By JOHN KIFNER

RAHOVEC, Kosova -- Several thousand Kosovo Albanians marched through this little town Sunday, in the fourth day of peaceful protests against plans to station Russian troops among the NATO peacekeepers here.

The Albanians assert that Russian mercenaries fought as members of the nationalist Serbian militias that carried out a campaign of killing, looting and burning across the southwest corner of Kosovo and that the Russians would be overly solicitous of the handful of remaining Serbs.

"The Russians, they killed a lot of people here," said one of a group of men waiting in the town square for the midday demonstration to begin, as others nodded agreement.

There have been a number of accounts from refugees of hearing fighters with the Serbian forces speaking Russian or other foreign languages during the brutal campaign to drive out Kosovo's Albanian majority population that began in late March. At one point, the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army produced a Russian fighter it had captured.

The Russians are considered sympathetic to the Serbs because of their common Slavic and Orthodox Catholic background. But there is no reason to believe the Russians will not honor their role as peacekeepers, and in fact, the agreement with the Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, to end NATO's bombing campaign and get Serbian forces out of Kosovo, allowing the Albanians to return, was reached with Russian help.

The protests here are the latest snag in Russia's effort to insert itself into the peacekeeping force here, after it was left out in the initial agreement.

First the Russians startled the NATO powers by rushing several hundred troops attached to the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Bosnia to take over the airport outside Pristina, a "K" for Kosovo hastily and clumsily painted over the insignia on their armored vehicles. An embarrassing standoff ensued, with the NATO forces deprived of their planned headquarters at the airport site.

An agreement to include the Russians was reached in Helsinki, Finland, but the arrival of their paratroopers was delayed by American diplomatic pressure on neighboring countries to deny Russia permission for flights in their air space.

There were fears that if the Russians were concentrated in one place, the Serbs might try to partition the northern sector of the country, with its rich mines and Orthodox monasteries. So the Russian contingent is to be divided among sectors allotted to other countries.

Publicly, NATO officials have rather stiffly insisted they are happy to have the Russians.

"We welcome the Russian participation," Maj. Jan Joosten, a spokesman for the peacekeeping force, said in response to a question about the demonstrations here. Its soldiers, he said, "have the duty and responsibility to carry out these tasks in an evenhanded way toward all ethnic groups."

"There is no doubt that the professional and well-trained Russian soldiers will act accordingly," he said.

But doubts abounded in this battered town among the hills where Albanian villages have been sacked, burned and destroyed and hundreds of people apparently killed in massacres by rampaging Serbian forces this spring.

"About the Russians, we don't want them here," said Ramadan Pallaqa, an English teacher at the demonstration. "The ones with the paramilitary, they were paid money and were not soldiers from Russia, but it is the same."

The demonstrations began spontaneously when word reached this town that about a battalion of Russians would be sent to join Dutch soldiers based here in part of a larger sector that is run by a German command. The protests have grown larger and more organized each day, with demands that NATO and United Nations officials come here and agree not to send the Russians.

As noon approached, more and more people drifted into the town square, with a dried-up fountain in the center and a Dutch tank with an enormous cannon parked to the side. Red and black Albanian flags appeared, along with a few anti-Russian signs tacked to sticks.

Suddenly, the streets were full, and the crowd, which appeared to number more than 3,000, marched for about a mile, through the twisted streets of burned shops and a mosque with its minaret shot up. Then they turned around and marched back, their chants for NATO whenever they passed a military vehicle as loud as those supporting the rebels.

Back at the square two hours later, the crowd melted quietly away, many pausing to add their names to a petition against the Russians at a table set up under a tree.

Relaxed Dutch soldiers -- who wore oddly shaped blue-and-gold-tasseled caps with their battle-dress, making them look like armed Shriners -- presided benignly over the demonstration. Although there were no rebel uniforms or arms in sight, several young men served as parade marshals wearing the black clothes adopted by rebel Kosovo Liberation Army security forces, some bearing the emblem "Versace."

"It's really difficult to have the Russians here because they will support the Serbs, naturally," said Ahmet Dermala, a mechanical engineer. "And a lot of local Serbs took part in assassinations around here. We will continue our protests until we got a positive answer, and a positive answer is that the Russians are not coming here."

Kosova Report: Hardened FBI investigators weep after discovering five children tossed down a well by Serbs (Salon)

Risking snipers, facing sights so dreadful that they weep along with the victims' families, forensics teams from around the world -- including a team from the FBI -- are performing the heartbreaking but essential task of recording Serbian atrocities in Kosovo.

