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SERBIAN MASSACRES

• NATO Arrests Yugoslav Soldiers (AP)
• Noel Malcolm: Kosova´s Independence is necessary for long-term security of Balkans (KP)
• News in brief (Radio21)
• 109 Albanians massacred in the village of Celina were mostly women and children (Radio21)
• Milosevic's Vision of Glory Unleashes Decade of Ruin (NY Times)
• Peja: The New Vukovar (NY Times)
• Kosova rape victim crusades for others who were assaulted (CNN)
• Another Migration May Fuel a Myth (NY Times)
• Two Kosovar Boys in California for Medical Treatment (CNN)
• For Many Serbs, No Sense of Guilt Over Atrocities (LA Times)

NATO Arrests Yugoslav Soldiers (AP)

By DONNA BRYSON Associated Press Writer

PRISHTINA, Kosova (AP) - American peacekeeping forces arrested five Yugoslav army soldiers and Dutch peacekeepers took six suspected members of the Serbian Interior Ministry police into custody inside Kosova in violation of a troop-pullout agreement, NATO said today.

The five soldiers, all in uniform and carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles, were caught Thursday by U.S. troops in the sector assigned to Americans in southeastern Kosova, said Maj. Jan Joosten, a spokesman for the NATO mission in Kosova.

He said the soldiers, who were detained near Kosova's provincial boundary with the rest of Serbia, claimed to be part of a border security force.

Under the agreement between Yugoslavia and NATO that ended the 78-day allied air war, all Yugoslav soldiers and police are supposed to be outside a 3-mile-wide buffer zone along Kosova's provincial border.

Joosten said NATO commanders in Kosova had requested an explanation from the Yugoslav federal government.

In a separate incident, Joosten said NATO troops detained six suspected Serbian special police found with weapons, computers and radio equipment in a building in Urosevac, 20 miles south of Prishtina, the provincial capital.

He said peacekeepers went to the building after receiving information that radio signals were being sent from the location. The suspects were not wearing police uniforms, Joosten said.

The incidents were disclosed a day after the commander of U.S. peacekeepers in Kosova warned that soldiers still face a threat from Serb paramilitaries who remain in the province in violation of the peace agreement.

``It's a dangerous environment out there,'' U.S. Brig. Gen. John Craddock said. ``This is not going to be a quick fix. There are still too many acts of violence. There are still too many homes burning at night.''

American troops came under sniper fire twice last week but suffered no casualties.

U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark, the NATO supreme commander, also has expressed concern about paramilitaries.

``In a number of locations, it is clear that Serb paramilitaries, some with connections with intelligence organizations, and others have remained behind,'' Clark said, adding they might form ``the seeds for future conflict, to contest control of the province.''

Noel Malcolm: Kosova´s Independence is necessary for long-term security of Balkans (KP)

Oher, July 2 (Kosovapress) Yugoslavia is de facto without Kosova today and will be in the future de jure without the power to stop Kosova´s independece remarked Noel Malcolm.

Noel Malcolm today said that the international community failed in 1992 to recognize the existance of 8 distinct components of the ex-Yugoslavia. In response to a question, Malcolm stressed Milosevic`s Yugoslavia does not exist today.

Malcolm also referred to historical events surrounding the Albanian people of the last 150 years, since the Berlin Congress, when Albanians were ethnically cleansed from Nish, Leskovci, Vraja and elsewhere as well as the invasion of the Serb army in 1912 of Albanian territory which resulted in more ethnic cleansing and massacres of Albanians were committed.

He described the war Serbia waged on Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia as a war between faiths while the war with Albanians was ethnic in nature. After all that has happened, he said, the best solution for everyone is an independent Kosova and the independence of Montenegro, finally ending the Yugoslavia ruined by Milosevic.

News in brief (Radio21)

Hundreds of Albanians gathered in front of the United Nations building in Prishtina, asked the release of the Albanian political prisoners, held in prisons within Serbia.

Beta Belgrade news agency, quoting an anonymous spokesperson for KFOR, reported that German soldiers of KFOR disassembled last night a radio transmitter close to the district of Rahovec. They arrested six members of the Yugoslav army, in plain clothes, charged for disinformation of the population to cause negative reactions. The agency didn't say of whom the transmitter was and which was the way the arrested persons were making propaganda through it.

