Südosteuropa 58 (2010), H. 4, S. 478-519 ISABEL STRöHLE The Politics of Reintegration and War Commemoration. The Case of the Kosovo Liberation Army Abstract. This article examines the contentious question of the appropriate position of veterans in a postwar society, by juxtaposing the externally led reintegration policies with local concep- tions of (re-)integration propagated in the veterans’ circles of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Reintegration assistance, a constituent part of post-conflict reconstruction efforts, ultimately aims at demilitarization by supporting the return of former combatants to civilian life in the wake of armed conflict. As is illustrated with the case of Kosovo, reintegration programs can hardly live up to their overly ambitious aims; the assumed division between the combatants and the rest of the society is problematic in the context of partisan warfare. Despite pledges to contextual sensitivity, reintegration programs cannot do justice to the complexity of postwar realities. Hence, if disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) is to be successful beyond dismantling the machinery of war, more attention has to be paid to existing social cleavages and group boundaries formed on the basis of varying wartime experiences. Isabel Ströhle is pursuing a Ph.D. in the Department of History at the University of Munich. Introduction The Republic of Kosovo unilaterally declared independence on 17 February, 2008,1 nine years after the war (officially conflict) in Kosovo had come to an end.2 During this decade one of the most complex UN missions in the history of peace-building and postwar reconstruction was launched. The disarmament, 1 The research for this article was financed by the Berghof Foundation for Conflict Studies in the framework of the 28-month research project entitled “The role of non-state actors in the conflict transformation of the conflicts in Macedonia and in Kosovo”, which was housed at the University of Munich and supervised by Prof. Dr. Marie-Janine Calic. I wish to warmly thank Marie-Janine Calic, Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Vlatko Stojanov for their com- ments on earlier drafts of this paper. Special thanks go to everyone in Kosovo who supported me in realizing my research, but first and foremost to my contact persons and interviewees. 2 Since this article puts strong emphasis on the perspectives of local actors, I will use the term ”war” instead of “conflict” throughout the text. In Albanian the term “war of liberation” (lufta e lirisë) or “armed struggle” (lufta e armatosur) is commonly used to refer to the KLA’s activities and the fighting from February 1998 to June 1999. The Case of the Kosovo Liberation Army 479 demobilization and reintegration (DDR) of the former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA; in Albanian: Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës, or UÇK), and its members was considered both a constituent and an essential part of this effort, as well as a prerequisite for the success of the peace-building process. The following case study examines the decade-plus gap to trace the legacy of the former KLA in current Kosovar society and to shed light on the veterans’ social reintegration process under external influences. Through an ethnographic study of the ex-KLA fighters’ reintegration and societal demilitarization, I explore how the reintegration programs applied by the international administration in postwar Kosovo related to local visions of reintegration. I argue that the international actors’ endeavor to impose civilian status on the former fighters and to relativize their militarized collective identity stood in opposition to the attempts by KLA veteransto redefine power relations and to establish new social and political hierarchies in postwar Kosovo on the basis of their contribution to its “liberation”. In the first section, I provide some historical background on the KLA as well as an overview of its social and political relevance in the postwar context, followed by a review of the most recent research on the insurgency’s postwar transformation and a description of the methodology applied in this study. Subsequently, I debate the concept of DDR in theory and practice and develop some theoretical propositions regarding reintegration in the context of partisan warfare. After examining how DDR was implemented in Kosovo and what is known about its impacts, I analyze how the veterans conceptualized their place in the postwar society and why they refused to abandon their military identity. To this purpose, I review how politicians with a KLA background and the veterans’ organizations acted with regard to demilitarization and what their notions of reintegration were. Assuming a “social construction of reality”,3 in the last section, I take a look at how the master narrative of the war of liberation resonates in individual veterans’ self-representations. The Kosovo Liberation Army The Kosovo Liberation Army was a guerrilla army that fought against enlisted Yugoslav/Serbian troops for an independent Kosovo.4 In response to the aboli- 3 Peter L. Berger / Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City/NY 1967. 