Kosovo: The wired war

As this decade began, the Gulf War gave news viewers the chance to see live warfare on the television screen. The Internet played its part in getting news out in Bosnia, during the rebellion against Zaire's Mobuto Sese Seko and more recently, the uprising that toppled Indonesia's President Suharto.

But nothing like what's happening in Kosovo has ever been seen before. In remote Kosovo, where there are no foreign media satellite dishes and information is tightly controlled by the Yugoslav government, the Internet has become a battlefield in itself.

Cyber Zealots
A faithful, if fanatic, group of ethnic Albanians, foreign-based guerillas and Serb nationals are disseminating news on the conflict 24 hours a day via the Internet. Multi-lingual and updated around the clock, a half-dozen official sites dedicated to the Kosovo conflict provide everything from political condemnations and photographs of mutilated bodies to tourist information and sports scores.

Even the insurgent KLA has a site. Secretive and reclusive on the ground, their page puts a face on the rebels, whose colleagues abroad, it seems, have traded live fire for a fiery tongue. The editors of www.zik.com mourn the loss of fallen comrades and recruit support for the movement. The National Movement of Kosovo, which has at times claimed to be the political wing of the KLA, writes in Albanian that the "motherland is calling."The site damns a recent move by Swiss authorities to close several bank accounts believed to be funneling cash to the rebels. "The Serbs have started an offensive to exterminate civilian people in Kosovo, especially in regions that have higher numbers of Albanians," the site says. "The Serbs are trying to shut off our armed resistance and defeat the hope of freedom and the KLA."

"They think that with this offense they will win, but they are mistaken."

Repeated e-mails by MSNBC to www.zik.com went unanswered. For now, that battle station seems to be unmanned. A possible indication of the site's origin: one of the articles is attributed to two well-known student leaders, suspected of having ties to the rebel uprising.

Online in Exile
The self-proclaimed government of the Republic of Kosovo, elected by a landslide in a clandestine 1992 vote not recognized by Belgrade, maintains a site from its Geneva offices. The Republic's web site went the extra step of registering itself as a government organization, with the coveted ".org" tag, perhaps readying for the day when it is a fully independent state.

"The people of Kosova suffer the worst systematic human rights abuses in Europe. All spheres of life for Kosova Albanians -- educational, cultural and political -- are impacted by the Serbian totalitarian system" the site writes by way of its introduction.

In English, French, German and Albanian, the homepage of the Republic of Kosovo charts the history of a government that Serb officials call a "terrorist" province. Yet even in quiet lakeside Geneva, the government in exile is not immune to violence. In March, two gunmen burst into its offices and shot an employee who tried to stop them. Swiss police are investigating.

Cyber Serbia
Not to be outdone, on the other side of the cyber frontline, the Serbs, too, have a well-oiled online propaganda machine. The Serb Ministry of Information's Serbian Ministry of Information, run from Belgrade, traces the movement of "terrorist forces" in Kosovo. Without mentioning the outlaw KLA by name, the press department of the ministry routinely prints the number of rebels killed in attacks: "Eight terrorists were killed, and a good number were took (sic) captive," it reported recently. Serbia-info.com also reports of inhumane treatment and murders of Serb minority families in the region.

Cyber Albania
Albanians, with a diaspora of more than a half million worldwide, are clearly winning the battle for the most sites. The tour starts with The Albanian homepage But the events in Kosovo, which escalated sharply since March, have given the page a political edge. News of "massacres" and "ethnic cleansing" splash across its front page, with links to scenes in small Kosovo villages apparently after Serb security forces swept through. Albanian.com does its best to balance its information, by providing a link to Kosovo/a Online -- using both the Serb and Albanian spellings for the region -- which promotes online dialog between Serbs and Albanian intellectuals and politicians. But like many sites, after a few token words about securing peace in the region, the prose becomes ardently political -- anti-Serb and pro-independence.

On the ground
Publishing from downtown Pristina, Koha Ditore is the regional capital's biggest independent daily in print and online. The site receives about 15,000 hits every day, but has found the cyber battle to be every bit as dangerous as covering the battle on the ground.

The site's producer refuses to allow his name to be published because of a few Serb nationalists who regularly threaten their lives -- online.

"Some Serb guy e-mails us on a regular basis. He threatens to 'cut the throats' of the entire staff." An anonymous alias might usually protect the editors at the paper, but with ethnic tensions high, they have to take precautions, the producer said.

One of the greatest frustrations of Koha Ditore (Daily Times) online efforts has been the Yugoslav government, which apparently has refused to give the site access to a recently-completed fiber link between Pristina and Belgrade. Koha Ditore wants to become an Internet service provider, and has 20 phone lines installed and ready for users, but their applications have been rebuffed. "I have a friend that confirmed to me that the fiber optic line is working, but we can't get a response from the government," the producer said. So, for the time being, updating the site is an all-day process. It often takes an hour just to get a call into the Belgrade server, and then several more hours to change the page.

Private War
A number of individual and unofficial sites also provide insight into the age-old hatred and suspicion between Serbs and Albanians by fervently explaining their nationality's historic right to the territory. No expense is spared, as their most prominent historians hold forth on centuries of repression at the hands of the enemy.

The religious importance of Kosovo to Serbs and their cultural right to the province is dealt with at www.kosovo.com, the Web Site of the Serbian Resistance Movement, which publishes no fewer than four historic "outlines" (read: novels) on Serbian identity in Kosovo. Every big gun contributor is an expert armed with at least one Ph.D.

Kosovo is an "unalienable part of the Serbian state, without which the future security of Serbia and the equality of all its citizens without regard to their religious or ethnic affiliation, cannot be imagined," it says. The Serbian Resistance Movement calls Kosovo a "Serbian Jerusalem," the center of the Serbian state and culture.

Ethnic Albanians living abroad also provide a lively forum for their claim to the region. Albanian.com offers a list of Albanians online at www.albanian.com/main/homepages, where you can find ethnic Albanians like Qosja Rexhep, who offers music, personal musings on Kosovo, his top ten favorite images from the region and links to other Albanian diaspora.

Ironically, given the volume of information online, few Serbs and ethnic Albanians living in the former Yugoslavia have Internet access. Of Serbia's 10 million population, it's estimated that between 20,000 to 50,000 are online. In the Kosovo province, the number drops to less 1,000. Phone lines are unreliable or nonexistent in much of the area, and there is not a single server for the two million inhabitants. If Kosovo is benefiting in some way from the Internet, its residents are unaware.

But there's a site notably absent from Web: one that provides a solution to the conflict. And the opposing sides in Kosovo's cyber battle for Kosovo are unlikely to declare a truce any time soon.