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LETTERS OF SUPPORT

SERBIAN MASSACRES

 Updated at 4:00 PM on June 09, 1999

Independence for Kosova (NY Times)

By NOEL MALCOLM

LONDON -- If war is the continuation of policy by other means, then it helps to know what the policy is and whether it makes sense. Most of the debate about Kosova until last week concentrated on military and moral issues -- the need for ground troops, the justifiability of bombing, and so on. Even during the now stalled peace talks, questions about the long-term political future of Kosova have received little attention. Yet these are the most important questions of all.

The official line of the NATO governments goes something like this: Under the protection of an international force, Kosova will develop its own autonomous administration, while remaining within the federal Yugoslav state. This means that the Kosovars will have Yugoslav passports, be liable for call-up to the Yugoslav army, pay Yugoslav taxes and pass through Yugoslav controls at the borders (the same borders where the Yugoslav police robbed them and drove them through minefields a few weeks ago).

Meanwhile, say the NATO politicians, Slobodan Milosevic will have fallen from power and a new, democratic leadership in Belgrade will recognize the rights of the Kosova Albanians, no longer regarding them as second-class Yugoslav citizens.

Unfortunately, no one has yet told us which of the available political leaders will take on this enlightened task. Certainly not Vojislav Seselj, the fanatical Serb nationalist who has publicly advocated infecting Kosova Albanians with the AIDS virus. Not Vuk Draskovic, whose political career arose from his notoriety as a mouthpiece of anti-Muslim prejudice. And probably not Zoran Djindjic, the Democratic Party leader, who gave unstinting support to the Bosnian Serb extremists during the Bosnian war.

As we know, most Serbs do not wish to see the Kosovars as equal partners in a Yugoslav state; they would rather not have them in their country at all. The sad truth is that Mr. Milosevic's overall policy on Kosova -- keeping the territory and getting rid of the people -- continues to be genuinely popular in Serbia.

Once it finally becomes clear that this policy has been thwarted, Serb politicians will start working toward a scaled-down version of the same goal: a partition of Kosova, whereby Serbia will keep the northern half of the province and eject all the Albanians from it. If the deployment of an international force involves creating a special zone for Russian troops in the north, de facto partition will quickly follow, as few Albanians will be willing to return to their homes under the "protection" of Belgrade's closest allies.

Some Western commentators are already advocating partition as the best long-term solution. The argument is usually dressed up with assertions about the northern half of Kosova's being more of an ethnically Serb area anyway, or with references to the Serbs' "holy places." But in fact the northern half of Kosova was just as much an Albanian-majority area as the south: in the last reliable census (in 1981) the large northern municipalities of Vucitrn and Podujevo, for example, had Albanian majorities of 88 and 96 percent.

As for the use of churches and monasteries to justify partition, this is merely a pious fiction: Mr. Milosevic's real interest in northern Kosova is economic, not monastic. He wants the rich mines of the Trepca district and their associated factories and power plants -- the essential assets without which any independent southern rump of Kosova would not be economically viable at all.

Of course the monasteries and churches should be cared for, and the rights of those who worship in them (a small minority of the Serbs, whom all surveys before the war showed to be the most nonreligious population in the former Yugoslavia) should be respected. But it is hard to believe that, in the late 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Kosovar citizens might be told that they must permanently abandon their homes in cities like Vucitrn and Mitrovica simply because of the physical presence of a monastery building 20 miles down the road.

If partition is unjustifiable, and if the reintegration of Kosova into Yugoslavia unworkable, what long-term options remain? There are only two possibilities. Either the situation stays frozen after the deployment of tens of thousands of NATO troops, who are then committed to exercising a permanent de facto protectorate over Kosova, or Kosova is allowed, eventually, to become independent and to guard its own borders with its own army.

In the long term, the second option is more in the interests of the West. It is certainly the strong preference of the Kosova Albanians themselves, who voted overwhelmingly for independence as long ago as 1991. It is what the volunteer soldiers of the Kosova Liberation Army were fighting for; without some assurance on eventual self-determination, they will be very reluctant to give up their weapons, and their leaders will become more radical, not less.

Such an assurance on self-determination (albeit in ambiguous phrasing) was included in the Rambouillet accord; otherwise the Albanians would never have signed that document. Their acceptance of the Rambouillet plan is taken for granted today. And yet that key assurance clause was dropped from the plan put forward last week by the Russian envoy, Viktor Chernomyrdin, and President Martti Ahtisaari of Finland.

Western governments have always said that they are against the idea of independence for Kosova. Why are they so keen to rule out the one long-term option that offers a genuine, and just, solution? Although I have discussed this question with many politicians, diplomats and academics over the last few years, I have never heard a convincing (or even a well-informed) answer to that question.

One standard response is that granting independence to Kosova would encourage the Albanians of Macedonia to demand a territorial carve-up of that state, too. This is to misrepresent the aims of the Macedonian Albanian politicians, who have always campaigned for greater political rights within Macedonia, not separation from it. And in any case, the biggest threat to Macedonia's stability today is the sheer presence of hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees -- people who will not return to Kosova if they think they will eventually be subjected, once again, to Yugoslav rule.

The other standard reply is that an independent Kosova would set a precedent for all kinds of other breakaway ethnic groups: Basques, Kurds or whatever. This is to misunderstand the basis of Kosova's legal claim to independence. In the old Yugoslavia, Kosova functioned as a federal unit and was formally defined not just as a province of Serbia but also, and more important, as a component of the federation.

When that federation dissolved in 1991 and '92, each unit had a legal right to self-determination. Independence for Kosova would thus follow an old precedent: the one set by Slovenia and Croatia. And no other places could follow this precedent unless they were federations in a process of complete dissolution -- a rarity in modern political history.

The only dangerous new precedent here is the one the West is actually planning to create: the permanent NATO occupation of one part of a sovereign state. Such an outcome is not in the interests of the West, and will certainly never satisfy the Kosovars, whose interests this entire Western policy was designed, allegedly, to protect.

Noel Malcolm is the author of ``Kosovo: A Short History,'' a new edition of which has just been published.

Serb forces mine Kosova attempting to inflict more pain to its citizens

Kaçanik,June 9, (Kosovapress) In the region of Kaçanik during the last 24 hours, Serb forces have been spotted setting mines throughout the territory.

