Tens of Thousands Protest Throughout Kosovo

Tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians staged Kosovo’s biggest protest in a decade Monday to condemn a brutal Serbian police assault that left as many as 77 people dead in the separatist-minded province.

Relatives of many Albanians killed in the sweep refused to claim the bodies, demanding autopsies by foreign pathologists.

Riot police with submachine guns sat in buses on side streets as about 50,000 Albanians demonstrated in Pristina, the provincial capital. It was the first time the police had tolerated such a protest since Kosovo was stripped of its autonomous status in 1989.

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, has kept its 2 million people in submission with a heavy police presence but now faces a budding armed challenge from the small Kosovo Liberation Army.

After winding down the nine-day offensive Sunday, Milosevic reined in his security forces to avoid new bloodshed Monday as officials from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia met in London to condemn his police methods and debate how to punish them.

Still, a cameraman for Britain’s Independent Television News was beaten by three Serbs in Pristina after he filmed one of them waving a gun at the Albanian protesters and kissing it. Albanian journalists said the police fired tear gas to disperse protesters in Pec, Klina and Lipljan but tolerated rallies in three other towns.

The 50-minute rally in Pristina echoed with chants of “Drenica,” the name of the valley targeted by the police assault, and “Europe, where are you?” One sign in the crowd read: “We’ll give our lives, but won’t give up Kosovo.”

Official news broadcasts in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, called the rallies a show of support for terrorism. Serbian television read statements of support for the police crackdown from local officials across the country and from the political movement led by Mirjana Markovic, Milosevic’s wife.

Serbian officials put the death toll in the Kosovo violence at 46 Albanians and six Serbian police. They said that most of the dead were separatist guerrillas or sympathizers who resisted police orders to abandon their village homes.

But Enver Maloku of the Albanian-run Kosovo Information Center said that at least 77 Albanians died--25 who were buried last Tuesday and 52 who were killed in two villages, Donji Prekaz and Lausa, during four days of mortar and artillery shelling that ended Sunday.

Police kept the valley sealed off and under heavy patrol Monday in a continuing search for guerrillas. But Serbian authorities gave the International Committee of the Red Cross permission to go there today to aid an estimated 5,000 people who fled the assault and are still homeless.