By Peter Landesman

July 9, 1999 | Gjakova, Kosova -- In the village of Meja, on the outskirts of the 16th century town of Gjakova, the fields are filled with the anonymous dead. In one, two large compost piles circled by bulldozer tracks have been moved, re-piled and inverted. According to witnesses, they contain countless executed ethnic Albanians. The air around them is putrid, the surrounding grass littered with identity papers, combs, cigarette cases, bloody hats, human bones and teeth; a leg dismembered at the hip, the shoe still attached. The whole figure of a man, just bones and clothes now, lies in the thicket where he fell, probably shot trying to escape. According to war-crimes investigators, at least 400 men, women and children -- most of them refugees on the run from other villages, some from Gjakova itself -- were executed and buried in this one place by Serbian paramilitaries. At least 100 more were shot in a schoolhouse 200 meters down the road and trucked away. Two cemeteries nearby have been scored by pit graves big enough to accommodate dozens of bodies. Atop one lies a severed human foot and the scalp of a young woman who had had long black hair.

It is to this place that Naxhie Gagierri, 27, comes looking for her husband, Fadil, 35, with Fadil's brother and sister. Leaving Naxhie's 2-year-old daughter crying in the back seat of their car, they walk resolutely into the carnage. They toe through the effects. "Where is he?" Naxhie asks, raking her fingers through her hair. She bends over the dismembered leg, stares hard at the corpse in the brush. But the clothes don't match her husband's. Not that she has any hope of his being alive. "Look what the Serbs have done," she sobs. All she wants, she says, is a body to re-bury with dignity.

Naxhie and Fadil were among a large group of refugees from the villages surrounding Gjakova, traveling together toward the Albanian border, believing there was safety in numbers. On April 27, not far from this field just a few miles short of their goal, they were surrounded by Serbian paramilitaries. The men were separated out, the women searched for money. Naxhie remembers watching in horror as one Serbian paramilitary, demanding money from one woman, ripped out the teeth of her child as punishment when she couldn't produce any.

Naxhie's last sight of her husband was of him standing beside a tractor, hugging his 2-year-old daughter, telling her goodbye. As Naxhie ran off with other women toward the Albanian border, she heard long rips of automatic gunfire behind her.

Now she walks a widening circle, then stops, staring at the ground. One hand over her nose to block the stench, she fingers a bloody sock. "It is his," she says; she repaired the sock herself and recognizes her handiwork. She frantically looks for other evidence but finds nothing.

Standing among the fields, villagers come from all directions and ask to be able to show visitors the location and evidence of massacres in their homes and yards. No one near Gjakova is burying bodies just yet. They are waiting for the war crimes tribunal to come, exhume the dead and bear witness to the Serbs' crimes.

"Come see my atrocity," one man insists.

In Gjakova itself, more than 1,200 ethnic Albanian men are still missing. Only four have returned in recognizable form. They were released from Serbian prisons last week with 162 other Kosovars and bused home by the International Red Cross. The Gjakova they came home to has been turned largely to rubble, the alleyways and cobblestone streets of its old quarter incinerated in a night and day of frenzied revenge by Serbian paramilitaries following the first NATO bombs. The shops and homes are X-rays of themselves, the walls gone, all the contents evaporated but those made of metal and glass: blackened wine glasses and bottles sit where they were abandoned on an iron cafe table; a drill press and grinding stone stand awkwardly in the ashes of a machine shop. The minaret of the town's 500-year-old mosque has been decapitated. In the last two weeks the town of 100,000, of whom 98 percent are ethnic Albanians, has had the air of emerging from an apocalyptic blizzard, the neighborhoods clogged by giant drifts of slate and brick, its population -- steadily returning from refugee camps -- blinking with astonishment and despair.

Gjakova's streets are dangerous. The tanks and armored personnel carriers of the Italian KFOR battalion patrol the streets. Five Italian soldiers have been killed, four by land mines. Last week, their compound was fired upon; the local Kosovo Liberation Army leadership has made no secret of its desire to not surrender their weapons as stipulated in the peace agreement. It is known but not openly discussed that the weapons they do hand over will be replaced, or already have been. Automatic gunfire rings out at night throughout town. Now and then one hears return fire.

This town and the mass graves surrounding it are quickly becoming a focal point for The Hague's war crimes tribunal investigations. Officials, bound to silence by the rules of legal conduct in the case against the Serbian leadership, won't say why. Its spokesman in Pristina, James Lansdale, will only hint at the need to prove how the chains of command among local Serbs lead to Belgrade. In the end, that is the evidence The Hague is looking for, should Serbian president and indicted war criminal Slobodan Milosovic and four others ever be brought to trial. "If The Hague doesn't do the job, it will lose all credibility," said Masar Shala, a former spokesman for the Kosovo Liberation Army, now the minister of information for civilian authorities in southern Kosovo. "They must go to every grave so they can have a record of the Serbs' crimes in Kosovo. If this doesn't happen, it will be a gift to the criminals."

