Stage Being Set for More Ethnic Fury in Balkans : Serbia: Krajina refugees arrive in Kosovo region. Oppressed Albanian majority there shuns them.

When Dusan Gvojic, his tractor and 200 or so other Krajina Serb refugees were put aboard a Yugoslav train over the weekend, they were told they were going to the capital, Belgrade. But when they awoke the next morning, they found themselves here in the restive region of Kosovo, home to ethnic Albanians who want nothing to do with new arrivals.

As the first Krajina Serb refugees are dispatched to the rural villages of Kosovo, Yugoslavia’s southernmost province and the ancient heartland of Serbian nationalism, the stage is being set for yet another ethnic explosion that many fear would spill beyond the Balkans.

The mainly Muslim Albanians accuse the Belgrade government of using the refugees’ plight to try to shift the ethnic balance in Kosovo, where Albanians constitute 90% of the population but hold no political power and live in a virtual police state. They fear that the Serbs will oust them from their homes--just as Serbian refugees are seizing dwellings in other parts of Yugoslavia and in Serb-held areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Indeed, U.N. officials on Monday said that Bosnian Serbs had begun expelling the last 12,000 ethnic Croats living in the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Banja Luka, in what U.N. spokesman Kris Janowski branded “the final touch to a 3-year-old barbarity . . . of murder, intimidation and expulsions.”

Janowski said he expects Banja Luka’s last 30,000 Muslims to be next, as “ethnic cleansing” sweeps through the former Yugoslav federation.

It was in Kosovo that the current Serbian quest to build an ethnically pure state got its start. Serbian strongman President Slobodan Milosevic rose to power in the late 1980s on a campaign of reasserting Serbian supremacy over the Albanians of Kosovo; from there, he inspired both the Bosnian and Krajina Serbs to fight for secession from Bosnia and Croatia.

Ibrahim Rugova, who heads the Albanians’ Democratic League of Kosovo, said the “colonization” of Kosovo with Krajina Serbs represents a “provocation” that could lead to a dangerous escalation of violence.

Kosovo has always been considered a potential tripwire to a war widened beyond the Balkans because of its location. A Serbian attack on the Albanian majority here, analysts say, would draw in neighboring Macedonia--where the only U.S. troops in the Balkans are stationed--and then a chain reaction might follow involving Greece, Bulgaria and others with assorted territorial and ethnic claims.

Threat Seems Real

For the estimated 2 million Albanians of Kosovo, the threat seems basic and real.

“There is no way we can accept them [the refugees],” cafe owner Deme Dedushi, 30, said in the Kosovo capital of Pristina. “If they come--five, 10, 100,000--they will take our places, our homes, our jobs, everything.”

Hilmi Islami, 38, a doctor who like most Albanians was fired from his state job, observed: “This is not a solution--not for them or for us. [Those whose families] did not live here for centuries cannot connect. No way.”

Many refugees themselves are unhappy with the prospect of settling in Kosovo, though they are in such desperate straits as to have little choice.

Kosovo was an autonomous region until the then-federal Yugoslav government imposed martial law in 1989. When the Yugoslav federation began to disintegrate in 1991, federal security forces and paramilitary squads clamped down further and prevented Kosovo from seceding, the way Croatia and Bosnia did.

Kosovo’s Albanians today say they live a form of apartheid: A large majority is ruled by a small minority--they speak different languages, attend segregated schools, are treated in separate hospitals and use different names for the same city streets.

At the principal elementary school in Pristina, Serbian children enter by one door, Albanian children by another. They are kept apart by a wall that divides the building. The door in the wall has no handle on the Albanian children’s side.

Even without the refugee crisis, Kosovo is tense. Serbian police control its towns with a heavy hand. European human rights monitors were kicked out two years ago.

Dusan Gvojic and the other members of the first refugee group to arrive in Kosovo said they are hoping for the best. “We don’t know the people, it’s a new environment, we cannot judge immediately,” said Gvojic, 36, who left behind a 17-acre pig and potato farm in his native Vrginmost when he fled the Croatian army offensive that captured the Krajina.

“I’ve heard they don’t like Serbs,” he said of the Albanians, adding that if he is expelled anew from this spot, “we will go away again. We have lived through terrible things, so now everything is the same for us.”

Gvojic was seated at a table in the Korenik Hotel in the Kosovo town of Djurakovac, where refugees are being housed temporarily. As he spoke, Caslav Miljkovic, the Serbian manager of the hotel, reassured him that everything would be all right.

But Iso Sylaj, an Albanian waiter, had his doubts, saying nervously: “It is not good that the refugees are here. They lived where they lived. Maybe there will be problems.”

Outside, at tables on the hotel’s front patio, a drunk Serbian policeman railed against the Albanians. “Those who don’t want to respect Serb authority,” he bellowed, “should be forced out!”

Kosovo was the seat of the medieval Serbian kingdom, which Serbs regard as their most glorious period and which ended with the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, when Serbs were slaughtered by the Ottoman Turks. That defeat, seen as the ultimate act of martyrdom, shaped and scarred the Serbian psyche.

Albanian political leaders say that the Milosevic government’s plan to colonize the already densely populated Kosovo region is the real motive behind the refugee resettlement. Fearful that a small incident could spark an escalation of hostilities, they have urged restraint in their community.

The rump Yugoslav government said it plans to send at least 16,000 Serbs to Kosovo, with the argument that all parts of the country must be prepared to share the burden of the more than 100,000 impoverished refugees who have crossed into Serbia as part of the exodus from Croatia. Local Serbian authorities were quoted as saying they would make available between 10,000 and 12,500 acres to the refugees, although it was unclear where this land would be.

Meanwhile, as peace efforts continued among the Europeans, Americans and Russians, and there were reports of Serbian bombings of areas around the Croatian resort city Dubrovnik, U.S. officials said the second of four unmanned aircraft sent to Gjader Air Force Base in Albania in late June to gather information on the war in Bosnia was lost Monday when it developed engine trouble and was deliberately destroyed in the air.

2 Spy Planes Are Lost

Just Friday, the ground crew lost contact with another of the aircraft. Pentagon officials refused to confirm press reports that antiaircraft fire brought that craft down, and Defense Secretary William J. Perry ordered an investigation Saturday.

A Pentagon spokesman said the loss of the two spy planes has not damaged America’s ability to gather information about troop movements in Bosnia by providing high-resolution videotape and still photographs of ground action.