NATO's problem is that it is reluctant to push the KLA to honor an agreement to disarm by September 19. "Various Western politicians made different promises to the KLA during the war and immediately after, and the KLA is taking advantage of the confusion to hang on to their weapons and infrastructure," says TIME Central Europe bureau reporter Dejan Anastasijevic. "Most importantly, though, NATO isn't prepared to risk confrontation with the organization. NATO showed during the war that its prime concern is to avoid taking casualties, and on that score the KLA can make life very difficult for NATO. Now NATO may be trying to seduce them into at least partially disarming, but it's unlikely to go smoothly." Because unlike NATO, the KLA has nothing to lose.
NATO: Making the Worst of a Bad Situation
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It takes a fanciful mind to reinvent the Kosovo Liberation Army as a corps of civic-minded fellows who put out fires and rescue people from natural disasters, but NATO is desperate to find a way out of its Kosovo dilemma. With the deadline for the complete disarming of the guerrilla movement two weeks away, the KLA shows no sign of agreeing to put down its weapons and morph into a civilian political organization. So NATO is negotiating a deal to allow 3,000 KLA members to form a "Kosovo Corps" whose duties are similar to those of the National Guard. Of course the KLA sees the force simply as the nucleus of an army that would serve the future independent Kosovo for which it's fighting. That, and the fact that KLA members continue to attack Serbs and other non-Albanian minorities in Kosovo, has the Russians crying foul. And since any NATO-KLA deal must be ratified by the U.N. Security Council, Moscow's consent will be crucial.