The forensics teams of eight nations have dispersed throughout Kosovo, working at The Hague's behest. Scotland Yard is here. So are teams from Germany, Denmark, Canada, France, Holland and Switzerland. Gjakova belongs to the American Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI left Gjakova on July 1, after less than a week, its operation a model of efficiency, having exceeded by nearly double its mandate to examine and catalog five local massacre sites. It had brought an entourage of 64 forensics experts and medical and security personnel. It had brought air-conditioned tents, computers, generators, its own food and water, its own armored vehicles and a small arsenal of weapons. It could have fought its own small war if it had to.

The FBI team lived and worked out of a corner of the Italian KFOR command compound. At the tightly guarded compound gate the night before the FBI is to leave, two Gypsy women are wringing their hands, trying to mime the town's latest tragedy. The younger of the two says, "Papa," then, "KLA," and draws her finger across her throat. Eventually, the Italian captain and a visitor decide that what she is saying is that the KLA just shot her father. This is a problem. If the shooter had been a Serb, the Italians would have mobilized instantly. Instead, the captain shrugs, offering the visitor a helpless look, then mimes for the woman to wait so he can locate a higher-ranking officer to tell her they can do nothing about it. No one is protecting the Gypsies. Albanians blame them collectively for collaborating in Serbian atrocities. Gypsy neighborhoods all over Kosovo are ablaze. The plight of those who have fled the country is no better. In Macedonian refugee camps, Gypsies have been attacked and nearly killed by ethnic Albanian lynch mobs. One such incident in Stankovic I caused a violent riot. The lives of the Gypsies in question were saved at the very last moment.

Inside the KFOR compound, the FBI team is resting after a grueling and upsetting couple of days. The four heavily armed members of the hostage recovery team it brought as bodyguards are on high alert. The team was fired upon by at least two snipers the night before from a building across the street.

Today, the team exhumed one of eight bodies found in a well and buried by locals near the town of Pec. The subject was an old man, and his family had coincidentally returned from Albania the day before to this news of his murder and the torching of the family's home. They watched from a distance as the forensic pathologist performed an open-air autopsy to make official what was already known. With the HRT soldiers eyeing the surrounding countryside, their machine guns ready, experts in white gowns, white caps, masks and shoe coverings cleaved the man's skull, pulled off his face like a rubber mask and fished around inside the brain for the projectile. They didn't find the bullet, and decomposition was too advanced to locate an exit wound, but they found the entrance wound at the base of the skull and made their conclusion: shot once in the back of the head, tossed down a well in a puzzle of limbs. Most upsetting to the team was that of the nine bodies in the well, five were children. The old man's family embraced the team afterward. Everyone, including the FBI, cried. The old man could be buried with dignity now.

"Everyone's emotionally beaten up from not being able to solve the problem," says Allyson Simons, chief of the FBI's forensic analysis team, her eyes wet. "In 29 years in the business, I've never seen anything like this. This is the worst I've ever seen. How do we do this to each other? Everyone understands army vs. army, but how do you mix in women and children?"

The day before, in Gjakova, the team had spent the day sifting through the ashes of 157 Millogh Gillic St., collecting and cataloging the bone fragments of 20 women and children. Analyzing bullet shell casings, blood spatter patterns and eyewitness testimony, forensic pathologists can reconstruct what happened: The women told their men to flee to Albania, that they would be safe, that the Serbs wouldn't dare kill women and children. The next day, Serbs were at their door. The women and their children were herded to No. 157 Millogh Gillic St. and incinerated alive with hand grenades.

As the team worked, the neighbors on Millogh Gillic Street surrounded them, flooding them with good wishes. Family members came to ask them what really happened, to achieve a state of personal reckoning and bury their relatives in their minds. "We are treated like heroes," says Simons. At other sites around Gjakova, citizens beg them to come examine other massacres, bodies in their homes, in their yards. More than once the FBI complied, "just to listen to the stories," says Roger Nisley, the team's commander. "That's what's needed here. To listen to the stories, to release them, to let their relatives go."

But Paul Mallet, the team's assistant commander, emphasizes the team's limitations. "The evidence we've collected shows clear proof of wide-reaching atrocities," he says. "What this evidence cannot show is the extent of the human suffering inflicted on a whole people." Adds Paul Risley, the tribunal's chief spokesman at The Hague: "The resources of the tribunal must be focused on those investigations that can lead to the indictment and arrest of specific individuals that we hope to bring to justice."

