Another Serbian pummeling of Kosovo spills over into Albania and rings alarms around the West

By JAMES WALSH

hey fled in panic from their homes and hid in the forests. Their houses were bombarded and burned, while dead livestock lay in the streets. Family by family, regrouping in the wilderness, the refugees set off on trails of hardship and tears across the mountains, following goat tracks in hopes of finding asylum. According to early reports, some--the very young or old or ill--perished along the way and had to be abandoned unburied. The treks crossed terrain that is among the most rugged in Europe, including mountains nearly 2,000 m high. At the end of the road, in such remote and unlikely havens as Tropoja in northern Albania, the villagers wept with shock and exhaustion. Then came the realization that the world they had known for a lifetime was lost. A 39-year-old father lamented, "There is no way back, no."

Their ordeal sounds like an agony from the death rattles of World War II, when crisscrossing onslaughts sent refugees in all directions. Yet it happened last week, and the scene was--again--Yugoslavia. A part of the world that suffered through the butchery of Bosnia for three years earlier in this decade erupted yet another time in the kind of full-dress interethnic hostilities not seen in the rest of Europe for half a century. Even as France was preparing to open festivities for the World Cup, and as well-fed Europeans of all sorts looked forward to imminent summer breaks, artillery units fielded by Slobodan Milosevic's government in Belgrade were launching blitzes against rural villages in Serbia's turbulent province of Kosovo. By the end of the week, some 10,000 ethnic Albanians had streamed in fright and despair over the border into Albania, whose Foreign Minister angrily denounced the military campaign as a crisis verging on "open war."

Although nominally the motherland of the 2 million-strong demographic majority in Kosovo, impoverished Albania, which went through its own bout of anarchy last year, has struggled to keep out of the confrontation next door. The hands-off policy was wearing extremely thin last week. As the chaos began to spill over frontiers, it posed the threat of border-crossing hot pursuit by Serbian forces or punitive raids into Albania. The long-feared scenario of a Balkans-wide conflict thus started to look like a genuine possibility, ringing alarms in NATO headquarters and Western chancelleries. With 34,000 troops already deployed to stabilize Bosnia, NATO considered the idea of beefing up its presence in the region to secure Kosovo's borders: conducting exercises in Albania, reinforcing the small contingent in Macedonia. Intervention in Kosovo itself remained a far-fetched option, but American policymakers were not ruling it out. According to one member of a Kosovo Albanian delegation who appealed to Bill Clinton for help, the U.S. President remarked, "Bosnia should not be repeated and will not be repeated."

For all the fireworks, Kosovo was still not close to becoming a Bosnia. Casualty figures could only be guessed at from the outside, since the zone under pummeling by 10,000 Serbian paramilitary police was strictly sealed off. Best estimates judged that the campaign by week's end had left at least 60 people dead, some 250 missing and perhaps 40,000 civilians still sheltering in the forests, waiting to make a break for safety. The real damages to date were not in human life so much as a way of life--extinguishing homes and settlements in a swath of countryside in Kosovo's southwestern pocket, between the towns of Decani and Pec and adjoining the Albanian border. As they did in March in Kosovo's Drenica region, Serbian forces seemed to be instigating panic deliberately and torching houses in an effort to destroy bases and arms-supply routes for guerrillas in the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Just why Milosevic lowered the boom again when he did remained a matter of conjecture: perhaps because Western eyes were fixed on Montenegro's elections, or perhaps because the independence-seeking K.L.A, which claims to control 40% of Kosovo, was encroaching on the main overland road from Serbia proper into the southern province, endangering the police supply lifeline. In any event, Milosevic's renewed application of brute force exploded in Washington's face. U.S. troubleshooter Richard Holbrooke had just arranged to ease Western economic sanctions in exchange for the Yugoslav President's word that he would pursue a Kosovo peace via negotiations with ethnic Albanians.

America's Western European allies, who had to be arm-twisted into applying the sanctions in the first place, were furious last week that Holbrooke's deal was punctured so soon and so brazenly. Of course, American officials were themselves hardly pleased, especially when the mainstream Kosovo Albanian party broke off further talks with Milosevic. For now, Washington believes the crisis remains controllable. Milosevic does not appear to have a good chance of simply driving a jackboot into Kosovo to the point of abject obedience. But American officials were beginning to believe reports that Serbian police carrying out the blitz "don't give a damn what happens to people."

Do Serbians elsewhere give a damn? The Belgrade newspaper Telegraf reported last week that some 100 policemen in the capital had been fired for refusing to serve in the Kosovo crackdown, having concluded that it was a no-win effort. With Serbia's democratic opposition fragmented and demoralized, however, the idea that such resistance to Milosevic might somehow overcome his policies still looked like a bad bet. Most Serbians know little about Kosovo except what the party line tells them. As it was put by Veljko Odalovic, the top Serbian government official in Kosovo: "We are simply responding to attacks by terrorists. They were very well dug in. Every house was practically a fortress in the entire area." Now that Albania and even Montenegro are suffering the fallout from that "defensive" action, Serbia's neighbors may be the ones who have to remind Milosevic more forcibly that he does not live in 1945.

--Reported by Dejan Anastasijevic /Belgrade and Dean Fischer /Washington