EUROPE	MARCH 16, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 11
	A Volcano Explodes Serbian forces launch a rampage of vengeance in Kosovo, setting off fears of another, wider war By JAMES WALSH or the past nine years, experts on European security have pointed fingers of caution, sometimes alarm, at the remote upland region of Kosovo. They have warned that this southernmost province of Serbia, though on its face an implausible fulcrum for any balance of power, constituted the hot spot most likely to trigger a broader, completely unpredictable European conflict. For a decade, nothing much happened in Kosovo except for intermittent acts of violence amid steadily rising tensions. Even as Yugoslavia disintegrated from warfare in Croatia and Bosnia, Kosovo managed to keep a lid on its seething internal resentments. All that changed last week following a single clash that seemed to burst the pressure cooker in one dramatic explosion. What began as an ambush by insurgents on a Serbian police patrol quickly turned into a ferocious crackdown resulting in at least 50 deaths and a security sweep bearing some of the earmarks of Bosnian-style "ethnic cleansing." "This is ultimately a very, very scary scenario," declared Kris Janowski, spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency in Geneva. "We are alarmed because we have seen it all before." Yet what happened in Bosnia, for all the shocking atrocities of that war, never really threatened the peace of Southeastern Europe as a whole. Kosovo does. With a population more than 90% ethnic Albanian, these highlands--considered by Serbs to be the cradle of their own civilization despite the preponderance of non-Serbs there--adjoin Albania to the west and Macedonia to the southeast, both tinderboxes in their own right involving security concerns of Greece and Turkey. As Serbian armed forces mounted an offensive in full battle array late last week within a sealed-off zone of central Kosovo, Albania put two reserve battalions on alert, and some 20,000 ethnic Albanians staged an angry mass demonstration in Skopje, Macedonia's capital. Troubleshooters for the United States, Britain and Germany warned Serbian authorities to back off. Just how much death and destruction the paramilitary police were inflicting on the cordoned-off sector of Drenica was still unknown late in the week. Although the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug said 20 armed militants were killed and a "terrorist base" destroyed in the village of Donji Prekazi, the sweep, scheduled to last until Sunday, also stirred widespread panic. Kosovo Albanians apparently were either fleeing villages in wholesale numbers or being deliberately removed. Television in Belgrade, Serbia's capital, showed scenes of a bulldozer razing a house, apparently the home of a "liquidated" Kosovo Liberation Army leader named Adem Jashari. British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, visiting the Balkans as the crisis erupted, issued stern cautions. But he got nowhere in an edgy meeting with Slobodan Milosevic, President of Yugoslavia, which now consists only of Serbia and little Montenegro. It was Milosevic who revoked Kosovo's autonomy in 1989, and last week he told Cook, in effect, to butt out of an internal affair. At his departure from Belgrade, Cook remarked acidly, "I wish I could say that I leave here more hopeful than when I arrived." The U.S. threatened to withdraw four diplomatic privileges it had just awarded to Yugoslavia and to reimpose economic sanctions. Robert Gelbard, the U.S. special envoy, warned of "very serious action," and commented: "We simply won't brook any violence." If Albanians were fleeing villages, they had powerful reasons. The incidents that set off Kosovo's explosion the previous weekend amounted to what witnesses described as a police massacre of 24 villagers, including 10 members of one family. As events could best be reconstructed, the mayhem started as a police car was chasing suspected rebels on the road to Likosane, a Drenica hamlet about 40 km northwest of the provincial capital, Pristina. The car was ambushed by the Kosovo Liberation Army, a pro-independence force that had managed to turn Drenica into a virtual no-go zone for Serbs. A backup patrol was then hit as well, losing four officers in all. At that point, paramilitary police with at least 30 armored vehicles and two helicopter gunships swooped down on Likosane and the nearby village of Cirez. An onslaught started with house-to-house searches and executions. By Monday, bodies were piled in grisly heaps. Xhemshir Nabihu and his pregnant wife Rukije lay dead on the floor of a ransacked house, the woman's head having been blown off by gunfire. The bodies of four brothers in the Gieli family bore powder burns around their wounds, suggesting shots at point-blank range. Muhammet Xela, 79, was executed alongside his brother Naser. The Ahmeti family took the brunt of violence. When the police arrived, said Mirsie Ahmeti, 24, her father shouted that the doors were unlocked and invited them in. Instead, armored personnel carriers smashed through the compound's gates. "They broke windows from the yard, aimed rifles at us and ordered us to lie face down on the floor," she said. Police then led outside all 10 male members of the family and a guest. "We heard screams and shots," Mirsie recalled. "Later, they locked us in a small room and we stayed there all night and the day after, until the police left." According to the sole surviving Ahmeti male, Xhevdet, who was in Pristina at the time, the invaders took away $3,000 worth of gold, 10 kg of meat, a satellite TV receiver and a car radio. Before leaving, a neighbor said, the officers drank and sang all night in a house next door. Trying to explain the killings, a police source said, "Bullets were coming in from all around. Our boys just went wild." Further wildness, with worse consequences, was precisely what Western governments were trying to prevent. Cook called an emergency meeting in London of the Contact Group on the Balkans, a gathering that includes the U.S., Britain, Russia, France, Germany and Italy. The U.N. Security Council decided to postpone debate until the Contact Group met. Russia, however, is opposed to leveling economic sanctions on Milosevic again, leaving the West hamstrung. The K.L.A. was not a widely popular movement in Kosovo until Serbian violence broke down the doors. At the mass funeral in Likosane last week, a young man surveyed the crowd and remarked somberly, "They are all K.L.A. now." --Reported by Dejan Anastasijevic /Likosane, Barry Hillenbrand /London and Douglas Waller /Washington
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