There are simply too many sites to examine. The forensics teams are overwhelmed. The original seven sites named in the indictment are being added to every day. "This is the biggest undertaking by far by the Office of the Prosecutor, in terms of the gravity, scale and speed with which the crimes were committed," says The Hague's spokesman in Pristina, James Lansdale. It is bigger, he says, than Bosnia. Bigger than Srebrenica, the site where 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men were slaughtered in the worst massacre in Europe since the Holocaust.

The massacres, then, have to be prioritized. But is it more of a war crime to kill 100 people than 10? Is it quantity rather than quality? Women and children rather than men? The answer is counter-intuitive. The most important element, says Lansdale, is to pick sites, whether vast or limited, that will add not drama but hard information to the most important puzzle: the chain of command. Milosovic and his henchmen are the tribunal's targets, not catharsis. Together with the intelligence reports of foreign agencies and local informants, massacre sites that are clear in terms of who did what, rather than big, are the most useful in proving what Lansdale calls a "widespread and systematic campaign" of criminal conduct. After all, a charge of genocide, the highest possible indictment, can be brought on the basis of the murder of a single individual. What must be proven to convict is not the wiping out of an entire ethnic grouping, but the intent to do so. Not the deed, in other words, but the design. Patterns of murder are important, but blueprints pieced together with linked massacre sites, witness testimony and intelligence reports even more so. The Hague has already charged Milosevic with crimes against humanity. What it really wants is to charge him with genocide.

On the other hand, Lansdale says, "Big sites can't be ignored. Common sense dictates attention be paid." The reason the FBI didn't examine the Meja pit graves, he says, is that it simply wasn't equipped for mass exhumations. And Allyson Simons, whose decision it would have been to make the effort, refused to expose her team to the contamination risks in handling large numbers of corpses without being fully prepared. In sites where there are corpses to handle, she says, pathologists are often literally elbow-deep in flesh. "Some bodies are so decomposed," she says, "bones were pulled out of the flesh when the bodies were lifted up." Also, many of the larger sites have yet to be de-mined. Meja is now at the top of the tribunal's list. Some of the war's fiercest battles were fought between Gjakova and the nearby Albanian border. The atrocities that took place there are linked to the fighting, and may, Lansdale hinted broadly, lead The Hague directly to Belgrade. Other forensics teams are on their way there. The FBI, too, he says, may return.

Lansdale insists on making one final, and important, point about the tribunal's indictments. "We are trying to relieve a sense of collective guilt. Not all Serbs are guilty. The indictments against individuals may help break the chain of retribution."

The particular ruthlessness of Serbian activity in and around Gjakova may stem from the town's robust intellectual and economic status over the years. During Yugoslavia's Communist rule, many of its diplomats and university professors came from Gjakova. The old quarter of town was wealthy, the economy robust, fed by factories that made refrigerator motors and washing machines. It is also not far from Djrenica, the heart of Albanian nationalism, and the location of the first KLA rebellions, and first Serbian atrocities.

The night after NATO's bombing campaign began, Gjakova was one of the first towns to burn. A young man named Patrit, who refused to give his last name, remembers "the first day of bombing, the town was empty, like Texas. It was hot, the dust was blowing. It was scary." At 11:30 in the morning, the first fires began. "We thought NATO had bombed the town. People were crying in the streets, 'God save us.'" Two hundred fifty shops burnt in the old quarter, including the town's 500-year-old mosque, the most famous in Kosovo. "I thought, this is the end, this is how God wanted it to be, how it's supposed to be.

"Life after that was a nightmare," Patrit says. "You had a vision in your head that the police would come and that they were only looking for you." The vision, for many, came true.

On March 28, the KLA mounted an offensive against Serbian positions in the town. But the Serbs countered with overwhelming force and decisively won a firefight that largely took place in what remained of the old quarter. The KLA withdrew, leaving Gjakova's exposed population helpless before Serbian reprisals. The paramilitary units came swiftly and brutally. Within days, more than 1,200 men disappeared, the fate of most still unknown. It was around this time that the massacres at Meja occurred.

Today, every morning, a man in a green suit, hat and tie sits before his incinerated store, from which he once sold funeral supplies. Down the street, another man sits before his obliterated machine shop. "I worked in this shop for 55 years," he says. "I will rebuild if the U.N. helps me. My tools are gone. I don't have anything. NATO started this, so they have to fix it. What they did was good for the nation but my shop is only mine and no one can help me."

Tacked to Gjakova's charred telephone poles are stark notices of the known dead. Townspeople gather and crane their necks to take note of who among them won't be coming back. But the notices are few.