Yesterday, mines were once again set on the secondary roads of the region, (the ones most unlikely to be attended to by NATO forces and those most likely to be used by returning deportees). The roads leading to the Fushë e Pajtimit-Glloboshicë(the road to Tetova) highway and also in Doganaj, in Dubrava, to the water-mill, near the factory of Silkapor, in Sepetin and in other places of Kaçanik have been rendered impassable. Mines have also been placed along the Kaçanik-Fusha e Pajtimit highway posing a direct threat to incoming NATO troops and in the area from Dushkajë up to Stagovë.

Four citizens have been injured two days ago while walking through a mine field in this area. For the last three weeks, sources in the area have said 11 civilians have lost limbs to Serb anti-personnel mines.

In the past, Serbs mined the areas of Shtimje, the village of Belinc, throughout the Gorge of Carravleva, around Gështënjave Hill, from the orchard to Dimjaku towards Balaj of Ferizaj, at the entrance of Jezerc, in Burrnik and in Kashtanjeva. All these areas will have to be demined before civilians can move about.

The commander of the Nerodima Operational Zone has appealed to all civilians to be careful while moving about for Serb booby traps and mines litter Kosova. The commander has also asked for any suspicious object to be immediately reported to the KLA who will send in their bomb removal experts to clear the area.

Contrary to US "intelligence" reports, Serbs are not withdrawing, but respositioning

Ferizaj, June 9, (Kosovapress) Starting on June 1st, large numbers of Serb forces have been spotted in the city of Ferizaj and its suburbs. One AAA gun, a tank and about 20 Serb soldiers are currently stationed at Rakaj village in the district of Izhancë. Towards the village of Doganaj in Ferizaj, ten soldiers and an AAA gun are installed on the right of the area between Doganaj and Nerodime. In Zaskok village, near the old school, 50 Serb soldiers (living in the building of the new school) guard one mobile AAA (Praga) and one AAA gun which are set up there. There are two trucks placed in the old school as well, its contents has not been identified.

Armed soldiers with masks have been reported between the buildings on the left of the Church in the region of Gjilan. Three hidden tanks and about 10 soldiers are stationed near Pishina at the bridge of Gjilan. It has been reported that Bibaj village is empty of civilians but there are large numbers of Serb military and paramilitary troops living there.

As reported earlier, the "Pranvera" cafe in Ferizaj is being used by Serb police as a torture camp. In the building of the ex-Social Service Department Serbs deliver the confiscated documents and passports of Kosovars while the basement of the building serves as the interrogation room of Kosovars abducted off the roads. On "Zenel Hajdini" street is a veritable "war zone," where large amounts of ammunition is stored in the sports field and guarded by two dozen Serb soldiers. The private hospital "Uroplastika" now serves as a hospital for the Serb soldiers. On "Emin Duraku" street, Serb soldiers have hidden 5 or 6 armored military vehicles among the homes. At the Softaj-Rahovicë crossroad next to the electric mill near the road, 6 military vehicles and 2 AAA guns have been stored by Serb forces.

A convoy of Serb forces reported in Lushtë

Mitrovicë, June 9, (Kosovapress) This morning in Lushtë located on the Skënderaj-Mitrovicë road, a Serb convoy of more than ten tanks, mobile AAA and other military equipment has been reported.

Within this convoy civilian vehicles could be seen, clearly to protect the military hardware from attack.

The destination of the convoy could not be verified.

Conversation with Sami Lushtaku, the KLA commander of the Drenica Operational Zone

June 9, (Kosovapress)

Kosovapress talked with the KLA commander of the Drenica Operational Zone, Sami Lushtaku, about the situation in Drenica and the KLA's activities in the region.

Kosovapress: What is the position of the KLA in your operational zone?

Sami Lushtaku: The military preparation and the morale of KLA units that operate in the Drenica area is at its highest point today. Our army, morally and politically deserves to be called a Liberation Army and it will be a Legendary army.

Kosovapress: What is the scale of destruction in Drenica?

Sami Lushtaku: The scale of destruction in Drenica territory is huge. Serb forces, unable to face our forces, have attacked everything which is Albanian, both defenceless civilians and their homes.

Kosovapress: Do you know how many civilians have been killed during the latest Serb offensive?

Sami Lushtaku: The number of killed civilians reaches several hundred. The world either knows or will know that these killed were mostly murdered by Serbs and not casualties of a legitimate war.

Kosovapress: Can you tell us something about the present condition of the civilians?

Sami Lushtaku: The condition of the civilians in Drenica is a very grave one, we can even say terrible because they lack food and medicine. The situation for the children and old people is particularly hard, and it is getting worse every day.

Kosovapress: Is there any evidence of a Serb withdrawal and what military operations are they undertaking now?

Sami Lushtaku: No there is no evidence of a Serb withdrawal. On the contrary, their presence has increased in Drenica. The last time Serb forces lost control of the area, they took out their frustration on civilians. They are doing that again.

Kosovapress: What is the KLA presently doing in the area?

Sami Lushtaku: Fighting between our units and the enemy are taking place everyday in our zone. We have changed our tactics. We have moved from facing the enemy head on to conducting a classic guerrilla war. This is achieving good results.

HORROR BY DESIGN: The Ravaging of Kosova (NY Times)

By JOHN KIFNER

Although the purge of more than one million ethnic Albanians from Kosova since late March seemed to be a random kaleidoscope of violence, a reconstruction of the early days of the operation shows that it was meticulously organized from the outset. Western officials say the plans were drawn up by the Yugoslav Army and the Interior Ministry of the Serbian Republic, then carried out by a variety of Serbian forces acting under a single command.

It seems evident now that the operation had at least two major goals: crushing the rebel Kosova Liberation Army and permanently changing the ethnic balance of Kosova by driving out as many Albanians as possible.

By early May, the State Department says, 90 percent of all ethnic Albanians in Kosova had been expelled from their homes; 900,000 were driven across the province's borders and 500,000 more were displaced inside Kosova. An additional 4,600 were reported killed -- a number that is likely to increase as time goes on and more is known.

By expelling ethnic Albanians from Kosova, Serbian forces aimed to restrict the guerrillas' base of support and cover. By controlling the borders and the devastated corridors along the major highways, the Serbs planned to isolate and then eradicate the Kosova Liberation Army in the forests and mountains.

The violent emptying of the Djakovica region is an example of such an operation. Hours after the first NATO bombs fell, special police, paramilitary officers and local police used a focused fury of violence and fear to clear the area of ethnic Albanians. In just seven days -- March 30 to April 5 -- some 51,880 people were herded on foot from Djakovica to a tiny remote border crossing in the mountains, according to records of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

But the Serbs did not limit their attention to suspected KLA strongholds. Another opening assault of the drive to empty Kosova, this one in the troubled province's capital city of Pristina, illustrates another apparent aim of the Serb offensive: depopulation.

