Kosovo Villagers Cross Into Albania to Escape Fighting

Thousands of villagers fled across the border to Albania on Monday, trying to escape heavy fighting in Serbia’s Kosovo province amid reports that dozens of residents had been killed.

Albania called on the United States and the European Union to intervene to end “the massacre in Kosovo,” calling the fighting “the start of a war with tragical dimensions.”

Conflicting accounts of the number of casualties in Kosovo’s sealed-off areas could not immediately be resolved. But the bloodshed appeared to be the worst since early March, when Serbian police killed more than 80 people in a crackdown on ethnic Albanian militants.

The latest fighting prompted at least 2,000 Kosovo Albanians, mostly women, children and elderly, to stream out of the troubled region beginning Sunday and cross into Albania, authorities said Monday. More refugees were arriving by the hour, they said.

Many of the refugees had walked for hours to reach safety. Albanian officials were providing food and clothes for them.

Serbian officials are trying to block independence sentiment in Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians outnumber Serbs 9 to 1. More than 200 people have died in Kosovo clashes since March. About half of the Serbian province is now controlled by militant ethnic Albanians.

Serbs claimed Sunday to have killed several dozen militants in four villages in the Decani region of western Kosovo. Ethnic Albanian officials said Monday that 37 Albanians had been killed over the weekend.

Twenty-seven died in clashes in Decani while 10 were killed when Serbian police stormed another village, the ethnic Albanians said.

Two Serbian police officers also died in the fighting around Decani, Serbian sources said. The area is 45 miles west of Pristina, the provincial capital.