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Resigned to the absence of Rugova and his Democratic League of Kosovo party (LDK), rival Kosovo Albanian political parties and Kosovo Serbian leaders took his party's boycott of United Nations-sponsored talks Friday in stride. They forged ahead without him, cobbling together a transitional council to represent the Kosovo people to the international administrators that will govern Kosovo under a U.N. mandate.

"If Rugova's LDK continues to obstruct the creation of unity among the other Kosovo Albanian parties, we may be obliged to try to unite with political representatives of the LDK who are ready to work with us," warned Hudajet Huseni, a Kosovo Albanian politician formerly in Rugova's LDK party and now a member of a political party (the United Democratic League, or LBD) allied with the Kosovo Liberation Army. "It is a new reality today. Rugova has got to stop obstructing this process."

Rugova and his allies are refusing to participate in the U.N.-backed transitional council unless they get more seats than the other key political forces in Kosovo, particularly the KLA and the rival LBD party.

That position conflicts with the agreement struck at the failed Rambouillet peace talks in France on Feb. 23. There, Rugova agreed that his LDK party, the KLA, the LBD party and two independent journalists would each get two seats in a provisional government that would govern until elections are held, and that would be led by 30-year-old KLA leader Hashim Thaci as prime minister.

Now Rugova's party is demanding that his LDK party get a third seat, and has boycotted international talks to form a Kosovo provisional government until he gets it.

U.N. administrators in Kosovo increasingly consider Rugova and his close allies a nuisance. "Please, if you have any opportunity, tell [a close Rugova ally] to stop obstructing the formation of the transitional council," one frustrated U.N. advisor told a reporter last week in Pristina. "The U.N. will simply go on without the LDK and Rugova if it keeps up."

"I am sad that the LDK has chosen not to participate in that first meeting,'' said Bernard Kouchner, the former French health minister and founder of Doctors Without Borders charged with leading the massive U.N. mission in Kosovo, UNMIK, at the opening of the meeting Friday which Rugova boycotted. "They are unhappy about the current composition of the council.''

The reason the U.N. has gone to such trouble trying to get Rugova and the LDK on board was evident in the popular reaction to his belated return to Kosovo Thursday. He was greeted by a crowd of some 300 supporters on apartment building balconies and on the streets, throwing flowers and chanting his name.

At the same time, the controversy and sense of betrayal Rugova provokes was also evident, in the editorial headline in the leading Kosovo Albanian newspaper Koha Ditore, which read, "The Loser is Back."

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