By expelling ethnic Albanians from Pristina and other large cities, Serb officials were seeking to defuse a potential demographic time bomb. At the beginning of the Serb offensives, ethnic Albanians accounted for 90 percent of Kosova's population. Moreover, the Albanian population was growing at a far faster rate than the Serb population.

Still, for all the signs of logic and planning behind the purge, many of the individual episodes -- including the systematic gunning down of women and children -- appears inexplicable in military terms, except perhaps as an indication of the unpredictability and savagery that drove the exodus.

PART I

How Serb Forces Purged One Million Albanians

In the night of March 24, as NATO bombs began falling over Yugoslavia, Hani Hoxha said he saw black-masked Serbs swaggering through Djakovica, shooting, cutting throats and burning houses.

At 3:30 in the morning, about nine miles east, a tank pulled up and parked in front of Isuf Zhenigi's farmhouse in the village of Bela Crkva. At daybreak the slaughter began there.

That day, in Pec, 22 miles to the northwest, and Prizren, 15 miles southeast, Serbian forces began firing wildly and burning Albanian-owned shops.

Meanwhile, in Pristina, about 44 miles to the northeast, Serbian operatives driving military jeeps and private cars set fire to Albanian-owned cafes, clinics and the printing presses of Kosova Sot, an independent Albanian newspaper.

These were the opening assaults in what quickly became a drive to empty the city, the provincial and intellectual center of Kosova.

As it began, the Serbs' purge of more than one million ethnic Albanians from Kosova seemed from the outside to be a random kaleidoscope of violence. But a reconstruction of the early days of the operation -- based on interviews with scores of refugees, and with senior officials in Washington and NATO, as well as on a computer analysis of reported horrors from many sources -- shows that it was meticulously organized and aimed, from the outset, at expelling huge numbers of people.

>From this reporting over the last nine weeks, it is possible to see the design behind the roster of atrocities cited by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague in its indictment on Thursday of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and four of his top officials for crimes against humanity.

With specific charges including the wave of killings in Djakovica and its surrounding villages and the forced expulsion of Albanians from Pristina, the indictment charged the Serbian forces with a "campaign of terror" that "intentionally created an atmosphere of fear and oppression through the use of force, threats of force and acts of violence" in order to drive out Kosova's majority Albanians.

The Serbs have insisted in recent months that most of the refugees fled Kosova because of NATO's bombing. Western officials, however, say the plans were drawn up by the Yugoslav Army and the Interior Ministry of the Serbian Republic and carried out, under a single command, by a variety of Serbian forces acting in concert: regular soldiers, the blue-uniformed Special Police of the Interior Ministry and the dreaded private armies of ultra-nationalist warlords who had achieved a reputation for blood lust and looting in Bosnia and Croatia.

The plan was a harsh refinement of a campaign last summer by Interior Ministry forces that failed to crush Albanian rebels. It was put into effect after a mounting campaign of terrorism on both sides, including the ambushing of Serbian police patrols and officials by the Albanians and several instances of the kidnapping and killing of Serbian civilians.

But in retrospect, it seems evident that the operation had at least two major goals from its inception: crushing the rebel Kosova Liberation Army and permanently changing the ethnic balance of Kosova by driving out as many Albanians as possible.

Hounding more than a million Albanians from their homes accomplished two purposes for the Serbs.

First, it removed the guerrillas' base of support and cover, in effect, drying up the sea in which the guerrilla fish swam.

With the Serbs controlling the borders and scorched earth along the highways, they could isolate and mop up the Kosova Liberation Army in the forests and mountains. Young men viewed as potential rebel recruits were singled out and either killed or removed to an unknown fate.

In the longer run, depopulating Kosova defused a demographic time bomb for the Serbs: Albanians already made up 90 percent of the population and were reproducing at a far higher rate than the Serbs.

Although killing and torching were plentiful, the Serbs' most potent weapon was fear. The seemingly random, flamboyantly public killings of the first few days meant that as the campaign progressed, all it took was a handful of armed, masked Serbs to drive thousands of people from their homes, rob them and send them off in caravans, their houses in flames.

Independent accounts indicate that there have been mass killings of from a dozen to roughly 100 people in more than 40 places. The State Department now puts the death toll at 4,600, a number only likely to increase as time goes on and more is known. But even that horrifying statistic indicates a goal of depopulation rather than extermination; it is low by comparison with the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, where in one massacre alone, at Srebrenica, the Serbs were accused of killing 7,000 people.

To amplify the effect of the killings in Kosova, Serbs gunned down Albanians in the streets and in their homes, sometimes at random, sometimes from target lists. Bodies have been mutilated, with ears cut off, eyes gouged out or a cross, a Serbian symbol, carved into foreheads or chests.

In many places the Serbs compounded the fear with humiliation. Older men were beaten for wearing the white conical hats of the Albanian mountains or forced to make the Serbian Orthodox three-fingered sign. One refugee convoy passed row on row of white conical hats set atop fence posts.

Two months into the campaign now, the terror has been devastatingly effective and virtually unhampered by NATO's bombing campaign, judging by accounts from refugees, relief workers and officials from international agencies, NATO and the United States Government.

By early May, 90 percent of all ethnic Albanians in Kosova had been expelled from their homes, the State Department says, 900,000 driven across the province's borders and 500,000 more displaced inside Kosova. Most of those remaining have been chased into hiding in forests and mountains, huddled together in villages penned in by snipers waiting to be allowed to flee, or captured, their fate unknown.

More than 500 villages have been emptied and burned, the State Department said.

And there was another element to the pattern: The Serbs made every effort to insure that those who fled abroad would not come back. Almost universally, refugees reported that they had been not only robbed but also systematically stripped of all identity papers, rendering them, in effect, stateless nonpersons, at least in the eyes of the Serbian government, and making it difficult for them ever to return home. Even the license plates of their cars -- the Serbs kept the good ones -- were methodically unscrewed at the borders. "This is not your land -- you will never see it again," the refugees were told. "Go to your NATO -- go to your Clinton."

Part II GJAKOVA : Emptying a City of All but Bodies

''They were burning the houses and they started to scream like a wolf - 'woo, woo' - and they shot people in the back.'' Dr. Flori Bakalli

The Serbs began attacking Kosova Liberation Army strongholds on March 19, but their attack kicked into high gear on March 24, the night NATO began bombing Yugoslavia.

Djakovica was one of the Serbs' first major targets.

