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Bernard Kouchner, the United Nations administrator of Kosovo, will tomorrow ask the Security Council to back his controversial plan to recruit ethnic Albanian guerrillas into a civil emergency force, after the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) is disbanded.
Russia, as well as Yugoslavia of which Kosovo remains nominally a part, have criticised the plan for effectively maintaining the KLA in another guise. But the KLA has complained the new force, dubbed provisionally the Kosovo Corps, will be too small and too civilian in nature to serve as a nucleus for the territory's defence, when Nato eventually pulls out.
Mr Kouchner's proposal is aimed at finding a future for KLA members after September 19, when they are due - under last June's de- militarisation accord - to hand in all their guns and uniforms.
The idea is to offer ex-KLA members places in the police, where they have already accounted for 40 per cent of the first intake of 400 recruits taken in this week for training, and in the Kosovo Corps.
Composed of 3,000 regulars and 2,000 part-timers, this latter force would be used for emergency relief, infrastructure rebuilding and ceremonial duties. Kfor is insisting that only a few corps members would carry weapons for limited and specific purposes, and that the corps remain under its operational control, until such time as Kosovo elects some political authority.
Mr Kouchner, who flew to New York yesterday to present his first progress report on post-war Kosovo, may be able to sidestep a formal Security Council vote on the plan because he has some discretion as the special representative of Kofi Annan, the secretary-general, to take such initiatives and because key details of the plan are still being negotiated between commanders of Nato peacekeepers and of the KLA.
But in a meeting earlier this week in Pristina with Javier Solana, the Nato secretary-general, General Agim Ceku, the KLA chief of staff, was still demanding that the corps should be an armed force of at least 6,000 men.