Kosovo Family Torn Asunder by the Terror

Zilfi Halili awoke to predawn gunfire, then heard the heavy thump-thumping of police helicopters close over her village. It was the sound of a new battlefront erupting in the Balkans, just when the region seemed to be calming down.

“I saw them circling,” she said. “They opened the doors of the helicopters and started shooting.”

Halili, 53, reacted as hundreds of thousands of others have across the Balkans in seven years of brutal ethnic warfare. She gathered her two daughters and 24 other women and children from her extended family and set off Thursday on a desperate trek through the forest.

“We just left the house. We didn’t take anything with us,” said the thin peasant woman, her eyes brimming with tears. “The men stayed to protect our homes.”

“God help you!” was the last she heard from her husband, or anyone else left behind in the besieged village of Galica.

Halili is an ethnic Albanian in a desolate, mountainous area called Kosovo. The helicopters were part of the Serbian government’s first major offensive against a budding Albanian separatist insurgency there. The nine-day battle represents the West’s newest nightmare--a brush fire that could engulf the southern Balkans with the ferocity of another Bosnia.

Forty-five Albanians and six Serbian police were killed in the fighting, by official Serbian count. Kosovo’s Albanians say the toll was probably higher from a Serbian blitz that used armored vehicles and heavy artillery to demolish villages of tidy whitewashed houses with tiled roofs, leaving about 5,000 people homeless.

Ethnic Albanians make up 90% of the population of Kosovo--a province of Serbia, which is the dominant part of the rump Yugoslavia. President Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian overlord of Yugoslavia, stripped Kosovo of its autonomous status in 1989 and kept its 2 million people in submission--until recently--with 19,500 heavily equipped police and soldiers.

Now he has a fight on his hands. The emergence of masked guerrillas calling themselves the Kosovo Liberation Army has quickly radicalized the area, undermining the local Albanian leadership’s nonviolent path toward a de facto parallel state with its own taxes, schools, hospitals and other institutions.

Milosevic’s forces struck hard after four patrolmen were slain in a Feb. 27 guerrilla ambush. The police killed 25 people in a sweep that weekend through Drenica, which comprises 33 towns and villages where the guerrillas are said to operate. When 30,000 Albanians gathered in protest, police in riot gear dispersed them with clubs, water cannons and tear gas.

The guerrillas appealed Wednesday for military-age Albanians to join their ranks and avenge the killings. Unidentified gunmen sprayed a police station with gunfire that night, wounding two officers and setting off an even bigger Serbian assault on Drenica--the same assault that drove Halili and her family into the woods.

That offensive wound up Sunday with Serbian forces in control of two near-deserted villages, Donji Prekaz and Lausa, their apparent targets. Journalists escorted through the vicinity by bus said that about half the 50 homes in Donji Prekaz had been heavily damaged or destroyed.

Among them were family compounds belonging to Adem Jasari and Bajram Lustaku. Serbian television identified the two men as senior guerrilla leaders and said they were killed in the assault. Police said they also found four underground bunkers--one storing machine guns and grenades and two others containing beds, operating tables and medical supplies.

“The operation to liquidate the heart of Kosovo terrorism has ended,” Veljko Daljevic, the Serbian deputy chief of Kosovo province, said Sunday. But few in Kosovo believed the guerrillas were defeated, and police manning sandbagged junctions kept the area sealed off.

International observers say they are disturbed by parallels here with the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which ended in November 1995, and by the delayed fallout of a civil war that racked neighboring Albania in the first half of 1997.

“This is ultimately a very, very scary scenario,” said Kris Janowski, a spokesman in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, for the Geneva-based United Nations refugee agency. “We are alarmed because we have seen it all before.”

There were widespread reports last week of wholesale Serbian attacks on civilians, some carried out by the same black-clad paramilitary Interior Ministry troops that employed such tactics in Bosnia. Among those killed in Kosovo were 10 men of the Ahmeti clan, ages 16 to 50, who, according to surviving relatives, surrendered to police at their family compound in Likosani and were taken away alive. Their bodies turned up at a morgue.

Ibrahim Rugova, the moderate elected leader of the Kosovo Albanians’ shadow government, said the police assault was part of an “ethnic cleansing” campaign to rid Kosovo of non-Serbs.

Western leaders have been pushing Milosevic to negotiate Rugova’s demands for autonomy--to no avail. The Yugoslav president made his refusal doubly clear by unleashing the police in Kosovo the same day he was receiving British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital. Kosovo’s future is a purely Yugoslav matter, Milosevic lectured him.

Alarmed by the assault, the United States will press its European allies for punitive measures against Milosevic’s regime at a meeting in London today of the six-nation Contact Group on the former Yugoslav federation, but opposition from Russia is expected to dilute any response.

Observers in Yugoslavia wonder whether anyone--Milosevic, Rugova or any foreign government--can control events in Kosovo now. The fledgling guerrilla army, recently estimated to number 200 fighters, is being fed by Serbian repression, financial contributors in the Albanian diaspora and tens of thousands of guns that have made their way to Kosovo from Communist-era stockpiles in Albania since the conflict there.

“We have all the preconditions for a civil war--long, bloody and with an outcome that will certainly be unfavorable for the Serbian authorities,” Milos Vasic, a liberal, independent commentator, wrote last week in the Belgrade magazine Vreme.

While little is known of the guerrilla group and less about its losses in the past week, the police assault could further weaken the unpopular Rugova’s nonviolent leadership and prompt more Albanians to take up arms, said Baton Haxhiu, editor of Kosovo’s independent Albanian-language newspaper, Koha Ditore.

“Politics is dead in Kosovo. The only politics in Kosovo is the [Kosovo Liberation Army],” he said. “There is no way back after these events in Drenica.”

A bigger fear is that low-intensity combat will spread from Kosovo to neighboring Macedonia, which has a restive Albanian minority and a Kosovo Liberation Army presence. If that happened, analysts warn, neighboring states such as Serbia and Albania, but also Greece, Bulgaria and even Turkey, might be drawn into a tit-for-tat struggle, again plunging the Balkans into a major war.

Times special correspondent Zoran Cirjakovic contributed to this report from Pristina, the capital of Kosovo.