB was direct or indirect through a company like the MPRI or similar, I do not know, but soon, I will have new and revealing information about events connected to this. However, I would like to publish this information first in Norwegian and English language media.
In the meantime, you an old newsletter from December 2000, you can read the story Dutch sniper killing Serbs. Below you can also read you can read a couple of stories from my experiences as a war reporter in South Serbia and Macedonia. It should also be noted that the UÇPMB has a Facebook page that has been recently updated.