A look at a map explains the strategic significance of this city of 60,000, which was populated almost entirely by Albanians. The city and its surrounding chain of villages, stretching between Junik and Prizren, lie in the shadow of the Accursed Mountains, a remote, rugged range running along the border between Albania and Kosova.

The Kosova Liberation Army maintains its camps and staging areas on the Albanian side of the mountains. A Western military officer, sketching out a map, slashed a series of lines down the mountains into the valleys around Djakovica, indicating rebel infiltration routes. Clearly, he said, the Serbs want to empty the area of ethnic Albanians, fortify and control it to block the rebels.

Those who survived it say they will never forget the focused fury of the Serbian forces who attacked Djakovica in the hundreds hours after the first NATO bombs fell.

"A group of six men with masks came, and they took the women and children out of the houses, and they burned the houses," said Mehdi Halilaj, a 27-year-old economist, recalling that first night. "The first night they burned 50 or more shops and about 35 houses. They were helped by the police."

"They took 11 men and killed them, and some they cut up their bodies," he continued, speaking in English. "They left their bodies in the street for everybody to see, and nobody dared take them away. The city was very scared from Wednesday on."

A woman called Ardina, who asked that her family name not be used, said: "The second night we saw their lights, cars, trucks, an armored vehicle. They started shooting like I have never heard in my life. I thought everyone was dead."

"We were lucky," she said, speaking in English. "All the houses around us were burned and people killed. That night killed two brothers were, a man about 40 burned in his house and my sister-in-law with Down syndrome, they burned her in her house. She is dead. There was a body on the street, nobody could touch that body all day long."

As in many places, the Serbs were guided to the most affluent and influential families, the people who helped give the Albanian community its cohesion. It is not known whether this was on instruction, or perhaps motivated by the greed, or grudges, of individual attackers, but one effect may be to damage Albanian prospects for rebuilding their communities.

"In this block, they burned a lot of houses," Ardina said. "They were the best houses in town, the rich people," she said. "There was a Serb from the city guiding them. He told them: 'Burn this house. Kill this one.' Everyone in Djakovica knows him. They killed a large number of intellectuals, especially doctors. They shot a prominent surgeon, Dr. Izet Hima. They went for the rich people, to steal their television sets or whatever they see, burn their houses and kill them."

>From the first days, the speed and scale of the Serbian campaign were stunning, even by the violent standards of Balkan wars as waves of paramilitary thugs, special policemen, regular soldiers and armed Serbian civilians swept through region after region of Kosova, acting in concert.

The burning and killing in the center of Djakovica went on for three weeks beginning in the narrow streets and small Ottoman-style houses of the Old Town, and then moved on to the newer high-rise buildings in the more modern section. "In the beginning they were just burning at night," Ardina said. "But after a week they were burning all day long, starting at 9 o'clock in the morning."

"There were selected homes burned in the beginning, after that it was all the buildings," Dr. Flori Bakalli said, in English. "There were special police, local police, paramilitaries, and some of them civilians, armed. They were burning the houses and they started to scream like a wolf -- 'woo, woo' -- and they shot people in the back. Near my house there were five of them I saw myself."

Ethnic Albanians moved from house to house and apartment to apartment, fleeing and moving in with relatives and friends, they said, to stay ahead of the advancing Serbs. In the old town, where many of the dwellings were built close together, Albanians broke holes through the walls so they could run from one home to another to escape if the Serbs knocked on the door.

Everybody, children included, slept fitfully in their clothes and shoes, ready to run. Someone had to be always awake, peering through a window or the peepholes of steel gates to see if the Serbs were coming.

Hoxha, a dignified white-haired man, took a reporter's notebook to sketch his family's compound and their futile attempts to elude Serbian attackers as they killed and burned their way through the neighborhood.

"We moved from one house to another and finally to my older daughter Tringa's house," he said. "That night I saw an old man, about 80, killed and burned and a 15-year-old boy as well. We stayed there for four nights, and the fifth night the Serbs came."

"It was around 12 o'clock, and we didn't have any electricity, when they came, about 30 people, paramilitary, V.J. and Serbs from Djakovica who had been given uniforms and guns," Hoxha said, using the initials by which the Yugoslav Army is known. "We were sleeping. My son-in-law was watching through the hole in the steel gate and came and told us to wake up."

They had parked a car sideways across the gate to block it, but the Serbs pushed through with a heavier vehicle. Thinking that the Serbs were looking only for men of military age, Hoxha and two other men climbed out a second-story window, dropped onto a wall and escaped.

He spent the next seven hours hiding in the narrow space between two buildings, squeezed between the concrete walls, listening to shouts and screams and gunshots.

In the morning he came back to the compound and found the bodies of everyone who had been left behind, some of the bodies burned. Later he said he had learned that the Serbs had first shot his 15-year-old daughter, Flaka, in front of her mother, then the older daughter, Tringa. His wife pleaded with them not to kill the children, but then they killed her. One of his granddaughters, Shihana, a spunky girl of 6, ran away and tried to hide in a closet, but they killed her there and set fire to the closet.

After he explained all this, he put his head in his hands and cried.

Next door, in the Caka family house, 20 people were hiding in the basement, when the Serbian forces broke in. They shot 18 people in the back of the head. A 10-year-old boy, Dren Caka, was somehow only wounded in the left arm, and escaped by pretending to be dead, and later gave his account to reporters at the medical tent set up at the Morini border crossing. After the Serbs left, he said, he managed to slip out a window, but he could not take his 2-year-old sister with him and she was burned alive when the Serbs torched the house. It was he who witnessed the killing of Hoxha's family.

Over the course of the assault, more than 100 boys -- presumably regarded as potential Kosova Liberation Army recruits -- were captured, refugees said, and taken to a sports center. No one knows what has happened to them.

In just seven days, March 30 to April 5, some 51,880 people were herded on foot, according to records of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, from Djakovica to a tiny remote border crossing in the mountains called Qafar-e-Prushit. The way looks like a road on a map, but it really becomes just a muddy footpath up the steep climb, which can be traveled only on foot because vehicles would set off the mines the Serbs had planted. They were city people in city shoes, and they pushed the sick and elderly along with them in wheelbarrows.

As Djakovica suffered, other Serbs were at work nearby purging a wide area they regarded as a rebel highway.

In a rare account by a Serb, a captured soldier described to NATO interrogators how his infantry battalion was sent without explanation to Pec.

On March 27, the soldier said, his commander gathered about 100 men outside an elementary school and outlined their mission: expelling Albanians from their homes. The time had come, he said, to drive the Albanians out of Serbia, according to an American official familiar with the account.

