News of Pact Not Budging Refugees in Kosovo Hills

The ethnic Albanian refugees shivering against the damp cold on this mountainside in Kosovo listened through the static of pocket radios to news of the deal that’s supposed to save them.

What they heard did nothing to ease the fear that drove them into the forest weeks ago, and in the chill wind of fall there is little time left to convince them that it’s safe to go home.

“We have about a week to 10 days,” said Terry Heselius, an American relief worker who led a short convoy of trucks to help some of the refugees Wednesday. “After that, they’re going to start shivering to death.”

Despite this week’s eleventh-hour deal aimed at ending Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s crackdown in this separatist province, almost 3,500 refugees are still living under homemade tents of plastic tarps in mountain camps in Kishna Reka, nearly 20 miles west of Kosovo’s provincial capital, Pristina.

They are among as many as 50,000 ethnic Albanian refugees who are trying to survive near-freezing nights with only blankets, tarps and fires to keep them warm, foreign relief workers estimate.

Yugoslavia’s government insists that the figures are exaggerated and says the agreement brokered by U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke early Tuesday leaves refugees with nothing to fear.

But the people huddling under plastic sheeting in this camp say that the terms of the deal are too vague to convince them that Milosevic’s police won’t be free to take revenge when the world isn’t watching.

“We are not worried about our ruined houses anymore, because they can be rebuilt someday,” said one ethnic Albanian man who, like many of fighting age, didn’t want to be identified. “We want our freedom.”

As the U.S. and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization turned the screws on Milosevic with the continued threat of airstrikes, many ethnic Albanians were hoping that the bombs will fall.

They imagine that NATO intervention would bring foreign troops to Kosovo, just as in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina at the end of its war in 1995. But Milosevic refused to let NATO soldiers set foot on what foreign governments agree is Yugoslavia’s sovereign territory.

The accord allows 2,000 civilians, backed up by unarmed reconnaissance aircraft, to verify whether Milosevic keeps his promise to pull back Serbian forces from Kosovo.

The aid that Heselius brought from the relief group Mercy Corps International was barely enough to help an encampment of about 1,800 refugees, who had gone three weeks without supplies.

“[The last delivery] was only enough to last them a couple of weeks, so I’m sure they’ve been hurting this last week,” Heselius said.

Wednesday’s relief included 30 camping stoves, some bedrolls, plastic sheeting, 10 tons of flour, 1 1/2 tons of sugar and 2,000 quarts of cooking oil, enough to last about two weeks, Heselius estimated.

If the weather is normal, the almost daily rain will turn to snow, and the small river running through the refugee camp is likely to start icing up by Nov. 1, just as the refugees’ current food stocks run out.

“That tells us what we have to do by that time, and that’s get people back into their homes if possible, or into someplace where they can get warm and stay warm,” Heselius said.

Many of the refugees say they would be willing to go back to the houses with shattered windows or shell-blasted walls and roofs, if only someone could guarantee protection from security forces, he added.

Heselius, a former businessman turned relief worker, has lived in Albania for the past 5 1/2 years and says the refugees trust him enough to go home if he says they should.

But he said he isn’t confident enough after Tuesday’s deal to assure ethnic Albanians that they won’t suffer the retaliation of Serbian security forces.

“They’ve told me: ‘Terry, if I have to live in a cellar or anyplace, I will. I just want to be on my own property. I want to be home, but I’m afraid, because they made promises before and here I am,’ ” Heselius said.

Milosevic is supposed to reduce military levels to what they were in February, before the crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists began. Without specific numbers, there’s too much room for Milosevic to renege, critics of the deal argue.

Although an informal cease-fire has reduced tensions in the province, Kosovo Liberation Army fighters dressed in camouflage combat fatigues drove freely Wednesday along the potholed mountain tracks near the refugee camp. The barrels of their assault rifles poked through open windows.

Just a couple of miles away, past scorched villages, Serbian police officers manned checkpoints along the main road to Pristina.

A local guerrilla commander refused to comment on the deal without permission from higher up, but KLA spokesmen in Europe have rejected the accord, calling the promised 2,000 civilian monitors worthless.

“We think they are good for nothing, and one day they will be hostages of Serb paramilitary and military forces,” spokesman Jashar Salihu said by phone from Switzerland.

“For us, the war will end when Kosovo achieves independence. It’s impossible to live within Yugoslavia with such a criminal regime which destroyed half of Kosovo.”

NATO has given Milosevic until Saturday to prove he is complying with the agreement or face a renewed threat of airstrikes. But NATO didn’t issue the same warning to the KLA guerrillas.

Without armed peacekeepers to separate the warring sides, it wouldn’t take much for the shooting to start again, and those in Kosovo who feel betrayed by the West could be the first to pull the trigger.

“All the world has to know that the only language Milosevic understands is the language of force,” Salihu said. “NATO will make a very big mistake if it stops only with words and does not attack.”

The civilian teams that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is sending in to verify Milosevic’s compliance merely add to diplomatic observers already in the province, argued newspaper publisher Veton Surroi.

Air patrols will only add to pictures already coming from spy satellites, Surroi wrote in an editorial published in his Koha Ditore newspaper.

“ ‘Verifiers’ and air patrols do not create safe surroundings for Albanian refugees either, nor for the potential ones,” Surroi wrote. “Kosovo, through these two concessions, remains the Serb regime’s concentration camp observed by foreigners, from air and land.”