KACANIK, Yugoslavia — The Kalashnikov assault rifle slung over Saip Reka's shoulder comes courtesy of the Serbian police so that the Kosovo Albanian and his wife can fight their own people.
Ethnic Albanian guerrillas in the Kosovo Liberation Army are scattered in the mountain forests and foothills that surround this small, almost deserted town in southern Kosovo.
So Serbian authorities are arming the minority of fiercely loyal ethnic Albanians to join in the fight against the KLA, which wants to make an independent state out of Kosovo, a poor southern province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic.
"We see them from time to time in the nearby hills, in groups of three to five men--at most 10," Reka said through a translator Sunday. "Thank God I haven't met any directly because I know that if they catch me, I'm dead."
The government's strategy of creating new ethnic Albanian militias is creating another potential threat that foreign peacekeeping troops will have to contend with once they get into Kosovo, either by negotiation or by force.
Reka, 44, heads the local self-defense unit of ethnic Albanians, whose ranks include his wife, Malina, also 44, an ample woman with a few gold teeth, a serious smoking habit and an assault rifle of her own.
They are among just 150 ethnic Albanians holding out in Kacanik, which had a population of about 10,000 people before the North Atlantic Treaty Organization began its air war against Yugoslavia almost 10 weeks ago.
Fifty Serbs and Gypsies also live in the town, which is a constant target for NATO warplanes--and KLA guerrillas--because Yugoslav forces are dug in all around in case NATO troops attack from nearby Macedonia.
"In addition to providing security, we are trying to talk to people and persuade them not to leave," Reka said. "I can understand that those [guerrillas] who have bloodied their hands are going, but those who have not, nobody has ever touched them."
Many of the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians who are now refugees in Albania and Macedonia, or elsewhere, say that Serbian police, soldiers and paramilitary units forced them to flee. Others say they left to escape NATO's bombs.
Thousands of burned homes and shops across much of Kosovo only hint at the terror that swept through.
NATO calls it "ethnic cleansing," a euphemism coined in the early stages of the Yugoslav federation's violent breakup, when armed thugs drove people from their homes, and often set fire to the buildings, to permanently expel whole ethnic groups.