One Gjakova man who has lived to tell his tale has become something of a celebrity. Labinot Lifovec, 24, was one of the four released from Serbian prisons. He sits on his porch, gaunt, weak, glad and lucky to be alive.

"It was 6 a.m. on May 14," he recalls of his capture, "and my brother and sister were sleeping. I was awake with my mother and father. Fifteen to 20 policemen in blue uniforms broke down the door. I saw only guns in my face.

"One guy beat me in the head with his gun. I lost consciousness, and woke three to four hours later. I saw myself in the garden with my brother. I asked what happened. Another guy took my mother and began to beat her in front of me with a club. I started to scream, 'Don't push my mother.' One policeman says, 'I'm going to kill you. You have 30 minutes to live.' I said it's better to kill me now. He hit me with his gun. I was unconscious again. When I woke I saw blood everywhere. I asked my brother, 'Are we alive or are we dead?' The police said: 'You want to say your last words to your family now?' I said, 'I don't have last words. I'm not going to die, I'm going to live.'

"They started laughing. I thought my life was gone. I told my brother, 'We are going to die, but don't be afraid, we are not the first, and we won't be the last.'"

In Gjakova's jail, Lifovec was interrogated, accused of spying for NATO and beaten for five days and nights. Then he was transported with four others to a jail in Pec. There, he was tossed into a cell full of Serbian criminals, who were told he'd worked with NATO and the KLA, and hated Serbs. Ten men descended on him and beat him.

At 4 a.m. on June 11, Lifovec was awakened. "I knew what was going to happen, because Milosevic signed agreements. I knew I was going to Serbia." He was herded onto one of eight buses full of ethnic Albanians. On the bus, the Serbs forced the men to eat bars of soap, threatening them with cutting their throats if they didn't comply. If they didn't eat enough, their faces were cut. The Serbs drank continuously, beating their prisoners with the empty bottles of liquor. They put the business end of their machine guns in the prisoners' mouths. "Do we kill them now or after?" Lifovec remembers them asking each other.

At one point, forces belonging to the notorious Arkan stopped the bus and demanded three Albanians be brought to him to be shot. The guards argued for over an hour for the prisoners' lives. They won the argument, but when the buses began to move again they demanded the prisoners pay for the lives they'd just been spared. But no one had the money to pay, and they were severely beaten again. Once over the border in Serbia, en route to the prisons, the guards stopped the buses in 10 different villages, each time permitting local Serbs to board the buses and take their shots at the Albanians with fists and clubs. The buses were split into two groups, one heading to a prison in the town of Lifovec, the other to Zagechar.

Other reports by ethnic Albanians who survived Serbian jails detail a brutal regimen of mistreatment that reminds one of adolescent torture fantasies: large groups of men packed into small rooms, forced for hours to drink water tinged with their own blood from previous beatings, then refused access to a bathroom, leaving them no choice but to urinate on each other; forced one by one to play goalie against a string of Serbian penalty kickers, the punishment for failing to stop a shot a severe beating.

The men were kept for over a month, surviving on daily food rations of 200 grams of bread and four grams of cheese. Lifovec lost 33 pounds. He was released on June 29. When asked why he didn't flee Gjakova when he had the opportunity, to join the columns of refugees fleeing toward Albania and Macedonia, he replies, "I wanted to stay, not to be a refugee. It is better to die at home than to die somewhere where they won't know who is the body."

About the writer Peter Landesman is a journalist and novelist. His journalism has appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. His second novel, "Blood Acre," was published in February by Viking.

The ones who fell on top of me saved my life (Salon)

A man who miraculously survived a Serbian massacre tells his terrible story.

BY PETER LANDESMAN

A couple of miles to the southwest of Suhareka, Kosovo -- a charmless, sun-bitten tire-manufacturing town of 110,000 north of Prizren -- four unclaimed bodies lie half-interred in the gravel of a riverbed, hands clawed and legs kicking skyward like amputated trees. The corpses appear headless, the flesh chewed at, the manner of death not clear. A leg wears an Adidas tracksuit. The riverbank hums with bees. A few hundred yards downstream, the water empties into the town's drinking supply.

Among Suhareka's vineyards, a girl, perhaps 15, perhaps 19, lies spread-eagle in a clearing. No one knows her name; probably she was a refugee from another village. There is no clothing. Her hair, long and black, pools beneath a skull charred by the sun, teeth clenched in agony. Her body, obviously young, has burst, maggot-ridden. Worse still are her fingernails, painted scarlet red, unchipped, the perfection of a great beauty. Dead two weeks, she was led here, raped, her throat slit, not necessarily in that order, and left as she lies. One imagines her not begging for her life.