The troops were to move through the city house by house, he said, ordering residents to dress in a few minutes, pack one small bag and leave in the direction of Decani, a city to the south. The soldiers looted jewelry, torched homes. At day's end, many were driving new cars.

An artillery and armoured unit deployed to the nearby village of Ljubenic used rougher tactics. The soldier said a friend in the unit had told him they had killed 80 men while expelling the women, children and elderly.

In another of the region's villages, Bela Crkva (Bellacrkva in Albanian), on March 25, soldiers and special policemen torched the homes and farm buildings and killed at least 62 people, most of them gunned down with automatic weapons in a stream bend.

"They just started shooting," Zheniqi, a survivor, said in an interview. "The dead bodies behind me pushed me over a cliff and into the stream. I was lucky because all the dead bodies fell on top of me."

It was one of a series of mass killings over the next few days along a seven-mile stretch of villages in the rolling hills, including Celina, Pirane, Krush-e-Vogel (called Mala Krusa in Serbian) and Krush-e-Mahde (Velika Krusa), where Bekim Duraku remembered, life was so "beautiful, if someone offered to take me to the United States, I wouldn't have gone."

On March 26, the third day of the NATO bombing, the idyllic life ended in one of the best-documented of the mass killings, including an amateur videotape of the bodies. Serbian forces stormed through the village shooting down people in several areas, burning some bodies, digging a mass grave with a backhoe for others and leaving some lying in piles on the ground.

Part III Villages: Expelling Refugees for a Relief Crisis

The violent emptying of the Djakovica region had a specific military purpose: cutting off the Kosova Liberation Army supply lines. The Serbs followed it up by planting more mines, strengthening their forces along the border and mounting raids into Albania.

But in a long stretch of villages, towns and cities across Kosova -- places either close to the border or on main transportation routes -- there were similar, if less intensely concentrated, outbursts of killing and burning in those same days with another aim: driving out the majority Albanian population.

How it worked is readily discerned by comparing the refugee figures kept at the Albanian, Macedonian and Montenegrin borders with a map of Kosova. What the comparison shows is how areas close to the border were cleared first, often by wild bursts of killings that served as an example. This cleared transportation routes that facilitated the hounding out of people from other villages, who gathered in the main town of a region, and from the cities.

Sweeping his hands over a map in broad arcs across the major roadways, Fron Nazi, an Albanian-American scholar heading up a major human rights study and in touch with both refugees and the rebels, demonstrated how the Serbian strategy was apparent: first to empty the population centers and control that scorched earth, then to isolate the rebel fighters in the forests where they could be contained, squeezed and even starved out.

Forcing the refugees over the borders, NATO intelligence experts believe, served another purpose: overwhelming NATO troops stationed in Macedonia with an unmanageable relief crisis, calculating that the task of feeding, housing and caring for hundreds of thousands of refugees would consume the alliance's energies and divert it from preparing a military campaign.

"It was the first use of a weapon like this in modern warfare," a NATO intelligence officer said. "It was like sending the cattle against the Indians."

The refugees accounts in their thousands bear a striking sameness as they tell of Serbian gunmen bursting into their homes, threatening to kill if the Albanians do not give up jewelry, of seeing relatives or neighbors killed. Almost every Albanian interviewed begins by telling the exact time the Serbs arrived. But after days of hiding or plodding along in refugee columns, they often could not remember what day it was.

In many accounts, it is possible to discern a division of labor among the Serbian attackers.

Typically the Yugoslav Army, usually the Pristina Corps of the Third Army, surrounded an area, shelling it with tanks, artillery or or Katyusha rockets. Then the police, local Serbs who were sometimes reservists, and the paramilitaries moved in for the close-in dirty work, going block by block, house by house, pounding on doors, demanding money, and often shooting people on the spot.

After the door-to-door terror, the military moved in to herd the people out, either on foot or tractor, or sometimes on trains and buses, the refugee accounts agree.

The Pristina Corps, in close conjunction with the blue-uniformed Serbian Interior Ministry troops, cleared transit routes. As the flow of refugees accelerated, regular soldiers in green camouflage were deployed at key intersections to control movement.

By all accounts, it was a tightly ordered, coordinated campaign, from the artillery that shelled villages, to the masked gunmen who killed, looted and spread terror, to the armored cars and lines of troops who chased people hiding in the woods to corral them in larger central towns for eventual expulsion. In some cases, human rights workers interviewing refugees say, different groups of gunmen were distinguished by different colored armbands or headbands.

Even the wild-appearing masked irregulars -- Arkan's Tigers, the White Eagles and others -- were under tight control, NATO experts said, and reported to the intelligence arm of the Serbian Interior Ministry.

"They were in there with Belgrade's blessing," a NATO intelligence official said. "What they would be allowed to do is up to the local commander."

The level of violence varied widely, depending on the whim of the local Serbian official in charge, or even individual gunmen. An international official visited a woman of about 50 in a hospital with both of her nipples hacked off.

"All she wanted was to tell her brother in Srbica what happened," he said, referring to a town in north-central Kosova. "How could I tell her Srbica doesn't exist any more."

Some people were clearly targeted, particularly men age 15 to 50, suspected or potential rebel fighters, and those who worked for or rented space to the observer teams from the Office of Cooperation and Security in Europe. One key political activist who was a bridge between Kosovar factions, Fehmi Agani, was pulled off a train outside Pristina by the Serbian police and killed. There were reports by human rights groups that doctors had been singled out.

Evidence on the incidence of rape is less complete. President Clinton and other Western leaders often charge that there has been organized rape. But while it is clear that there have been rapes, accounts that are available do not resolve whether they were systematic. Rape was not mentioned in the indictment by the war crimes tribunal.

But for all the signs of a logic behind the purge of Kosova, many of the individual episodes -- including the gunning down of women and children -- seem inexplicable in military terms, except that the very unpredictability of the savagery added the powerful fear that drove the exodus.

"That's what so terrifying -- there are no rules," said an official in close touch with the international war crimes investigation in The Hague. "It's so random. One set of people might be spared, and the people next door do the same thing and are all killed. There was a man who gave the police 10 marks and they let go, and another who gave them 250, so they thought he must have more and killed him."

By the time, three weeks into the campaign, that the Serbs came to drive the ethnic Albanians out of the north-central city of Mitrovica, said Jacques Franquin, a United Nations official, it was enough for them to gun down an old woman and a teen-age girl in one neighborhood for everyone around to quietly board buses and be directed out of town through traffic control points.

