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PRISTINA, Sept 23 (Reuters) - ``The pride of a farmer in his livestock, or of a collector in his specimens, is nothing to the pride of an Albanian in his weapons,'' an English traveller in the Balkans wrote in the 1880s.
``They are... the guardians of his hearth, the object of his admiration, and his perpetual glory,'' wrote the traveller, quoted in Noel Malcolm's ``Kosovo: A Short History.''
Against the backdrop of such an ingrained gun culture, and with Kosovo's final political status unresolved, no one has any doubt that ethnic Albanian guerrillas still have access to plenty of arms despite handing in over 10,000 to peacekeepers.
The weapons -- including 9,000 small arms, 800 machine-guns, 300 anti-tank weapons and 178 mortars -- were submitted as part of the process officially disbanding the Kosovo Liberation Army, which was completed this week.
Analysts and diplomats believe arms still concealed in fields, barns and other sites across Kosovo and northern Albania should not pose a major problem if they remain out of sight and KLA leaders continue to cooperate with international officials here.
``As long as those weapons stay hidden, I don't think anybody's going to bother about them too much,'' said Bryan Hopkinson, head of the Pristina office of the International Crisis Group, which provides analysis of world trouble-spots.
Hopkinson said the attitude of the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping force was likely to be similar to that of a teacher telling his pupils: ``No smoking behind the bike sheds but if you go to the field next door, we won't bother you.''
Putting an exact figure on how many weapons the KLA may still have is an impossible task, experts believe.
The guerrilla force, which waged an armed campaign against Serb rule in Kosovo, often operated as a loosely associated group and armed resistance also came from other ethnic Albanians who were never even formally members of the KLA.
The KLA's declared holdings of 10,000 weapons -- offered when the guerrillas agreed to disarm in June after the end of NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia -- is widely viewed as sketchy.
``The figure was pretty amateurish guesswork because the KLA themselves didn't know what they'd got,'' one Western source said. ``The air campaign had only been finished a week.''
Analysts are sure the number of weapons still in the hands of both ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo is substantial.
``Kosovo has always had a gun culture,'' said Zoran Kusovac, an analyst with Jane's, the intelligence and defence information company. ``I still believe the number of weapons held by the population is closer to tens of thousands than thousands.''
KFOR commander Lieutenant-General Sir Mike Jackson insisted this week his troops would clamp down hard on illicit weapons but observers doubt if the peacekeepers will be too proactive.
``The important thing is that they (the arms) are not used or displayed to try and maintain some sort of KLA intimidation over the population,'' the Western source said.
``I don't think we should expect to see KFOR teams going into big fields to dig up a few rusting AK-47s,'' he predicted.
Problems resulting from the stored weapons are more likely to come further down the road, if the guerrillas who fought for complete independence for Kosovo are unhappy at whatever final political settlement is reached for the territory.
``Even if you're going to trust KFOR, there still remains the problem of what happens when KFOR goes away,'' Hopkinson said.
``They can't be absolutely certain that the fickle international community won't abandon them to the Serbs at some time in the future.''