Kosovo Conflict Grows With Army’s Presence

It was when the Yugoslav army arrived--heavily armed soldiers outfitted in camouflage, their faces painted dark--that 32-year-old Idriz decided to send away his wife and children.

Violence that rocked Serbia’s Albanian-dominated Kosovo province had until then remained the work of brutal but badly organized police. The deployment of Yugoslav troops late last month, however, upped the ante and opened a new front in the battle for Kosovo.

On Sunday, fighting raged 10 miles south of Idriz’s home and just a few miles from the border with Albania. At least four Serbian police officers and an unknown number of ethnic Albanians were wounded in the mortar and machine-gun attack. Helicopters flew overhead and, throughout the weekend, streets here in Decani remained deserted.

“Every day, we expect a massacre,” Idriz said.

In the two months since the government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic launched a ferocious crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists fighting for the independence of Kosovo, more than 120 people have been killed and thousands driven from their homes.

Peacekeeping bodies with a heavy U.S. presence, such as NATO, are increasingly being called on to stop the bloodshed, which American officials fear might spill into neighboring Balkan states.

But the conflict appears only to deepen.

While government troops mass around two suspected guerrilla strongholds and attempt to intercept the flow of smuggled weapons, rebel forces are growing in number and boldness--and perhaps well beyond the control of the Kosovo Albanians’ civilian authorities. Daily skirmishes claim many victims, and diplomatic negotiations stalled before they ever began.

With no political solution in sight, race-baiting propaganda filling the air and a divided international community unable to agree on decisive action, Kosovo appears headed for a long, messy summer of war.

“I am afraid that a big conflict is coming that will spiral out of everyone’s control,” said Mahmut Bakalli, a prominent ethnic Albanian politician and member of a 15-member committee established to participate in any eventual negotiations.

Ethnic Albanians make up an estimated 90% of Kosovo’s population of 2 million and refuse to recognize Serbia’s strong-arm rule. Serbs, on the other hand, cherish Kosovo as the legendary birthplace of their medieval civilization, and Milosevic has effectively stoked nationalist resolve never to relinquish the impoverished province.

After a series of armed attacks on Serbian police stations attributed to a group calling itself the Kosovo Liberation Army, Milosevic, who revoked Kosovo’s provincial autonomy in 1989, launched a crackdown in late February and early March that killed more than 80 ethnic Albanians, including a number of children.

Most of the fighting took place in the historically rebellious region of Kosovo known as Drenica, a hilly triangle roughly 20 miles west of Pristina, the provincial capital.

Troops Open Fire

The Serb-dominated Yugoslav army fully joined the fight on April 23, when troops battled what authorities said was a column of 200 ethnic Albanian gunrunners infiltrating Kosovo from neighboring Albania. They were detected crossing the notoriously rugged Damned Mountains, as they are known, that separate the two countries. At least 22 Albanians were killed in the fighting that day, the army said.

Large numbers of troops continued to pour into the region, shifting the fight westward to a swath that runs south from Decani and that roughly parallels Kosovo’s border with Albania. With tanks and heavy artillery, the soldiers are digging in around an artificial lake not far from the village of Glodjane, a reputed headquarters of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

The strategy of the Yugoslav army and police special units appears to be to flank and encircle two principal rebel strongholds--in Drenica and around Glodjane--while cutting off attempts by the guerrillas to link the two and establish supply routes from Albania.

The guerrillas are also fortifying and organizing themselves, smuggling into their territory new shipments of weapons and recruiting and training new fighters.

Rebels Hold Ground

While government forces manning heavily sandbagged checkpoints control the main roads and towns, armed Albanians hold sway over parts of Kosovo’s rural territory. Just weeks ago, encountering a patrol of rebels was a furtive experience for journalists roaming the countryside. Now it is nearly routine, even as the rolling hills become lush green knolls painted with yellow, white and periwinkle-blue splotches of wildflowers.

Weather, foliage, time and delay all work in the rebels’ favor. The first round of fighting, and the police atrocities that accompanied it, radicalized many young Albanian men and fed the ranks of the guerrilla army.

“Since we are dead anyway, we might as well achieve something with our deaths,” said a father of two in Decani, indicating his newfound support for the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Last week, the group warned that it must be included in any negotiations, saying that an agreement without its participation would be meaningless.

But on both military and political fronts, the Albanians and Serbs appear to be moving further away from a solution. Serbian authorities are offering to negotiate under conditions they know the Albanians cannot accept, while the Albanians do not seem to be in much of a hurry to seize the initiative and jump-start the talks.

Funerals in Kosovo have become daily events. After Serbian police opened fire on the burial of an ethnic Albanian last week, killing a mourner, the bereaved have taken to holding funerals at dusk in order to be less visible and less vulnerable.

Attacks by Albanian gunmen have also increased. Serbian sources say that 11 Serbs have been kidnapped in Kosovo since April 22. Three were freed, and two turned up dead.

Milosevic on April 23 engineered a “national referendum” to show that the Serbian people support his Kosovo policy and reject foreign mediators, whom the Albanians are demanding.

In fact, the Albanians have put much faith in the West stepping up to save the day. But at three “urgent” meetings of the six-nation Contact Group, which monitors Balkan conflicts, the United States failed to agree with its European allies and Russia on all but cosmetic measures to pressure Milosevic.

At its most recent meeting, last week in Rome, the Contact Group agreed to the symbolic freezing of Yugoslav bank accounts abroad and set a May 9 deadline before slapping restrictions on foreign investment in Serbia.

Ethnic Hatreds Grow

The rhetoric coming out of Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, is clearly designed to whip up ethnic hatred. State television portrays Serbs as perennial victims of Albanian violence. Newspapers must refer to slain Albanians as “terrorists.”

But war propaganda is not the exclusive property of one side. Kosovo’s Albanians, most of whom have satellite dishes tilted toward the Albanian capital, Tirana, were treated over the weekend to a fawning homage to Adem Jashari, a Kosovo Liberation Army commander slain in March with most of his family during a two-day shootout with police.