Part IV Pristina: 'In Every House They Broke the Doors'

''We waited two months, hoping something would happen.'' Luljeta Jarina

In Pristina, the knock on Bajram Kelmendi's door came at 1 o'clock in the morning of the night NATO started bombing.

"We will kill you if you do not open in five seconds," the Serbian police shouted, his wife, Nedima, recalled. Five uniformed policemen burst in, forced the family to lie on the floor and demanded money, one warning, "If you are lying, I will kill the little children."

They took away Kelmendi, a well-known human rights lawyer, and his two sons, age 30 and 16. They told the elder son, Kastriut, "Kiss your wife and two children because this will be the last time you see them," the elder Mrs. Kelmendi said.

The family found the three bodies by the side of the road two days later.

Brutal, too, but Pristina was different.

In the Djakovica region, the Serbs had a clear military goal: to cut off the Kosova Liberation Army. But Pristina, like the other cities the Serbs emptied, was not a rebel stronghold. Indeed, in previous outbursts of fighting in Kosova, villagers often went to stay in the city until things calmed down.

Born in the Drenica valley, the Kosova Liberation Army was largely a rural movement and tied in with the traditional clans, although it did begin to pick up urban sympathy with a Serbian crackdown in March 1998.

Within the divided Kosovar society, Pristina was the base of the nonviolent leader Ibrahim Rugova and his Democratic League of Kosova, whose tactics won the praise of Western leaders -- mainly because they did not cause trouble. Among the city's educated elite, there had been suspicion and criticism of the Kosova Liberation Army.

In Pristina, the Serbian aim appears to have been depopulation.

And from some of the targets chosen, like Kelmendi and Agani, the activist pulled from a train and killed, it also seems clear that the Serbs set out to destroy the Albanian political class and its institutions.

The offices of Rugova's Democratic League was burned down on March 24, and a guard was shot and killed by the police at the newspaper Koha Ditore, whose publisher, Veton Surroi, had been a delegate at the talks in Rambouillet, France, early this year. The next night, the warehouse of the largest Kosovar charity, the Mother Teresa Society, was burned. On March 28, the house of Rexhep Qosja, a prominent academic, head of the Albanian Democratic Movement and another member of the Rambouillet delegation, was torched.

The first few days of the NATO bombing were marked in Pristina by nightly arson and bomb attacks on Albanian homes, shops and businesses, refugees recall. Police cars raced through the night, amid explosions and gunfire that terrified the Albanian residents.

Some people began fleeing, mostly middle-class residents who had cars.

"At first, while the telephone was working, friends were calling and telling us this house was burning, or they arrested this guy and so on," said Ali Muriqi, 34, of the engineering faculty at Pristina University. "They were talking about intellectuals. Then at 6:30 in the evening, the electricity went off. Then the movement started, the police going around with weapons." Muriqi fled Pristina by car on March 29.

On March 30, in a chilling display of force, the Serbs began systematically emptying Pristina's neighborhoods -- Vranjevci, Tashlixhe, Dardania, Dragodan -- marching the Albanians along streets lined with gantlets of masked gunmen draped with weaponry, refugees said.

By the tens of thousands -- in an operation that required extensive advance logistical preparations -- they were herded into the city's railroad station overnight. At dawn some were packed aboard trains -- one refugee said he was among 28 people in a compartment meant for eight -- bound for Macedonia. Others were loaded on buses and even a refrigerator truck that normally transports sides of beef and dumped near the Albanian border to leave the country on foot.

"I walked out into the garden, and there were three people with black masks and big guns," said Suzana Krusniqi, collapsing in tears as she crossed the Albanian border with her elderly parents the next day.

"In every house they broke the doors," she said, speaking in English. When we went out, everyone was in the street walking between men with black masks and big guns."

The forced exodus of Pristina gathered momentum in April. When the Serbs marched Ramadan Osmani and his family from their home to the railroad station in early April, he said, it was so crowded they had to wait 12 hours for a train to Macedonia, where they slept in a field for six days before finding a space at the Bojane refugee camp.

Some ethnic Albanians tried to stay in Pristina. Many lived a cat-and-mouse existence after eluding the first wave of Serbian looting and expulsions, hiding in other people's homes or fleeing to nearby villages. Fearing discovery, they left always by back doors, made little noise, lit candles only in rooms where heavy blankets covered the windows, and sent old people out to buy food.

Hafiz Berisha and his family evaded being expelled from Pristina for two months, hiding in five homes. But last Sunday, the 70-year-old retired policeman was standing in line to buy bread when Serbian policemen walked up and pulled his cousin and a neighbor, both men under 30, out of the line and hustled them away. Berisha said he had seen two people gunned down in front of him and 40 bodies in a mass grave, but the sight of the helpless men being led away was too much. "You can't even buy bread," he said.

He fled the next day.

Luljeta Jarina, 19, and her father, Ramiz, who had worked in the personnel department of a mining company, were among those who went into hiding. Once when she ventured into the garden behind her home out of boredom, a Serbian sniper shot at her, she recalled.

And each night, Serbian soldiers and policemen cruised the streets of the city, firing their Kalashnikovs wildly into the air. Just this Wednesday, the Serbs rounded up 18 men, including her father, at gunpoint. All but her father and two others were taken away, to an unknown fate, she said.

"We waited two months, hoping something would happen," she said.

On Sunday, they found a Serb cruising the city in a bus -- a new entrepreneur driving refugees to the border for 20 to 100 German marks apiece, about $10 to $55 -- and fled their native land.

How Yugoslav Military Planned and Mounted Kosova's Ravaging

By MICHAEL R. GORDON and THOM SHANKER

he purge of Kosova this spring was led by Yugoslav army officers handpicked by President Slobodan Milosevic to replace the internal security forces who had tried and failed the previous summer to wipe out the Albanian rebels, NATO officials say.

Allied officials now acknowledge that they missed signs that the Yugoslav army was preparing a much more extensive operation in Kosova than they had attempted in 1998, one that would move well beyond attacking Kosova Liberation Army strongholds to cities and towns that had no direct ties to the rebels.

The Interior Ministry's drive against the rebels last year was no half-measure. Special policemen and soldiers drove as many as 400,000 ethnic Albanians from their homes in and around rebel strongholds. Then they swept east to west across the province, sifting through the hordes of refugees in search of the elusive rebel fighters.

But NATO officials say the Serbs made a tactical error in that earlier purge. They did not seal off the borders with Albania or Montenegro, allowing the rebels to mingle with civilians and escape. The Kosova Liberation Army was battered, but not defeated, and NATO officials say the Yugoslav army concluded that an even more brutal attack would be needed to quell the rebellion.