Hundreds died in Suhareka. In household gardens rest human skulls, femurs, teeth. In the bedrooms of houses torched by Serbs, couples lie burnt in their beds. In a nearby village off the road, nine bodies -- still unidentified -- lie in a puzzle of limbs at the bottom of a well.

Among Suhareka's killing fields lives Muharren Shala, age 47, although he shouldn't. On March 25, the day after NATO began bombing, Shala was shot five times by local Serbian militia members and left for dead beneath a pile of friends and neighbors. He is one of the few victims of Serbian massacres who is able to tell his story. When asked if he would do so, he hesitates, glancing skyward, wringing his hands. Thus far he has spoken to no one about this but family.

Then he nods, assenting, recalling a hasty pledge among his now-dead neighbors -- made on the off chance that anyone survived -- to make what happened known.

At 5:30 a.m. on March 24, Shala says, 30 to 40 militia members -- a ragtag platoon of local Serbs deputized by a notorious paramilitary leader named Mishko Niskovic -- rounded up 14 ethnic Albanian men from three neighboring families. Thirty refugees from nearby villages had been previously collected and separated by gender. The men were shoved together with the locals, then told to wait in a house.

Across the road, one girl among the female refugees was stripped of her jewelry and money, then told to run. She obeyed, began to flee, and was shot in the back. Other women were told to do the same and were similarly shot. Shala does not remember how many, but it was many. Then there was quiet again. The Serbs stood smoking in the road. "I could hear the flies," Shala says. The men began to pass cigarettes between themselves. "We told each other we would be killed. We told each other that if someone survived, he should tell what happened."

The Serbs approached them. "You are looking for independence?" one asked, grinning. Shala remembers putting out his cigarette and dropping it into his breast pocket.

The men were herded toward the door to a carpentry shop and told to go inside. As the men filed by, the militiamen opened fire with automatic weapons. Shala was shot five times in the shoulder and back and fell beneath two friends. Eight in all were shot from behind in the fusillade, then fell in a heap inside the shop entrance. As Shala lay quietly, militiamen stood over them and shot in the head the two they took to still be alive. In the chaos, two others had managed to bolt for the back door. They were caught, shot and later burned.

Lying beneath the bleeding corpses of his friends, Shala didn't understand why he was still alive. "I felt born for the second time," he says. He waited 20 minutes beneath the weight, pulled himself out, then, bleeding heavily, slipped into a neighboring building. Serbian snipers had taken positions on the roof of a school across the street. Shala waited three hours until the snipers withdrew. Someone he knew -- someone he would not name -- walked by. Shala signaled to him, begging for help, but the neighbor walked quickly on, afraid for his own life.

At 11 a.m., in agony, Shala spotted a girl of 7 or 8 in the street. He signaled to her and asked her to bring him water. When she returned with the water, he asked for bread and cheese, and she -- still unknown to him -- brought him those things. The girl returned a fourth time with her mother, who told Shala's wife where he was. At first Shala sent his wife away, fearing for her life. But they spent that night together in the house, lying on the floor, talking quietly of their escape.

By the next morning, Shala's bleeding had subsided, and with his wife's help he made his way back to his house. The Serbian police came looking for him, but his wife and children hid him beneath a couch, draping his 7-year-old daughter atop him.

The bodies, 90 in all, lay untouched in the street and carpentry shop for three days, when the Serbs returned to bury them in hastily dug graves in a cemetery across the street. Most were refugees unknown to Shala or anyone else, and those who do know them will most likely never know where they died.

Shala and his family then began a dismal journey identical to that of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians, taking refuge in one village, then the next. They were on the run for seven weeks. They returned to Suhareka only recently.

Shala holds out two plastic vials. One contains three bullets removed from his shoulder. The other holds the cigarette he dropped in his breast pocket moments before he was shot. "They are my memories," he says.

He leads his visitors to the cemetery and stands among the unmarked graves. A hardened man, he begins to weep. He wonders which of the mounds contain his friends. "The ones who fell on top of me saved my life," he says. "They paid."

Albanians from Presheva in Serbia proper are leaving because of Serb violence (KP)

Presheva, July 10 (Kosovapress)

According to unconfirmed reports coming from Presheva, Albanian residents of the villages of Carravajkë, Buhiq and Sefer, are leaving their homes as a result of increasing Serb violence. On the political border between Kosova and Serbia, four tractors filled with people have been seen today leaving towards Gjilan.