109 Albanians massacred in the village of Celina were mostly women and children (Radio21)

Most of the 109 bodies of the Albanian civilians massacred by the Serb forces in the village of Celina, Prizren district, were women and children.

Kosova Information Centre quoted eye witnesses saying that the massacre had been committed some days after NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia, began. Serb soldiers and paramilitary troops

surrounded the village and separated the males from women and children. The males were sent in unknown direction and women and children were massacred.

Milosevic's Vision of Glory Unleashes Decade of Ruin (NY Times)

By ROGER COHEN

Fushe Kosove -- On the eve of the NATO bombing of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic turned to the American envoys facing him. "You are a superpower," he said. "You can do what you want. If you want to say Sunday is Wednesday, you can. It is all up to you."

Christopher Hill, one of the officials present, was struck by the words because they seemed to capture the fatalism of the Yugoslav President as he led his people to the abyss. "It was a form of the old Serbian megalomania," Hill, the American Ambassador to Macedonia, observed, "the one that says you can destroy us, but we will be right."

Three months and tens of thousands of NATO sorties later, that destruction is evident in this ragged central Kosova town where the bleary Serbian faces speak of a sea change in the Balkan equation: A decade after Milosevic envisioned it here in a speech that whipped up Serbian nationalism and helped cement his power, Greater Serbia is dead.

In its place, a new group of largely ethnically homogeneous states has emerged, with the help of Milosevic's consistent brutality from Vukovar in Croatia through the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, to Kosova towns like Gjakova and Peja.

Milosevic has been the midwife of his enemies' ascendancy. His tactics of mass killing and eviction of civilians have helped forge a separate Croatia, a new Bosnian Muslim identity and now an embryonic Albanian nation state in Kosova. Serbia, meanwhile, one of the first Balkan nation states to emerge in the 19th century, is still casting around for stable borders, unable to resolve the dilemma of how to unite Serbs in one country now that the old Yugoslavia is dead.

Greater Serbia -- a land that would incorporate traditional Serb-populated swaths of Croatia and Bosnia -- was Milosevic's answer to that problem.

Now, the rise of Albanian nationalism in Kosova and the Balkans as a whole has prompted concern in the West. A Greater Albania -- embracing Albania, Kosova and the western part of Macedonia whose population is heavily Albanian -- is the avowed goal of some Kosova Liberation Army fighters.

"We spent the 1990's worrying about a Greater Serbia," Hill said. "That's finished. We are going to spend time well into the next century worrying about a Greater Albania."

Of course, Greater Serbia was always a project pursued with ruthless violence. There is no evidence that Albania has similar will or might. But the buoyant ascendancy of the Kosova Liberation Army is unmistakable, and some of the weapons it wields come from the military arsenals of Albania that were looted during the country's descent into economic mayhem in spring 1997.

Unlike Bosnia, Kosova has no model of a multiethnic state, and Prishtina has none of the cultural openness that marked Sarajevo. The remnants of peaceful coexistence here were snuffed out in the last two decades; first, the Albanian majority wielded power, then Milosevic stripped away that autonomy, and his police ruled Kosova harshly for the last decade. This history will complicate and continually undermine one of NATO's aims in Kosova: to allow Serbs and Albanians to live together in peace.

In some ways, the Albanian question is the Serbian question in a broken mirror. Like the Serbs, the Albanians are a people scattered in several countries, harboring a deep sense of historical injustice, marked by a pattern of disunity, still in search of stable contours for their nation and stable institutions to govern it.

Throughout Kosova, the Albanians' flag flutters on smashed factories and city halls, hoisted there by the young men of the K.L.A. From time to time, NATO patrols pass beneath the flags.

Such scenes could scarcely be more fantastically remote from the nationalist vision offered by Milosevic a decade ago when he came to Kosova's Field of Blackbirds -- scene of a Serbian defeat by the Turks in 1389 -- to proclaim a glorious Serbian future, one in which the Serbs -- no longer "humiliated" -- would do battle for their "state, national and spiritual integrity."

