Far from being mesmerised by Milosevic as it was in the early 1990s, the West, led by the United States, has been trying to topple him – but by indirect means. The brutally successful Serb counter-offensive which reversed the KLA’s early dramatic gains has set Kosovar Albanians at each others’ throats.During these events, the West has not been quite the naive and feeble bystander described by many advocates of intervention. Just as the Nato presence in Bosnia has avoided a head-on clash with the leading Serb war criminals and preferred to catch only small fry while trying to induce the Serb elite there to back the Dayton settlement, so in rump Yugoslavia a variety of covert means have been deployed to undermine Milosevic.The West backed his former protege, Milo Djukanovic, the President of Yugoslavia’s other republic, Montenegro, in the hope that he would ally with ex-Serbian nationalists-turned-democrats such as Zoran Djindjic in Belgrade and overthrow Milosevic. This has led to increasingly tense divisions among the Kosovar Albanians. While all eyes were on the internal power struggle in Albania in mid-September, the KLA liquidated one of its ex-commanders, Ahmet Krasniqui, in Tirana, apparently for changing sides to Rugova.

In Prishtina, the capital of Kosovo, an attempt was made to murder one of Rugova’s closest aides. In some cases they have provided European and American TV crews with footage of Serbian atrocities. There can be little doubt, too, that the KLA has pursued a policy designed to provoke reprisals from the Serbs, whose capacity for brutality was hardly in doubt after what had gone on in Bosnia. This was an approach refined in the 1940s by the partisans: kill a German, let the Wehrmacht take reprisals, recruit the survivors. This may have been an effective way of turning the enemy into a recruiting sergeant but it is hardly moral.The KLA leaders hoped their insurrection would marginalise Rugova as his pacifist policy collapsed in the face of the expected Serb backlash Rugova’s support has remained remarkably resilient, however.

Of course the vast majority of ill-equipped KLA fighters are simply locals up in arms, but the organisation is led by very different people Guerrilla armies are always like that. How often in the past, from the Balkans in the Second World War to Vietnam, have we heard that the partisans were just ordinary people, only to find after their victory that it was the party core not the people who took power and then did the opposite of what the peasants thought they had been fighting for?Like other freedom fighters before them, the KLA guerrillas have manipulated the media. It was only when Albania imploded in 1997 that they could turn their rhetoric into reality. Ironically, these same groups, based in Germany and Switzerland, had close links with the Stalinist regime in Albania that ended only in 1992. They called for a Maoist-style partisan war against Serb rule.