Charges Fly as Kosovo Battle Ends

His face red with outrage, the Serbian mayor of this battle-wrecked town condemned its Albanian residents Wednesday, claiming they secretly aided an attack by separatist fighters.

Each side accused the other of atrocities in the five-day battle for Orahovac in central Kosovo, which ended before dawn Wednesday when the last of the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, fighters withdrew.

Thousands of Albanian refugees from the town of 20,000 fled over northern hills to KLA-controlled territory, and hundreds of Serbs sought refuge in nearby rural villages. Many people hid in basements, emerging to find Serbian police in control and several red-brick houses charred and smoking, their roofs blown off by mortar fire.

“We were trying to maintain peace,” said Mayor Andjelko Kolasinac, standing on the town hall steps. “But they were planning all along. And it happened in a split second.”

By late Tuesday, Serbian police had fought their way to the center of the hillside town, followed by refugee and aid agencies searching for victims of the worst fighting in five months of ethnic conflict between Serbian forces and the ethnic Albanian rebels.

Reporters on a Serb-led tour of the town found a few dozen Albanians still hiding in their houses. Two men said that they had looked out a window hours earlier to see 10 tractors being loaded with bodies.

The claim could not be independently confirmed. But The Kosovo Information Center, close to the province’s ethnic Albanian leaders, reported 52 ethnic Albanian civilians were killed, including some dragged from their homes and shot.

In Orahovac, nervous-looking Serbian police guarded dusty streets covered with broken glass from shop windows. Shoes and plastic bags sticky with blood lay in an alley near a mosque.

Kosovo, a southern province in Serb-led Yugoslavia, has a population of 2 million people--90% of them ethnic Albanians. Many of the ethnic Albanians want independence from the oppressive regime of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

Despite its Albanian majority, Orahovac has a Serbian mayor because Albanians have boycotted elections since Milosevic stripped the province of its autonomy in 1989.

At least 350 people have been killed since Milosevic cracked down on Albanian militants in late February.