The battle has been lost. Defeat is now real, bitter as ash. "Milosevic has used us and betrayed us," said Radovan Delibasic, a Serb from Kosova Polje. "He came here 10 years ago to inspire us with our history in Kosova. But we have learned that you cannot live from history. Americans have no history and they live wonderfully well."

Peja: The New Vukovar (NY Times)

Peja was once a beautiful town, threaded by bright streams, backed by mountains. Like Mostar in Bosnia, and all that was most lovely in the Balkans, it expressed the delicate interweaving of Islamic and Christian architecture and traditions that was the legacy of the Ottoman Empire.

No more. Peja is gone, another Balkan bridge between East and West devoured in one of those paroxysms of destruction that have made charred, shattered ruins the most pervasive symbol of Yugoslavia's demise.

Gjevdet Zajmi and his wife, Ganimete, trudge home, past abandoned gardens with trees full of unpicked cherries, capsized trellises with vines still clinging to them, dead animals and the blackened windows that are the baleful eyes of so much Balkan ruin.

Kosova Albanians, the Zajmis were driven out on March 28, four days after the NATO bombardment began, by three Serbian paramilitary thugs in black masks. The same old story: from Prijedor in northwestern Bosnia to Prizren in southwestern Kosova, "ethnic cleansing" has few nuances.

A painful odyssey through a mountain village, Montenegro and finally Albania ensued, before this return. "We know everything has gone from the house, but we hope the house is still there," Zajmi says.

As they turn into their street, however, hope evaporates. Ganimete Zajmi takes in the scene and says simply: "Vukovar."

The death of Yugoslavia has now been sufficiently drawn-out for certain acts, like the Serbian obliteration of the mixed Croatian town of Vukovar in 1991, to pass into popular lore. Mrs. Zajmi is right: The ruin is as unmitigated as in the town on the Danube.

The house was built 30 years ago. The couple's three children were raised in it. The family planted the cherry tree that shades the area behind what was the kitchen. Shared memories, a life, really, lie in pieces in the rubble, and the thought of all this abruptly causes the couple to break down in sobs.

"The Serbs were killing before," Zajmi, a mild man who worked in an engineering plant, said. "But when NATO came, they went wild, screaming that we all had to leave. Only independence is possible now. Nothing else."

Walking back toward the center of town, they encounter a friend, Alma Dreshaj. She is one of few ethnic Albanians to have remained in Peja throughout the NATO bombing, protected, as she explains, by a kind Serb neighbor, Slavo Dedovic.

Two men pass and overhear her words. They turn on her in rage. "There are no good Serbs," one screams. "How can you say such a thing? They send our children to have their throats cut, and you talk of a good Serb." He seems on the verge of striking Ms. Dreshaj, but is restrained by the other man.

As the time for negotiation ran out last March and Hill explained that NATO would begin bombing, Milosevic shot back at him: "Anyone who does that -- bomb -- is going to spend the rest of his life on a psychiatric couch."

Once again, Hill found the words extraordinary, coming from a man who has appeared so consistently destructive.

The symbolism was apparently more important than the substance. Just as the Serbs were ready to go to war in 1914 for the principle that no Austro-Hungarian police be allowed onto their territory to investigate the murder in Sarajevo of the Hapsburg heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand, so they would fight -- even suicidally -- to stop a NATO deployment.

During the bombing, the Serbian leader tried every ploy to stop the bombardment -- making mischief with the Russians, co-opting the mild-mannered Albanian intellectual Ibrahim Rugova, destabilizing Macedonia, dividing the allies by playing on Serbian sympathies in Greece and Italy.

But he also did the one thing -- the brutal eviction and killing of Albanians -- that kept Western public opinion solidly behind the 78-day bombing and cemented the alliance.

"It is a real question whether, in the absence of the ethnic cleansing, NATO would have been able to keep it up after a couple of weeks," a Western official said. "In a sense, his brutality saved the alliance."

It was a serious misjudgment by Milosevic, one that led directly to the Western protectorate that masks and in some ways promotes the provisional Albanian government by the K.L.A. in Kosova today, and also, perhaps, could lead to his downfall.

