Guardian on Kosovo - an opinion

A friend of mine just asked me about my opinion and thoughts on this piece about the 1999 Nato action in Kosovo that appeared in the Guardian today. This is what I had to say:

I don't have any problem with the article. I actually find it very good. I have never liked how instead of supporting peaceful and genuinely democratic movements like Ibrahim Rugova's Gandhi-inspired Kosovo independence movement, the West chose to support a violent band of criminals (the KLA) who terrorised Kosovo's population (regardless of ethnicity) and were no different from Serb paramilitaries such as Arkan's Tigers. For all the paramilitaries in the Balkans, the nationalist ideals they ostensibly defended were just a powerful tool to easily sway their kinfolk into believing they were actually doing 'good', which in turn coerced the population to participate or ignore the actual crimes they were committing. The ensuing chaos ensured an environment in which such criminal activity could flourish. The fact that Arkan and the KLA, mortal ethnic foes according to the nationalist diatribe of the time, worked together proves this (they divvied up who controlled what parts of Kosovo in the petrol smuggling trade). The 2001 conflict in Macedonia was not a fight for Albanian rights but a cigarette-smuggling turf war between Macedonian and Albanian criminal groups.

I'm particularly glad that this point was made in the article:
But if the west had wanted to act morally in the Balkans and to protect the people in Kosovo there were solutions other than war with the Serbs, and options other than backing the KLA – the most violent group in Kosovan politics. They could have backed genuine multi-party negotiations, or offered to lift sanctions on Belgrade if a peaceful solution to the problem of Kosovo could be found.

Yes, the point could have been made of Milošević's past genocide-inducing actions in Bosnia and that Serb para-militaries were operating in Kosovo, but the bottom line is that the West should not have backed one criminal group and painted them as 'good' in order to fight against another bunch of criminals.