Many Albanian families who fled the municipalities of Presheva and Bujanovc because of Serb violence have already found shelter in Gjilan. They are sleeping in the dormitory of the local high school, and kindergarten. It is reported these displaced people have been victims of organized looting raids of Albanian villages located inside territorial Serbia and they have spilled over into Kosova itself. There is concern a concerted effort to create a partitioned Kosova, including the much more publicized Mitrovica, is taking place under the eyes of KFOR.

City hall in Pristina reopens with Albanian and Serb employees (AP)

By JIM HEINTZ The Associated Press 07/12/99 9:24 AM Eastern

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AP) -- For the first time since the end of NATO airstrikes last month, a mixed ethnic Albanian-Serb staff of 140 civil administration employees returned to work today, reopening Pristina's City Hall.

Eighty ethnic Albanians and 60 Serbs listened to J.F. Carter, the U.N. chief civil administrator, call for moderation and cooperation among the people of different ethnic backgrounds.

Following the pullout of Yugoslav army and Serbian police forces early last month and the flight of tens of thousands of Serbs fearing retribution from returning ethnic Albanian refugees, the war-battered province has been without local governments, courts and police.

At a news conference in Pristina today, Jiri Dienstbier, the U.N. special investigator on human rights in the current and former Yugoslavia, urged that the international community make the maximum effort to re-establish structures of civil justice, especially police forces.

Dienstbier also said work must be done to "guarantee property rights to make sure houses are in the hands of the people who own them."

U.N. officials are recruiting people to fill vacancies in the civilian sector in an attempt to help Kosovo recover from years of ethnic conflict and bloody fighting.

"Things will be never the same as they were in 1990, nor as they were in March of 1999," Carter told the City Hall workers, referring to the revocation of Kosovo's autonomy nearly a decade ago and the launching of NATO's punishing airstrikes on March 24.

"People have to work with their own community to create a new order," Carter said.

Pristina's City Hall will have nine departments and two co-mayors, called municipal presidents. The co-mayors will be Zvonimir Stevic, a former deputy mayor, and Mexhid Syla, an ethnic Albanian who has not worked since 1989 when he lost his job in an electricity company. He had served in the local government until 1984.

In the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it has received lists of more than 2,000 people detained in Serbia in connection with the Kosovo conflict.

The Red Cross said the Serbian Ministry of Justice has provided the names and location of 2,095 people held in Serbian prisons. The lists included 166 people who were released to the Red Cross on June 25 and returned to Kosovo.

Serbia earlier acknowledged holding the prisoners, and the Red Cross said the provision of their names was "a major contribution toward alleviating the anguish of families seeking to establish the whereabouts of a missing relative."

The Red Cross said it has visited 331 detainees and soon will visit more. Most are believed to be ethnic Albanians held on charges of terrorism or anti-state activities.

In Albania, government officials gave the chief prosecutor of the international war crimes tribunal, Louise Arbour, testimony collected from ethnic Albanian refugees of alleged war crimes committed by Serbs in Kosovo.

On Tuesday, Arbour is scheduled to go to Kosovo. Yugoslav officials would not let her enter Kosovo in January.

Dienstbier told reporters he has not been able to confirm reports that the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army may be holding people in detention centers in Kosovo.

But he said KLA leaders have told him they are concerned that "they cannot openly challenge the feelings of vengeance" in Kosovo. "I think strong leadership is needed to prevent problems like this," he added.

Dienstbier expressed concern about reports he said he heard in Prizren that local people have blocked fire brigades from extinguishing fires at Serb houses.

During the 78-day NATO campaign, hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians fled a Serb troop crackdown in the province that included mass killings and the destruction of homes.

An aerial survey conducted by the United States Imagery and Mapping Agency shows that more than 65,000 houses in Kosovo have been destroyed or left uninhabitable in the province, Ron Redmond of the U.N. refugee agency said.

During the weekend, U.S. Army troops began moving into Kosovo to take up peacekeeping duties from departing Marines who came under fire in separate incidents toward the end of their tour. No Americans were injured.

KFOR troops find no proof of secret KLA jails (CNN)

IRZNIC, Kosovo -- Heavily armed Italian KFOR troops broke into two buildings Sunday they suspected of being prisons run by the Kosovo Liberation Army, but found no evidence the buildings were being used as jails.

Attilio Andre, a spokesman for the Italians, said the KLA cooperated with KFOR during the operation.

Before the operation began, NATO officials said they had received reports that Serbs were being held in secret jails in western Kosovo. Two mechanized companies, reinforced by tanks and attack helicopters, carried out the operation.

KLA troops at a nearby assembly point said they were baffled by the scale of the operation, and insisted there were no jails in the immediate area.