Those who have seen Milosevic recently -- including Hill; Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the commander of NATO forces in Europe, and the Swedish financier Peter Castenfelt -- have found him extraordinarily out of touch, surrounded by mediocre aides, living in a world of complete unreality.

"Milosevic kept saying to me, 'We just need seven days to wipe out the Kosova Liberation Army,' " said General Clark. "He absolutely failed to see that this kind of movement does not work that way."

Before the war, Hill informed the Yugoslav President of Serbian atrocities he had observed in the Kosova town of Malisevo, including paramilitary forces systematically burning Albanian homes and stores.

Milosevic looked upset. He stood up, put his hands in his pockets and started pacing. Hill recalls him saying: "There is no excuse for that, even if the Serbs in Kosova are very angry. I accept responsibility. One of the most important tasks of a democracy is to protect its minorities."

This sort of discourse has been part of Milosevic's rule for 12 years.

For in the end, his survival can be explained only by his extraordinary ability to convince many Serbs that they are victims, that others are to blame for all that has befallen them.

But the reality of Yugoslavia's breakup and Milosevic's legacy is today a hard one: While Slovenia, Croatia and probably now Kosova have carved ethnic states out of the ruins, the land of the Serbs continues to shrink. On the Field of Blackbirds, a French parachute regiment has deployed, but most Serbs are too poor, isolated and misinformed to care.

Kosova rape victim crusades for others who were assaulted (CNN)

From Correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault

PRISHTINA, Kosova (CNN) -- On any given day prior to the start of NATO airstrikes, 50 women would come to see Sevdjie Ahmeti, a human rights activist who ran a center for abused women and children in Kosova.

When war came, many people ran away. But not Ahmeti, who decided, "I wanted to see with my own eyes what was happening."

It didn't take long before Ahmeti became a target. First, her office was broken into. Then she was attacked by three masked men, one of whom sexually assaulted her with a weapon.

Even though it is still painful for Ahmeti to talk about what she refers to as "gun rape," her training as a human rights worker helped. What she worries about are the women from traditional families who have been raped, many of whom suffer in silence and never get help.

So Ahmeti has decided to make supporting other Kosova rape victims her crusade, giving them "real support, something that is touchable."

Another Migration May Fuel a Myth (NY Times)

By ROGER COHEN

Hundreds of Serbs now huddle at the Patriarchate of Peja, the old Serbian church with frescoes that speak of the great flowering of medieval Serbian civilization.

Their cars are lined up, ready to leave for good if and when Italian NATO forces in Peja are ready to escort them out.

"We have been here for 700 years, and now NATO bombs and the Albanians have driven us out," said Dragutin Martinovic, the director of a factory. And what of the rampage against Albanians' homes? "All the homes were destroyed by NATO bombs," Martinovic said. "We did nothing."

There is a terrible sadness in the sight of all these Serbs slumped over old stones on the grounds of their church, their bundles beside them, awaiting some new migration in the long Serbian history of migrations.

More than 300 years ago, in 1689, Patriarch Arsenije led tens of thousands of Serbs north and west from Peja to escape the Turks in a flight that has become part of Serbian myth.

The themes of such myth remain unchanged -- long suffering, heroic isolation, irrational valor, victories in defeat. Perhaps the Kosova debacle will now be added to the panoply of heroism and suffering.

But unchanged, too, it seems, after 12 years of Milosevic's rule, is the inability to make these myths coincide with a reality that is stable rather than one that is merely destructive and self-destructive because it exists principally to preserve Milosevic's power.

When Milosevic came to Kosova a decade ago and spoke to hundreds of thousands of Serbs gathered in a celebration of rediscovered post-Communist identity, his inspiration was a battle lost by the Serbs to the Ottoman Turks but later turned into a beacon of Serbian national redemption through defeat because it marked the start of the Serbs' successful struggle to preserve their Orthodox faith during centuries of Islamic rule by the Turks.

"For the time, with Communism collapsing, it was a clever speech that Milosevic made to us in 1989," said Jovo Popovic, a former president of the Peja Town Council who was among those waiting to leave. "He said we deserved glory because from the Turks to Tito, we had suffered injustice. As for the speech's effects, however, just look around you."

