Serb-Inspired Panic Clears Kosovo Villages

Hana Zabeli, an 85-year-old invalid, died alone here last week. So did her village.

Life ended for this ethnic Albanian settlement and its oldest inhabitant on the day Serbian paramilitary police struck with gratuitous brutality, burning dozens of homes and shooting Zabeli in her bed.

Both were abandoned in the same panic that has emptied scores of Albanian communities during an anti-guerrilla sweep of Serbia’s separatist-minded Kosovo province, uprooting more than one-tenth of its 2 million people.

With the latest assault now in its fourth week, the number of ghost towns is growing so fast that relief agencies say they cannot keep up with--much less help--a scattering population in urgent need of food, clean water, medicine and shelter.

More than 3,000 people fleeing Rezala and nearby settlements have spilled into a forest clearing seven miles from here and set up flimsy lean-tos of logs covered with leafy branches. Everyone encountered in the camp said they were afraid to go home, even though the Serbs have withdrawn from the area. Many do not know whether their houses are even standing.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s troops are fighting not so much for a military objective or to “cleanse” the province of its Albanian majority, Western analysts say, but simply to punish the supporters of the Kosovo Liberation Army--and to demonstrate the rebel group’s inability to defend them.

In five months of fighting that has left 550 dead, Serbian police and Yugoslav army troops have driven guerrillas and civilians from village after village, leaving behind smoking ruins and a residue of fear.

According to a survey by the Albanian-led Independent Trade Union of Kosovo, 283 settlements have been abandoned by most of their inhabitants.

“Nowhere is safe in Kosovo,” said Fazile Syla, 49, a widow who has been sleeping in the forest clearing for a week with two of her grandchildren. “But it’s safer out here than waiting for Serbian rockets to crash through the roof.”

Kosovo consists of one city, 17 towns and hundreds of villages dotting a hilly landscape slightly bigger than Los Angeles County. Albanians outnumber Serbs 9 to 1 but hold none of the levers of power. Nearly all of them back the armed rebels’ demand for independence from Serbia, the larger of the two republics left in Yugoslavia.

The deaths of this community and the defenseless Hana Zabeli help explain the magnitude of the exodus--the largest in Europe since the Yugoslav federation’s bloody breakup in the early 1990s--and the Albanians’ reluctance to reclaim their homes.

Hana’s son, a still-shaken Zeqir Zabeli, said that he, his wife and four children awoke Thursday to the Serbian attack and a painful choice.

The problem was what to do with Hana, unable to speak and mostly paralyzed since a stroke seven years ago. They could lift her from bed and carry her through a rain of artillery and mortar fire, risking death for all in a slow escape. Or they could leave her behind, run away and pray for her survival.

A small guerrilla force that had been resisting the Serbs outside the village retreated the day before. So had most of the village’s 6,000 civilians.

Zeqir Zabeli chose to run.

“The Serbs attacked so fast we had no time to think how to evacuate my mother safely,” the 48-year-old farmer recalled, leading a visitor down a dirt road to his modest, two-story brick home. “They were grenading and shooting from all sides.

“I got my wife and children out. . . . We ran. It is a choice I will have to live with.”

Returning late that night, after the Serbs had moved on, Zabeli was at first relieved to find his house undamaged by the shelling. Then he looked inside and found his mother’s body on her mattress. She had been shot in the neck and slashed on the face, he said. Her bedroom had been ransacked.

Sokol Oruqi, 57, also died in the attack. A neighbor said Oruqi had left the day before and come back to untether his horses when police apparently shot him on the street and hacked off his arms.

News of both killings spread as residents trickled back here over the weekend to look at the damage and then left again, repelled by what they saw.

Serbian officials have said their summer assault is aimed at clearing guerrilla roadblocks from Kosovo’s highways. But the attack on Rezala and other villages in the Drenica Valley, far from any main road, appeared to serve no military purpose.

Of 380 homes lining Rezala’s twisting dirt roads, residents have counted 87 gutted by fire.

The Ahmeti cousins, Murat and Hamet, returned to see their homes intact but their cornfields burned black. Idriz Zabeli, a 59-year-old relative of the dead woman, found his ancestral home destroyed, along with his two cars and all four of his cattle. The three men headed back to the woods.

In the village, the stench of dead animals rose with the baking sun. Acrid smoke swirled from a few still-smoldering homes and grain storage buildings. The elementary school, where 780 children were taught until fighting erupted last winter and which later sheltered people uprooted from other villages, was ransacked and partly damaged by fire.

“What’s the point of going back if the police can come again and violate our homes?” asked Hazir, 48, a construction worker who fled Rezala in the white Mercedes-Benz incongruously parked next to his lean-to in the forest clearing. He would give only his first name. “We need security, but the Kosovo Liberation Army cannot give it. They have no strength.”

In fact, the guerrillas have so far survived the Serbian sweep and reclaimed their Drenica Valley headquarters in nearby Likovac. But as they dig in for a long conflict, they are not encouraging a quick civilian homecoming.

Left alone in a string of ghost towns, the rebels can now do more of what guerrillas are supposed to do--wage hit-and-run attacks on the government. “We can operate more freely without the civilians here,” said Rezala’s 25-year-old rebel commander, whose nom de guerre is Mali. “We don’t have to worry about protecting them.”

That’s no comfort to the people in the clearing--victims of a spreading catastrophe that can only worsen with the coming autumn rains and snowy Balkan winter.

For more than a week, the camp’s population has ebbed and flowed as people have moved away in search of better shelter and arrived from newly emptied villages.

A few drive cars over the rugged dirt roads, but most are crowded onto long carts pulled by horses or farm tractors. On the carts are all the possessions they could grab in haste--bags of clothing and towels, carpets, blankets, foam mattresses folded in two, sacks of flour and garden vegetables, rusty ovens for baking bread.

The makeshift colony is running out of food, and people are getting sick from malnutrition, contaminated well water and exposure to damp night air, said Myzafere Kastatri, an Albanian nurse in the field. She was examining a listless 5-year-old boy for what she believed to be hepatitis.

“The homes in villages around here are saturated with refugees, but they are [still] sending food to the field,” said Rifat Gashi, a volunteer for Kosovo’s Mother Teresa Society, the Albanian-run agency that distributes food. “But today’s parcels are enough to feed maybe one-fifth of the people out here.”

One small Red Cross shipment of baby food is the only foreign help that has reached the camp, he said.

Mans Nyberg, a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, estimated that the conflict has uprooted 231,000 people, 167,000 of whom remain in Kosovo. Nobody knows exactly where they have all gone, he said, although at least five camps of 1,000 or more have been spotted in the wilderness.

“One problem is a lack of access to areas where there is fighting,” Nyberg said. “Also, the people in need are constantly moving from one place to another.” He admitted that “all this happened so fast and the international community was unprepared to respond” with emergency aid and relief workers.

Few people camped in the clearing complained about the lagging relief effort. But they voiced frustration that the West has not carried out its occasional threats of military force to halt Milosevic’s offensive. The criticism is echoed by their leaders.

“Albanians are losing faith in the international community to resolve the Kosovo crisis peacefully,” said Blerim Shala, a member of the Albanian team in peace talks that broke down in May. “It’s important to have a balance of fear between Albanians and Serbs if we want to reach a compromise. This balance of fear now does not exist. All the fear is on the Albanian side.”