Private US firm training both sides in Balkans <http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/world.cfm?id=51340> Saturday, March 3, 2001 Christian Jennings In Debelde THE US government's favourite private security service has trained both sides in the latest ethnic flare-up in the Balkans. Only two years ago the rag-tag Kosovar Albanian rebels were taken in hand by the Virginia-based company of professional soldiers, Military Professional Resources Incorporated. An outfit of former US marines, helicopter pilots and special forces teams, MPRI's missions for the US government have run from flying Colombian helicopter gunships to supplying weapons to the Croatian army. Among its most recent tasks - training the Macedonian army, now shooting it out with the Albania guerrillas in and around the farming village of Tanusevce, just across the border from Kosovo. The twist symbolises perfectly how the sympathies of NATO and the UN are changing in and around Kosovo. About 200 black-uniformed Albanian fighters have taken control of Tanusevce in the last ten days and this week have clashed at least four times with some of the 300-plus Macedonian soldiers and policemen surrounding the village, which lies above the snow-line at 4,200ft in northern Macedonia. Only last summer, MPRI began working with the Macedonians. The UN refugee agency UNHCR estimates that over 500 refugees have fled the area since the fighting began last week. "There was more shooting last night, in the evening, over there beyond the ridge-line," says US Lieutenant Jeff Wilbur, from Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 325th Parachute Infantry Regiment, stationed with a squad of men a half mile back from the village of Debelde, some 800 yards from the border. Lt Wilbur points at a line of oak trees standing in the snow, marking the Macedonian border. Further on, inside the village, officers from the 82nd Airborne Division have their binoculars out and are watching the movements of Albanian rebels and Macedonian forces in the woods on the facing hillside. Smoke rises from a house that villagers say was set alight on Wednesday night. NATO's senior commander in Kosovo, Italian General Carlo Cabigiosu, has said Kosovo will not become a haven for rebels seeking to export violence from Kosovo, and has strengthened his troops on the border accordingly. His hand is made stronger by the training programme MPRI is giving to the higher echelons of the Macedonian army. "They've got a former two-star general heading up the programme, I think, it's high-level stuff," says one US army major inside Debelde. "If you're an ex-communist country, then MPRI are the guys for you," he says, watching a group of refugee children walk past. "MPRI have been training the Macedonian army and border police since spring of 2,000," says one MPRI employee based in the Macedonian capital, Skopje. MPRI armed and trained the Croatian army in the mid-90s, in preparation for "Operation Storm" in 1995, which saw the Croats liberate the Krajina region, forcing up to 100,000 Serbs out. Then in 1998 and 1999 MPRI was tasked with training and assisting the ethnic Albanians of the Kosovo Liberation Army in their struggle against the oppressive regime of the then-president, Slobodan Milosevic. MPRI sub-contracted some of the training programme to two British private security companies, ensuring that between 1998 and June 1999 the KLA was being armed, trained and assisted in Italy, Turkey, Kosovo and Germany by the Americans, the German external intelligence service and former and serving members of Britain's 22 SAS Regiment. Two years later, and a wave of ethnic cleansing of Kosovo's remaining Serbs at the hands of ethnic Albanians has left nearly 1,000 people murdered in 18 months. This week the two latest victims of Albanian extremism were two elderly Kosovo Serbs, axed to death in their homes in eastern Kosovo, the latest in a series of violent attacks on Kosovo's beleaguered population of ethnic minorities which is rapidly turning international sympathy away from the Kosovar Albanian cause. The incident is the latest in a series of attacks on Kosovo's minorities populations by extremist Albanians, designed to intimidate Serbs who fled Kosovo in 1999 from returning. Two weeks ago at least ten people died and up to 30 were injured in a bomb-attack on a bus carrying Serbs near the Kosovan town of Podujevo. "Day by day, the province is losing the sympathy of the international community," says Eric Morris, head the Kosovo mission of UNHCR.