Gen. Mauro del Vecchio, the Italian general commanding NATO troops in Peja, believes these "effects" can still be reversed. "We will not take Serbs out," he said. "In fact, we are escorting them back from Montenegro. We cannot allow one form of ethnic hatred to replace another now that the Albanians are back."

His sentiments are noble enough. But the future of Kosova seems to lie more in the determined expression of Ramiz Norici, who left his restaurant in the Bronx to fight for the Kosova Liberation Army in his native Peja.

"We are the legal army of a soon-to-be-independent Kosova," he said, squatting by the ruins of his family's home. "The Serbs have always killed us. Why should we trust them now?" The Future

Can West's Plan Bring Stability?

In effect, because the West waited for years to decide that Milosevic was at the heart of the problem in the Balkans, it has ended up trying to build a Western model in one of the corners of the Balkans where multiethnicity and tolerance are least conspicuous. The West is also building on the victory of what amounts to an Albanian peasant uprising led by orphaned Marxists and a motley crew of others.

But these are heady times in the Balkans. They bring Javier Solana, the Secretary General of NATO, to dismal Prishtina to be mobbed in the streets and to say, "We want to include this area in the beautiful house of Europe, a place of tolerance, looking to the past rather than the future."

His words reflect a unanimous Western decision to invest heavily in the Balkans and to try, after many years, to treat the problems of Yugoslavia's destruction in an overall rather than a piecemeal manner and so extend the zone of European stability southeastward. But can it work?

"It has to work," Hill said. "Balkan fatigue in Western nations is at an extreme level. We are all sick of it and we know this is the last chance."

In Bosnia, both Milosevic and President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia were made partners in the Dayton accords that ended the war they had helped to prosecute, despite records of atrocities committed by both their forces. Now the West has changed tack in a way that suggests it means business in the Balkans, and has stated straightforwardly that Milosevic must go.

But the residue of eight years of destruction is bitter indeed and the moderate center in Kosova hard to find.

Rugova has been marginalized. Another moderate, Fehmi Agani, has been murdered by the Serbs. The victory of the Kosova Liberation Army has been the victory of Drenica farmers and expatriate hard-liners over the urban intellectuals of Albanian society in Kosova. It has been a victory of the independence-then-perhaps-democracy school over the few who held that democracy should come first.

"Albanian history is in many ways the history of clans and families and an inability to establish relationships, loyalties or institutions beyond them," a Western official said.

Much turns on whether the K.L.A. will give up all its weapons to NATO as it has promised to do.

General Clark, the NATO commander, believes that the Albanian fighters "are about 70 percent O.K." But he added that there were many hard-liners of whom NATO had to be wary, adding, "We are not out of the woods in this part of the world."

Zeqir, who will not give his last name and calls himself the commander of the 134th brigade of the K.L.A., left his wife and two children in Switzerland to come and fight.

He says he is certain that Western countries will assist Albanians -- but not, it seems, in the way the West envisages. "NATO countries will help us with arms," he says. "That is no problem. I came to fight so that my children could live in one country, together with all Albanians, and know their language and culture."

Two Kosovar Boys in California for Medical Treatment (CNN)

From Correspondent Jennifer Auther

SANTA BARBARA, California (CNN) -- His nearly blown-off face hidden under bandages, a 12-year-old Kosova boy injured by a NATO bomb is in California for medical treatment, but Besart Ahmetaj's trauma seems as much psychological as it is physical.

"No needles," and "Get the light out of my face," the upset boy tells doctors at St. Francis Medical Center in Santa Barbara, squirming under the sheets of a hospital bed.

Even after more than 24 hours of travel from his home, Besart -- his facial wounds infected -- fought sedatives enough to limit an initial physical exam after his arrival Thursday in the United States.

Dr. John Padilla, leading a surgical reconstruction team, says his best evaluation of the young patient won't come until Besart is under anesthesia, possibly on Saturday.

'So traumatized'

Only Besart's family knows what he looks like beneath the bandage he wears diagonally across his mutilated face, covering his right eye and stretching to his left cheek.

"The young boy is so traumatized, he has absolutely no clue what's going on, and I don't even know where to begin to tell him what's going on," Padilla says.

