Support for guerrillas likely to prove a headache for UNHCR and NATO

To the uninitiated, it sounds like a schoolyard rhyme that the kids sing merrily at each passing westerner "oo-che-ke, oo-che-ke". In fact, they are declaring their support for the Kosovo Liberation Army by chanting its initials, UCK in Albanian.

Such children are everywhere in the camps, many with the accompanying regalia of an ardent follower of the volunteer force - camouflage baseball caps, KLA T-shirts and stickers bearing the KLA logo.

Their fanaticism might seem harmless but it serves as a reminder of the danger of having large numbers of war refugees congregated in the same location, a danger which is increasingly preoccupying humanitarian agencies in places such as Kukes.

The first point of arrival for all refugees coming across the Kosovo border into Albania, and home to 125,300 refugees at the last count, Kukes has become a breeding ground for KLA recruits.

KLA officers wander from tent to tent, seeking out new arrivals - such as the prisoners recently released from Serb detention centres. In the emergency reception centres, bruised and frail men are first approached by aid workers distributing food, next by KLA officials seeking to establish when they might be ready to go back to Kosovo.

"We have tried very hard to reinforce the idea of the camps as civilian zones but it is impossible to police them completely," said a UNHCR spokeswoman. As one senior UNHCR official put it "the experience of Zaire is still fresh in everyone's mind. The last thing we want is for the camps to become militarised, or military targets in themselves."

The UNHCR has no figures showing the number of refugees who have returned to Kosovo under the KLA flag. However, they are believed to have contributed greatly to the swelling of KLA troop numbers from 30,000 last April to an estimated 50,000 today.

The growing strength and widening support base of the KLA has also understandably worried NATO. Local military sources had expressed particular concern at the prospect of having to stop refugees from crossing the border into Kosovo while de-mining takes place and the security situation is stabilised.

"No Alliance force is going to want to put troops across the border to stop the KLA crossing. It may be preferable just to let things run their natural course, even if that means refugees are returning to a less than safe situation," said one NATO source.

And then there is the prospect of having to disarm the KLA, an idea which the organisation seems to be utterly opposed to. Masar, a KLA spokesman in Kukes, said his force was "a factor for stability in Kosovo" and should be transformed into a regular national army rather than disbanded.

Asked if the KLA would resist disarmament if NATO demanded it, he replied simply: "That is a hypothetical question."

The inability to get a straight answer from the KLA has been a hallmark of the force and a source of frustration for both NATO and humanitarian agencies. This week, for instance, the UNHCR was caught off guard when the Serbian army began shelling a number of villages in the border region of Pashtrik where the KLA had been assembling troops without informing the refugee agency. Almost 1,000 refugees and Albanian villagers have been hastily evacuated from the region to Kukes in recent days.

It is hard to gauge the feelings of KLA members towards the current peace initiative. Masar, for one, believes the current process is doomed. "The Serbs are playing games with the world," he said. "It would be better if this peace agreement collapses."

If it does, the KLA should have no problems in finding fresh volunteers, judging by the level of support it receives even from unlikely sources, like Miradife, a mother of three who has witnessed more than her share of the horrors of war.

She hid with her children under human body parts collected at the scene of a NATO attack on the back of a tractor.

With such a history, one might expect her to be opposed to violence. Yet her dream, she said, was to see her two boys, Betim (11) and Fatos (9) take up arms to defeat Serbia.