No surprise here. The Prime Minister is KLA also. Moderate Kosovo Update: “Kosovo appoints first defense minister,” from Xinhua, August 6 (thanks to all who sent this in):
Senior official of the ruling Kosovo Democratic Party Fehmi Mujota confirmed on Tuesday that he has been appointed as Kosovo’s first defense minister.
“I have the confirmation from Prime Minister (Hashim Thaci), I was appointed as a defense minister,” Mujota said.
Mujota, 45, is currently serving as a deputy in the Kosovo parliament. He was formerly a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and later served as mayor of Shtime, a small municipality in the south-east Kosovo. Mujota holds a double citizenship of Kosovo and Sweden….
Here is some background on the KLA. From “Al Qaeda’s Balkan Links” by Marcia Christoff Kurop in the Wall Street Journal Europe, November 1, 2001:
[…] Islamist infiltration of the Kosovo Liberation Army advanced, meanwhile. Bin Laden is said to have visited Albania in 1996 and 1997, according to the murder-trial testimony of an Algerian-born French national, Claude Kader, himself an Afghanistan-trained mujahideen fronting at the Albanian-Arab Islamic Bank. He recruited some Albanians to fight with the KLA in Kosovo, according to the Paris-based Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues.
Controversial Relationship
By early 1998 the U.S. had already entered into its controversial relationship with the KLA to help fight off Serbian oppression of that province. While in February the U.S. gave into KLA demands to remove it from the State Department’s terrorism list, the gesture amounted to little. That summer the CIA and CIA-modernized Albanian intelligence (SHIK) were engaged in one of the largest seizures of Islamic Jihad cells operating in Kosovo.
Fearing terrorist reprisal from al Qaeda, the U.S. temporarily closed its embassy in Tirana and a trip to Albania by then Defense Secretary William Cohen was canceled out of fear of an assassination attempt. Meanwhile, Albanian separatism in Kosovo and Metohija was formally characterized as a “jihad” in October 1998 at an annual international Islamic conference in Pakistan.
Nonetheless, the 25,000 strong KLA continued to receive official NATO/U.S. arms and training support and, at the talks in Rambouillet, France, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright shook hands with “freedom fighter” Hashim Thaci, a KLA leader. As this was taking place, Europol (the European Police Organization based in The Hague) was preparing a scathing report on the connection between the KLA and international drug gangs. Even Robert Gelbard, America’s special envoy to Bosnia, officially described the KLA as Islamic terrorists.
So now the Islamic terrorist Prime Minister of Kosovo has appointed another Islamic terrorist as Kosovo’s Defense Minister. But no worries! They’re all moderates now!