In the same hospital room with Besart, just on the other side of a curtain, lies his older sister, Lulietu, 19.

She, too, was maimed May 14 when a misdirected NATO bomb exploded in their home town of Korisa, killing dozens of ethnic Albanians. Among the dead were Besart and Lulietu's mother and two other family members.

Besart still asks to see his mother. No one has the courage to tell him she is dead.

During Lulietu's initial exam, she proves more cooperative than her brother, allowing the doctors to exam her facial wounds and fractured right leg.

In broken English, an interpreter relays Lulietu's thoughts: "She wishes it doesn't happen to anybody, what happened to her family."

Dr. Michael Paveloff, an eye surgeon, will try to assess if the siblings' eyesight can be restored. "I'm more optimistic for her than I am for her brother," he tells CNN.

Other doctors -- specialists in infectious diseases, orthopedic surgery and child psychology -- also are part of the team. All the doctors have donated their time and skills.

And, adds Padilla, "I'm going to ask God to help me."

For Many Serbs, No Sense of Guilt Over Atrocities (LA Times)

Yugoslavia: Some deny widespread violence occurred against Kosova's Albanians. Others see themselves as victims.

By RICHARD BOUDREAUX, Times Staff Writer

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia--Dragan Antic is appalled by what Slobodan Milosevic did to Kosova and bold enough to say so in public. Standing in a downtown Belgrade square with 200 other defiant Serbs, he accused the Yugoslav president by nickname. "It's Slobo who is guilty!" he shouted as police stepped in to break up the rally here in the capital. Milosevic has been indicted by an international war crimes tribunal for atrocities carried out by Yugoslav army and Serbian police forces against Kosova's ethnic Albanians. President Clinton has appealed to Serbs to "come to grips with what Mr. Milosevic ordered in Kosova" and dump their elected leader. But that's not what bothers Antic. Far more than the slaughter and mass expulsion of Albanians, the 44-year-old lawyer says he is furious about the messy surrender that swept him and other Serbs out of Kosova on the heels of Milosevic's retreating army. Defeat in NATO's 11-week air war has left Serbs feeling more angry than ashamed, more like victims than perpetrators.

While their reaction is a threat to Milosevic's hold on power, it hardly begins to address the painful question of responsibility--individual or collective--for Kosova's bloody spring. The few Serbs trying to ask this question in public argue that Serbia cannot become a democracy or break the cycle of ethnic violence and revenge in the Balkans until it starts a soul-searching process such as Germany's denazification after World War II. Such a moral reckoning is inhibited, however, by violent Albanian reprisals against the dwindling Serbian minority in postwar Kosova and by a wall of denial in the rest of Serbia. There have been no stories in Serbia's media over the past weeks and little public discussion as NATO peacekeepers sealed off mass burial sites and foreign journalists gathered accounts by ethnic Albanian survivors of the rampage of killing, burning, looting and rape in Kosova.

Opposition Focuses on Damage to Nation Nearly two-thirds of Serbs do not believe that such atrocities occurred, according to an opinion poll published last week in the Belgrade newsmagazine Nin. Most opposition leaders avoid the subject, preferring to emphasize the high price that Serbs are now paying for Milosevic's latest military defeat. "What was the purpose of fighting this war if we had to give Kosova away?" Antic asked at the rally last week. "Before the war, we were living in our own homes. Now we have nothing more than the clothes you see on our backs." Antic is one of about 80,000 Serbs who have fled Kosova since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization stopped bombing Yugoslavia last month and began escorting ethnic Albanians back home to the Serbian province where they form the overwhelming majority. Serbia is the Yugoslav federation's main republic. When separatist Albanian guerrillas poured into his native Prizren along with the returning refugees, Antic shed his army reservist uniform, turned in his gun and fled. "I didn't kill anyone," the lawyer insisted in an interview, "but an Albanian neighbor told me I would never be safe in Kosova. I am a victim of their ethnic cleansing." It matters little to Antic that many more Albanians--close to a million--fled under a Serbian assault that by all accounts was far more brutal, direct and systematic. In his view, the guilt and suffering on both sides negate each other. "They were victims, and then we were victims," he said. "It was a war, and the victors dictated their revenge." Scores of Serbs interviewed during and since the war echo this zero-sum conclusion about a slaughter that, according to Western officials, claimed about 10,000 Albanian lives. Ask a Serb why the nation cannot bring itself to condemn its killers, and you're likely to get a long explanation that starts, "It's all very complicated."

