Pullout to Deflect NATO Raises Ire of Kosovo Serbs

The threat of NATO airstrikes on Yugoslavia subsided Tuesday as most Serbian security forces withdrew from the besieged province of Kosovo, but Serbian villagers kept their guns and grenades primed to defend the land they hold sacred.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization ambassadors meeting in Brussels did keep up the pressure on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, reserving the right to launch an attack if he backtracks on a pact agreed to two weeks ago to bring peace to the province.

“This is a chance, not a guarantee,” President Clinton said in Washington. “That is why NATO agreed to retain the authority, the forces and the readiness to act if Mr. Milosevic backslides on his commitments.”

But the sizable Serbian pullout accomplished by a Tuesday deadline was enough to forestall military action.

Rejecting suggestions that the alliance had let Milosevic wriggle off the hook, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said the Yugoslav leader has already lost his dream of a Greater Serbia, and she predicted that the pact, which includes moves toward more self-rule for Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority, will further erode his influence.

“Kosovo, which he kind of saw as his backyard or his own preserve, has now become--the problem has become internationalized,” she said. Kosovo is in southern Serbia, the larger of Yugoslavia’s remaining republics.

In Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana reported that “over the past 24 hours, over 4,000 members of the [Serbian] special police have withdrawn from Kosovo. Police and military units based in Kosovo are moving back to their barracks with their heavy weapons.

“It is the pressure and our credible threat to use force that have changed the situation in Kosovo for the better,” he said.

That feeling was not shared by the residents of Svinjare, a small Serbian enclave in northwest Kosovo surrounded by four ethnic Albanian villages. Like mine worker Milan Antic, who carries an AK-47 assault rifle in the village’s volunteer defense unit, they feel sold out by their government, left exposed to retribution by ethnic Albanian guerrillas--and ready to fight.

“It’s going to be very tricky after these police and army withdrawals,” Antic said. “We’re going to have bigger clashes with the Albanians, that’s for sure.”

As the dozens of Serbian tanks and armored vehicles rolled out of the province atop train cars and tractor trailers, hundreds of ethnic Albanian refugees trekked back to homes they abandoned during eight months of war.

Ninety percent of Kosovo’s 2 million people are ethnic Albanians. Most of the others are Serbs who see themselves as the last line of defense in what they regard as Serbia’s historic heartland.

About 200 of Kosovo’s most nationalistic Serbs live in Svinjare, about 30 miles northwest of Kosovo’s capital, Pristina. Their houses line the village’s only street, which cars share with horse carts.

Antic was guarding the entrance to the village Tuesday with his assault rifle and a small metal paddle that said: “Stop. Militia.”

He was standing by a bunker made of logs and plastic tarp, leaning on the butt of his rifle and listening to Serbian folk songs blaring out the open hatch of his Yugo.

Although he looked relaxed enough, Antic said he expects ethnic Albanians to take advantage of the much weaker presence of security forces to try to drive Serbs like him out of Kosovo.

He is convinced that NATO is conspiring with Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas to hand the province over to ethnic Albanian separatists even though Western governments insist that Kosovo should remain in Yugoslavia.

To foreign eyes, the massive Serbian offensive last summer amounted to Bosnian-style “ethnic cleansing” because paramilitary police and soldiers shelled and burned homes and drove out up to 300,000 refugees.

To the Serbs of Svinjare, it was legitimate self-defense against separatists whom they consider terrorists.

“Neither the West, nor anybody else, is going to be successful in taking Kosovo from us,” Antic said. “It’s clear that the West is taking the side of terrorists.”

The center of Svinjare is the Club, a cafe and bar about the size of a living room. Proprietor Milos Drobjankovic, 79, pours shot glasses of a clear liquid with a vodka kick, and offers beer and thick black coffee as chasers.

Mladen Jovic, 33, had already had a few by midday. The mining engineer, who is also a volunteer militiaman, wore a black hand grenade pinned to his Calvin Klein belt and a 9-millimeter handgun in a leather holster.

Serbs and the ethnic Albanians from the next village weren’t exactly perfect neighbors, but they used to get along fine before guerrilla attacks escalated into all-out war last March, Jovic said.

A few ethnic Albanians even lived in Svinjare, and a few Serbs had homes in the neighboring ethnic Albanian village, but attacks and counterattacks have dug deep trenches between the two.

Now Jovic, who locks on with a cold stare when he talks about demands for Kosovo’s independence, says the only way he will give up his land is if he’s dead.

“There is no way an independent Kosovo can exist,” he said. “The Serbian people have been living here for centuries and will not allow this, regardless of what agreements are signed.”

If that means more killing, so be it, Jovic said. But later, as he offered a taste of the homemade brandy he makes from plums that grow in his front yard, Jovic was slightly less belligerent.

His three children were with him in the living room, two girls and a boy between ages 4 and 7, and he recalled how someone shot at them while they were playing in the garden next to his house.

“For the first time, I was scared, because if you lose your kids, none of this is worth it,” Jovic said.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.