The fighting continued sporadically into the fall, when the United States brokered a cease-fire under which the Serbs agreed to pull back many of their troops.

That agreement did not last long. Plainclothes intelligence operatives from the Interior Ministry filtered back into the province as the Kosova Liberation Army renewed its attacks. Western nations convened talks at a medieval castle in Rambouillet, France, in hopes of forcing a permanent settlement.

NATO officials say they failed to appreciate that the Serbs were girding for war while they talked of peace. In November, Milosevic fired the chief of staff of the Yugoslav army, Gen. Momcilo Perisic, who had made clear his distaste for ethnic cleansing.

He was replaced with Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic, a career officer who NATO officials say had close ties to Milosevic and had served previously in Kosova. A NATO intelligence official said this appointment was ominous for another reason: reports that Ojdanic's daughter had been raped by an Albanian when he was a commander at the Yugoslav army base in Prizren in Kosova.

Milosevic also replaced the overall commander of army forces in southern Serbia, turning to a general whose wife is said by Western officials to be related to the Serbian leader's wife, Mirjana Markovic.

That officer, Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, had previously commanded the main Serb army in Kosova.

Even more sinister was the appearance in Kosova during the winter of the notorious paramilitary groups that had played such a large part in the killing and purging of Bosnia.

There were Arkan's Tigers, the private army of the indicted war criminal Zeljko Raznjatovic, a parliamentary deputy from Kosova. Also spotted were the White Eagles of Vojislav Seselj, the pistol-waving law professor who is a Serbian deputy prime minister, and a band known as Frenki's Boys, led by Franko "Frenki" Simatovic.

Such units had previously been the strong arm of Serbian ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Croatia. In Kosova, according to U.S. officials, they were formally under Belgrade's command, reporting to Serbia's intelligence agency.

The United States threatened to bomb the Serbs if they did not sign a peace deal, which the Albanians had reluctantly accepted. In February and March, Western diplomats monitoring the shaky cease-fire saw the Serbs building up their forces. The question was why.

Pavkovic's predecessor as Third Army commander offered a clue early that winter, warning that his soldiers could look forward to a "hot spring."

By this time, NATO officials say, Pavkovic and his colleagues had worked out a new plan for attacking the Kosova Liberation Army that took account of the lessons from the failed attack last summer. The Yugoslav army was in charge, with the Interior Ministry taking orders from army officers.

This time, the army planned to seal Serbia's border with Albania so rebel fighters could not escape. A torrent of refugees unleashed by the ethnic cleansing would be pushed across the border with Macedonia, tying down NATO troops there that were poised to enforce any peace settlement. It was, NATO officials now say, a "hammer and anvil" plan in which the army would drive the rebels against the closed border and crush them.

NATO officials said they had no proof that Milosevic reviewed the specifics of the operation. But one U.S. official monitoring the situation said the military campaign "was signed off and approved at the General Staff level, and then, obviously the final go-ahead would have been given by President Milosevic, as head of state."

This assessment is based on the fact that as head of the Yugoslav state, Milosevic was president of the Supreme Defense Council, with ultimate responsibility for military operations.

At NATO headquarters, alliance diplomats signed off on a military plan of their own to bomb the Serbs.

Both sides prepared to execute their plans in March.

The Serbs moved first. On March 19, the Yugoslav army attacked key rebel strongholds and lines of communication on the periphery of Kosova, saying it was defending itself against new rebel operations. The 1,300 Western observers pulled out of Kosova the next day.

Pavkovic made no secret of his intentions, warning publicly that his troops were poised to take care of "internal enemy" if NATO went through with its threats to bomb.

On March 23, Serbian security forces began setting fire to villages that had never known rebel activity and -- even more telling -- began expelling ethnic Albanians from cities, which had never been used as bases by the rebels. NATO began bombing at nightfall. The war was on. Within days, tens of thousands of refugees would be streaming across three international borders.

Prishtina residents weary of war, wary of peace (CNN)

PRISHTINA, Kosova (CNN) -- As Yugoslavia and NATO finalize a plan that will end hostilities, the people of Kosova's capital, Pristina, are weary and full of apprehension.

Nine weeks after ethnic Albanians started flooding out of Pristina and NATO warplanes added it to their target list, the battered city's residents yearn for peace but fear the changes that will accompany it.

"For two months we've been living in a jail," a retiree told CNN's Jim Clancy. "We can't go out, we have to run away, our children have to hide."

With a peace deal within sight, Yugoslav officials on Tuesday allowed international journalists into Pristina for the first time since hostilities -- and the large-scale expulsion of Kosova's ethnic Albanians -- began in late March.

City scarred by bombings, looting

While the city hasn't seen the kind of wholesale destruction that occurred in Bosnia-Herzegovina during that country's war, Clancy reports, many buildings that NATO judged to be legitimate targets have been gutted by the alliance's bombs.

Throughout Pristina, windows in homes and shops are shattered, either by the force of explosions or by looters. Authorities said they had arrested 800 people, mostly Serbs, in looting incidents that targeted Serb and ethnic Albanian shops, as well as apartments.

On the streets, the impact of the exodus of tens of thousands of the city's ethnic Albanians is clear.

Serbs worried about return of refugees

The prospect of a mass return of those residents, and the corresponding departure of Yugoslav security forces, helps fuel residents' apprehension.

"They fled once NATO started bombing," one Pristina resident said, echoing the official Yugoslav position that it was alliance bombs, not a policy of forced expulsions, that led the vast majority of the province's ethnic Albanians to flee into exile.

"It should be possible for Serbs to live alongside the ethnic Albanians once again, if the conditions are right," he said.

The simple question for many of Pristina's Serb residents is whether they should remain in Kosova as it returns to its previous status of having a majority ethnic Albanian population, or whether they should move north into the Serb- dominated part of Serbia.

Many fear that if they go into Serbia proper, with its economy in ruins from years of U.N. sanctions and weeks of NATO pounding, they will end up homeless and jobless, becoming refugees in their own country.

Refugees Use Net for News From Home (AP)

By Melanie Burney ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

FORT DIX, N.J. (AP) -- The weary Kosova refugee sat quietly at a computer terminal for hours, searching the World Wide Web for images from the war-ravaged homeland he was forced to flee.

The grisly photographs he found overwhelmed Lulzim Dervishi. As images of mutilated, bullet-riddled bodies filled the screen before him, the 21-year-old put his head down, overcome with emotion.

