[kcc-news] HORROR BY DESIGN-The Ravaging of Kosova (fwd)

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New York  TIMES

HORROR BY DESIGN
The Ravaging of Kosova
By JOHN KIFNER

Although the purge of more than one million ethnic Albanians from Kosovo
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 Kosovo Liberation Army and permanently changing the
ethnic balance of Kosovo by driving out as many Albanians as possible.

By early May, the State Department says, 90 percent of all ethnic Albanians
in Kosovo had been expelled from their homes; 900,000 were driven across the
province's borders and 500,000 more were displaced inside Kosovo. 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 Kosovo, 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 Kosovo 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 Kosovo, 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 Kosovo'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 Kosovo.

As it began, the Serbs' purge of more than one million ethnic Albanians from
Kosovo 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
Kosovo's majority Albanians.

The Serbs have insisted in recent months that most of the refugees fled
Kosovo 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 Kosovo Liberation Army
and permanently changing the ethnic balance of Kosovo 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 Kosovo 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 Kosovo 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 Kosovo, 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 Kosovo had been expelled
from their homes, the State Department says, 900,000 driven across the
province's borders and 500,000 more displaced inside Kosovo. 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 Kosovo 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 Kosovo.

The Kosovo 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 Kosovo, 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 Kosovo 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 Kosovo 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 Kosovo -- 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 Kosovo. 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 Kosovo. "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 Kosovo, 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



n 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
Kosovo Liberation Army. But Pristina, like the other cities the Serbs
emptied, was not a rebel stronghold. Indeed, in previous outbursts of
fighting in Kosovo, villagers often went to stay in the city until things
calmed down.

Born in the Drenica valley, the Kosovo 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 Kosovo, 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 Kosovo 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.



------------------

May 29, 1999


How Yugoslav Military Planned and Mounted Kosovo's Ravaging


By MICHAEL R. GORDON and THOM SHANKER

he purge of Kosovo 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 Kosovo than they had
attempted in 1998, one that would move well beyond attacking Kosovo
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 Kosovo
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 Kosovo
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
Kosovo. 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
Kosovo.

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 Kosovo.

Even more sinister was the appearance in Kosovo 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 Kosovo. 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 Kosovo, 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 Kosovo 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 Kosovo, saying it
was defending itself against new rebel operations. The 1,300 Western
observers pulled out of Kosovo 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.


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