The ethnic Albanians showed the Italians decomposing corpses of Albanians killed by Serb forces, and said that more bodies were believed to be a heavily mined field nearby.

Serbs refuse to cooperate with U.N.

KFOR forces are anxious to show Kosovo's Serbs that they will investigate reports of ethnic Albanian abuses as promptly and thoroughly as they would stories of Serb atrocities. But Serb community leaders, including an Orthodox bishop, have refused to cooperate with the U.N. civilian mission in Kosovo, saying the international organization is allowing the "ethnic cleansing" of the Serb population.

NATO began an 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia on March 24 to stop Serb policies it said were aimed at eliminating ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. When Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic agreed to NATO demands and the bombing ended, the Albanians began to return to their homes -- and in many cases, they exacted revenge on their Serb neighbors.

"There has been ceaseless and systematic violence against Kosovo Serbs inflicted by Albanian terrorists and members of the so-called KLA geared at creating an ethnically-clean Kosovo ... while KFOR and the U.N. are present," said a statement issued by Bishop Artemije and Momcilo Trajkovic, leader of the Serbian Resistance Movement.

The two leaders refused to join a future political council in the Serbian province. But last week, they angered the Yugoslav government when they issued a statement with ethnic Albanian leaders condemning violence in Kosovo.

U.S. troops under fire

American KFOR troops came under fire while on duty in their sector of Kosovo, officials said Sunday. Capt. Martin Downie, a public information officer at the U.S. headquarters in Gnjilane, said the Americans had a "busy night."

U.S. military policemen were fired upon while securing a building where they found one dead man and an injured Albanian. The U.S. troops detained at least five people, Downie said, adding that he did not know the ethnicity of those detained.

The Americans found several weapons, including an AK-47, in the possession of the people they detained.

Elsewhere in Gnjilane, unknown gunmen fired at a U.S. sniper team twice in an hour. No KFOR troops were injured in the incidents.

In Pristina, KFOR spokesman Maj. Jan Joosten said shots were fired Saturday at a bus bringing Albanian refugees back to their homes in the Italian sector. No one was injured in that attack, and no arrests were made.

War Crimes Prosecutor In Albania To Study Kosovo Evidence (AFP)

TIRANA, Jul 12, 1999 -- (Agence France Presse) Louise Arbour, chief prosecutor of the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), arrived in Albania on Sunday to study testimony gathered from Kosovo Albanian refugees.

During her stay in Tirana, Arbour will also meet Albanian President Rexhep Meidani and Prime Minister Pandeli Majko, Albanian television reported.

She will also meet a group of prosecutors who have been looking into "war crimes and crimes against humanity carried out by Serbs in Kosovo since the beginning of the year," said Albanian prosecutor Arben Rakipi.

Arbour is on a tour of the Balkans that will take her Monday to Macedonia, into Kosovo on Tuesday and Wednesday, then on to Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia on Thursday through Saturday.

Her trip to Kosovo will be her first, and her spokesman Paul Risley said she would be meeting there with officials of the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR).

Arbour was prevented in January from visiting Kosovo by Yugoslav police when she tried to enter the province from Macedonia to investigate the killing of 45 Albanians in the village of Racak.

At the end of May, as NATO was bombing Yugoslavia, Arbour indicted Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and four other senior figures in his regime for crimes against humanity. ((c) 1999 Agence France Presse)

Robertson Vow After Kosovo Mass Grave Found (Reuters)

Defence Secretary George Robertson has reacted with horror to the discovery by Nato troops of what may be Kosovo's worst massacre.

Serb forces are feared to have butchered as many as 350 ethnic Albanian Kosovars at Ljubenic, a village in the west of the war ravaged province.

Allied troops have sealed off what is thought to be a mass grave, in the Italian controlled sector, to preserve evidence for war crimes investigators.

ICRC gets list of 1,438 Kosovars held in Serbia

PRISTINA, Serbia, July 12 - The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Monday Serbian authorities had provided a list of 1,438 Kosovo prisoners currently held in Serbian jails.

ICRC spokeswoman Daloni Carlisle said the people on the list, received over the weekend, were alleged to have been involved in ethnic Albanians' campaign against Belgrade rule.

Carlisle said most of the detainees seemed to have been transferred from Kosovo to elsewhere in Serbia around June 6, days before NATO-led peacekeepers moved into the province.

"They were all arrested in Kosovo in relation to the conflict here so they're essentially security detainees," Carlise told reporters in Pristina, Kosovo's capital.

Hundreds of Kosovo families have asked the ICRC to find out about the fate about missing loved ones, many of whom are suspected to be in Serbian jails.