``They need to look at it,'' said Abedin Bajupaj, a fellow refugee working here as a computer instructor and interpreter in the Internet Information Center. ``Every day, they look for relatives.''

More and more ethnic Albanian refugees airlifted to sanctuary at Fort Dix are turning to cyberspace for news and information from Yugoslavia, getting updates from home in English and Albanian. They are also using the Web to search for lost relatives.

About 3,500 Kosova refugees have been transported to this former Army basic training facility from camps in Macedonia for resettlement in communities around the country. The United States has agreed to accept up to 20,000 of the hundreds of thousands who have fled since NATO bombings began in Yugoslavia in March.

In an Internet center set up in an air-conditioned construction trailer at Fort Dix, more than two dozen refugees gathered Wednesday at a row of a dozen computers donated by Apple.

With a click of the mouse, they accessed Web sites that allowed them to read news accounts in their native language from familiar and trusted sources such as the weekly Albanian newspaper ``Voice of Kosova,'' or take in Albanian television reports and radio segments from Pristina, the capital of the Kosova province, on Radio 21.

``They're only looking at stuff they can understand,'' said Dave Zweigel, who is supervising the center for the U.S. Information Agency. ``They would look at CNN if it were in Albanian.''

Many were drawn to the Internet site www.Alb-net.com, where they viewed graphic photo galleries of alleged war crimes by Serbian soldiers.

``Some of them are rather horrific,'' said Chris Dingman, a center volunteer.

Selvie Berisha, 19, desperately wanted to see the images the site contends are evidence of the atrocities against women, children and the elderly, victims of ethnic cleansing. She fled her home in Pristina.

``She wants to see it. The computer helps her to know what is going on,'' an interpreter said for the young woman. ``She saw people without eyes. She's very sad. She thinks her relatives that are in Kosova -- maybe they are dead. All night she thinks about that.''

The iMac computers were set up to allow the refugees easy Internet access with minimal supervision. Instructions are written on a blackboard in Albanian and key Web sites and links already are bookmarked.

The Internet Center, which opened last week, is staffed by volunteers, mainly from Macintosh user groups in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It's open weekdays, but Zweigel said the hours will be expanded as demand increases.

Young refugee children sat at terminals side-by-side with their elders, patiently helping them navigate the Internet. Some sat with their heads bent listening closely to reports piped through computer speakers from the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and the BBC.

``The world divided us, the net brought us together, therefore the future shall keep us together,'' says a heading for the Kosova Crisis Center Web page.

So far, only one refugee at Fort Dix has located a missing relative -- a cousin -- through the Internet, Zweigel said. But officials are hoping for more success stories and are helping refugees set up e-mail accounts.

The computers are not just a conduit to horror. Luan Ardiu, 13, who came to the United States with his parents and three older brothers, also uses them to play a video game.

Other refugees regularly look for the latest NBA scores, Zweigel said.

``So when is (Michael) Jordan coming is what everyone wants to know,'' he said with a laugh. ``They really follow basketball.''

Rebels Position Themselves to Become Kosova's New Army (NY Times)

By IAN FISHER

KUKES, Albania -- When the separatist rebels of the Kosova Liberation Army launched what they called a major offensive near here two weeks ago, the strategy was basic: to open a supply corridor from Albania into Kosova and to cut off a highway so that Yugoslav troops could not move between two major cities in southern Kosova.

But much has happened in those two weeks. NATO planes have apparently helped out in the rebels' effort around Mount Pastrik, which is on the border between Kosova and Albania. Again on Tuesday, NATO dropped bombs of enormous power on the Yugoslav positions within sight of the Albanian border.

And a peace agreement is in the works that would require the Yugoslav troops to withdraw within days, making the fight for a supply corridor seem irrelevant.

But with the possibility that the Yugoslav troops will withdraw, the rebel force is positioning itself to be the province's new army -- and it seems to be working to prove that it deserves that role in what may be the conflict's final days.

"After the Serbs withdraw from Kosova, it's not going to be the Kosova Liberation Army," said Masar Shala, a spokesman for the rebel group here. "It will be the regular army. Maybe it won't be the same people. It can have a different name. But there must be an army."

By all accounts, the battles in recent days have been hard fought, with constant shelling by both sides as well as hand-to-hand fighting, said officials of the rebel group here. On any day in the last two weeks, it has been possible to stand at the Albanian border with Kosova and to watch shells land, most of them on rebel positions, and more recently to see bombs from NATO fall, most of them on Yugoslav positions, except for a few mistakes.

On the Serbian side, too, the fighting has been fierce. The Yugoslav military has spent much of the last year -- as well as the last crumbs of its international respect -- trying to eradicate the rebels in the Kosova province of Serbia, which is the major entity in Yugoslavia. Until a peace document is signed, the Serbs appear unwilling to let up.

The rebels say that they have a similar motive.

"We're going to continue our duty to liberate Kosova," said a top rebel commander. "The KLA must continue its attacks on the Serbs and destroy as much as we can."

The rebels also appear to be fighting for respect. Their army is often derided by military analysts as disorganized and poorly trained, despite what the Pentagon says are improvements recently under a new field commander, Adem Ceku, who has experience fighting Serbs in the Croatian army. Even with NATO essentially bombing the way forward into Kosova, the rebel offensive here has only pushed through a few miles in two weeks.

"In Mount Pastrik, the KLA failed to make significant inroads," Kenneth Bacon, a Pentagon spokesman, said in Washington on Tuesday. "They're in Kosova, but they're pinned down."

The rebels have had more success, Bacon said, in intense fighting in northwestern Kosova, in the Junik area, where 3,500 rebel fighters have been battling 2,500 Yugoslav forces over the last week to 10 days.

The Pentagon says its ambitions for the rebel group -- which American officials until recently called a terrorist group -- are not so high as those of the rebels. It would like the soldiers to become a police force. With a peace plan that requires the rebels to demilitarize, this issue may be only one of many on which the rebels and Western leaders find themselves at odds.

By fortunate timing for the rebels, the battle around Mount Pastrik does appear to put them in an ideal position to move into Kosova rapidly when and if a peace deal is signed. The rebel group will not say how many soldiers it has in the area, but it probably has several thousand.

Many are fighting on the Kosova side of the border, but there are also many more in Albania, in what rebel officials call "transit" areas and the Serbs call military camps. For the last two weeks, the Serbs have been shelling border towns in Albania, apparently trying to destroy the rebels' rear guard, the men who could follow the soldiers doing the actual fighting in Kosova.