Public Opinion Mirrors State Media "I'm sure a lot of dirty things happened in Kosova, but the Albanians started it," said Djordje Cvejic, an industrial plastics importer in Belgrade, which is the capital of both Serbia and Yugoslavia, who supports the democratic opposition. "They sided with the West against us, just as they sided with the Nazis. How can we feel sorry for them?" Most Serbs get their news from state television and tend to buy the government line: Nearly all ethnic Albanian civilians died or fled because of the bombs, except for a few who were killed by "rogue" soldiers or policemen acting on their own. Such propaganda can be quite effective; to this day, many Serbs here refuse to believe that Serbian forces in Bosnia spent much of the early 1990s shelling the Muslim-run capital, Sarajevo. But denial is also common among those Serbs able to watch or read Western accounts of the atrocities in Kosova. Allegations that Serbian soldiers committed rape couldn't possibly be true, argued one well-read Serbian man in Belgrade, because Albanian women are too ugly. "Your TV is more sophisticated than our TV, but it's still propaganda," said Branislav Savic, an economist who monitored the war from Belgrade's Internet Cafe.

"There's far too much generalization." Seeking the truth on her own, Serbian human rights activist Natasha Kandic traveled to Kosova during the bombing and came back with carefully documented evidence of three fresh graves containing the bodies of 94 Albanians near the city of Peja. Not a single Belgrade newspaper or newsmagazine would touch her story, not even those critical of Milosevic. "Some Serbs are angry at me because I say Albanians were the victims," she said. "Official propaganda is too strong, and fear blocks people's minds." A few others are trying to speak out, led by the Serbian Orthodox Church, which has denounced "the evil and suffering that the Albanian people endured in Kosova" and urged Milosevic to resign. Father Sava Janic of the monastery near Peja has raised questions about the church's complicity. "Perhaps there was more silence than there had to be," he said Monday. "People are slowly understanding; it's the painful waking up from a nightmare that lasted 10 years. We have been brainwashed. . . . We have the projection of one perverted mind of a political leader onto the whole nation." Most such reflection is going on in private. Biljana Srbljanovic, a Serbian playwright who visited Germany this month, said she concluded after long discussions with German friends about the Nazi era that all Serbs must admit some responsibility for Kosova so that such a tragedy is never repeated here.

"Many Serbs feel, if not terribly guilty, a little upset and embarrassed about what happened to the Albanians, to the extent that they're aware of it," said Belgrade historian Aleksa Djilas. But Western leaders should accept their own share of blame for Kosova, he warned, and not preach about repentance to the Serbs because "they are the world's most contrarian nation and will do the opposite of anything they're asked." Milosevic's political rivals are cautious. Vuk Draskovic, who was fired as Yugoslavia's deputy prime minister in April, is suggesting that blame for atrocities should fall on Vojislav Seselj, his extremist rival in the wartime government, rather than on the president or the military. "Frankly, we want to avoid the whole subject," said Slobodan Vuksanovic, vice president of the opposition Democratic Party. "Among our supporters are families of people killed by the Albanians. If we say something about our atrocities, they will ask about their atrocities.

State TV will present only part of our speeches, and propaganda will destroy us." For now, Milosevic's opponents are focusing their criticism on other fallout from the war--Serbia's wrecked economy, its isolation from the West and the dubious claim of its leaders that the country is rallying to mend itself. "What you'd like is for Serbs to realize that their leaders are genocidal maniacs, that they've tarnished the name of Serbia, but it won't happen that way," said Zarko Korac, a Belgrade University psychologist. "The leaders will go because they lost the war, because they're corrupt, they're inefficient . . . and people are tired of all that. "Only . . . after they're gone from power, and if we have a democracy, can we hope that those questions [about war crimes] will be raised and the guilty held accountable."