4 The KLA’s ideological long-term objective was the “liberation and unification of all Albanian inhabited territories”, as is reflected in the official oath that had to be sworn to the Albanian flag with the double headed eagle by most, but not all of the fighters: “I, soldier of the Kosovo Liberation Army, swear that I will fight for the liberation and unification of Albanian inhabited territories. I will always be a faithful soldier, a fighter of dignity and freedom, attentive, brave and disciplined and ready at all times to fight for the holy interest 480 Isabel Ströhle tion of Kosovo’s autonomy and the reinstatement of Serbian centralist rule in 1989, the province’s Albanian majority developed a broad-based and non-violent resistance movement. It set up a parallel system of institutions that was led by the Democratic League of Kosovo (Lidhja Demokratike e Kosovës, LDK), and most of its members belonged to the former socialist and urban elites. When the international community failed to address the situation of Kosovo’s Albanians in the Dayton peace treaty for Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995, passive forms of resistance gradually lost support among the Albanians, and their political leadership split into a pacifist, an activist, and a small militarist camp. Until 1997, only marginal, radical groups like the KLA had actively advo- cated armed resistance. The KLA first came to public attention in 1996, when it issued its first communiqués and carried out attacks on Serbian police sta- tions and officials, as well as on so-called “Albanian collaborators”. Violence in the Kosovar countryside escalated when Serbian troops encroached upon the civilian population in response to KLA guerrilla attacks against Serbian police officers and stations. However, the KLA guerrilla troops were only a marginal force, consisting of a mere 150 members, until 1997, when they catalyzed into an armed resistance movement numbering several thousand members.5 Fol- lowing this unexpected surge in the number of fighters, the troops needed to be professionalized and organized. Their loose command structure and de- centralized operative zones were to be transformed into a formally-integrated chain of command over the course of 1998. But the KLA, in fact, never became a professional army. The insurgency’s political position was enhanced when it was accorded a prominent role in the Albanian negotiating team for the peace talks of Rambouillet and Paris in spring 1999 that had been brokered by the Contact Group and NATO. Because the peace agreement was only signed by the Albanian side and the final negotiation attempts failed, NATO, in a controversial move, launched air strikes against Yugoslav targets on 24 March, 1999 which, while aimed at terminating the Serbian offensive, resulted in the large-scale expulsion of Albanians by the Serbian forces. On 10 June, 1999, one day after the Serbian leadership yielded to the key demands of NATO, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1244, which was to be become the guiding framework for the United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo. Having agreed to its of the fatherland (atdhe) without sparing my own life. If I will break this oath, I may be pun- ished with the harshest laws of war and if I should betray it, I may pay with my own blood. I swear, I swear, I swear.” 5 The International Organisation for Migration’s registration database counts 411 fight- ers before 1998, 14,660 said to have joined in 1998, and 9,506 registered to have entered the KLA in 1999, whereas 1,146 did not make any statement regarding their date of entry. Cf. International Organisation of Migration (IOM), Socio-Economic and Demographic Profiles of Former KLA Combatants, Registered by IOM. Prishtina 2000, 22; Tim Judah, Kosovo. War and Revenge. New Haven/CT, London 2000, 118. The Case of the Kosovo Liberation Army 481 own demilitarization in the peace agreement, the KLA was officially disbanded and partly integrated into the new political structures. A first glance at the number of KLA members might suggest that it had a rather limited social impact. Even the veterans themselves consider the number of 25,723 registered fighters to be inflated, and the number of families receiving war-related social assistance schemes levelled off at around 5,000.6 However, despite the considerably lower numbers of veterans, invalids, and surviving dependents in comparison to those of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia,7 the KLA veterans seem to be disproportionally influential in postwar Kosovo. After the war, a number of the former KLA soldiers found employment in the newly established civil protection corps, the police forces, and the civil service. Altogether there are four political parties with a KLA background or with strong personal affiliations to it, of which two hold 47 out of 120 seats in the current parliament.8 Around one third of the Kosovar Albanian deputies were active KLA members, and three out of the five Prime Ministers to date have held leading positions in the KLA.