Tales of Terror From Refugees Fleeing Kosovo

A 26-year-old student forced to strip naked while soldiers taunted her. An old man shot through the head with a Kalashnikov for moving too slowly. Toddlers forced to walk for miles in their stockinged feet.

Tales of horror, cruelty and depravity emerged Thursday at the Albanian border as more than 10,000 Kosovo Albanians who had been deported from their homes trudged, stumbled or rode across a red line on a bridge that marked the end of life as they had known it.

Many were weeping as they crossed that line, and some journalists and aid workers joined them. The woeful human tide of refugees to Albania and neighboring Macedonia increased dramatically Thursday as Serbs sought to empty Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, of ethnic Albanians.

In Macedonia, thousands of Pristina residents who had been rounded up and forced onto trains, enduring a horrific exodus from Kosovo, huddled together in a damp valley just inside the border as darkness fell.

Many of the refugees, including children and the elderly, had already spent one night exposed to the elements and faced the prospect of a second night in the cold surrounded by low mountains only about 15 miles from Skopje, the Macedonian capital.

Macedonian officials were swamped by the massive scale of the influx, and aid workers were overwhelmed and unable to provide adequate food or any kind of shelter at the border.

From time to time, the few Red Cross volunteers on the Macedonian border rushed from the crowd carrying seriously ill refugees on stretchers. But the situation was clearly too much for the volunteers and authorities to handle.

“It’s the first time during all the wars in the former Yugoslavia that they’re doing this: ethnic cleansing by train,” said Kris Janowski, a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. “They are clearly trying to empty out Pristina of ethnic Albanians.”

The U.N. refugee agency estimated Thursday evening that 20,000 to 25,000 refugees were stranded in the Macedonian valley, and there were reports that trains with thousands more refugees were on their way.

In Albania, about 120,000 Kosovo Albanians have arrived in the country since last Friday, including about 15,000 on Thursday alone, refugee officials said. The arrivals were coming so quickly that officials on the Albanian side were unable to provide enough transportation to move the refugees from the border to the nearest town, Kukes, about 12 miles away.

As a result, 3,000 refugees were left sitting on an Albanian mountainside Thursday night. No one knew how many were still waiting to be allowed across by Serbian police in Kosovo, but aid officials in Kukes acknowledged that the line could still be miles long.

A U.N. refugee agency official said it looked more and more as if Serbian forces in Kosovo have embarked on a policy of mass deportation reminiscent of Europe in World War II. Two women and two children died Thursday from dehydration and exposure to the elements on the Albanian side of the border, said U.N. refugee agency spokeswoman Laura Boldrini. An old man was said to have died “from nothing but fright.”

After days in which the refugees arriving in Albania had been from villages and towns in southern Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia, the influx Thursday came largely from Pristina. Refugees told consistent stories of their neighborhoods being surrounded by masked police and soldiers who taunted and robbed them as they told the ethnic Albanian population to vacate the city at once or die.

The refugees said they were marched through the streets of the city to a soccer stadium and a central plaza near the railroad station, where they spent the night in the open, guarded by police with dogs. Then they were loaded onto trains, buses and refrigerator trucks Thursday morning and sent to the border.

“You can’t imagine what kind of silence there was as we walked through the streets of Pristina,” said Leonore Lutoli, 22, a blond woman with a ponytail. “I thought Hitler’s time was coming back, and we were going to some kind of Auschwitz.”

“Nobody believed that we would arrive in Albania. I did not believe I would be here alive today,” said Enver Doda, 22, a former employee of a Kosovo radio station, distraught because he had lost his parents in the confusion.

“Albania or a bullet,” is what Blerim Pereva, 34, said he was told as he was forced out of his home at gunpoint with his wife, who is nine months pregnant.

The stories in Macedonia were frighteningly similar.

They were forced from their homes by armed Serbian troops wearing wool masks over their faces, the refugees said. With thousands of other people, they were ordered to walk toward the railway station, and held for hours in a field near the station. Then they were herded into passenger cars and livestock cars. Their money and their documents were stolen from them either before they got on the train or on the Kosovo side of the border, which is controlled by Serbian forces.

Before the trains departed from Pristina, Serbian troops joked bitterly that refugees were being given free train trips to Macedonia in exchange for their homes and belongings, victims and aid workers said.

Enver Vrajolli, 25, an economics student, said he saw what happened to a neighbor in his 60s who refused to leave his house. He was shot.

“We had only one choice: to leave or be killed. We chose to go,” said Vrajolli, who made the trip in a group of 11 people from two families.

Vrajolli said there was no question in his mind that the Serbian forces were determined to rid Pristina of all ethnic Albanians.

“As we were leaving, it was empty. There were only military forces and police left,” Vrajolli said.

“It was very horrible,” Gjylizare Babatinca, 32, said as she described how her family was forced out of a house Wednesday by masked Serbs with automatic rifles. Her family had been taking refuge at a home in Pristina after being forced out of its own home in the town of Podujevo two months earlier.

“We were forced into the train cars they use for animals. We were packed tightly together,” she said of her train trip Wednesday to the border. “It was completely dark, and we did not know where we were going.”

The accounts showed that it clearly is not a matter of the Kosovo Albanians fleeing of their own accord, the U.N. refugee agency’s Boldrini said in Albania. Now it is blatantly forced removal, she said, with the Serbian authorities ordering people out and even organizing their transport.

“Deportation--this violates every international rule,” she said. “They are organizing this. People want to stay, and they are being forced out.”

Those loaded on buses and trucks were dropped up to 10 miles short of the Albanian border, refugees said, from which they had to walk without food or water. Armed civilians and police abused them all along the way, according to the refugees. One said there were even teenage girls with machine guns ordering them, “Faster, faster.”

It was a scene of almost biblical suffering as they at last arrived: exhausted mothers crossing on foot holding their children’s hands; old men red-eyed from weeping; pregnant women and small children who had lost their families. One very old woman in peasant dress was bent over double, walking with a cane. There was a disabled boy of about 13 crying his eyes out as he struggled to make his way on a pair of purple crutches.

One wagon crammed with people carried the body of an elderly man, mouth open, lying in his daughter’s lap. He had apparently had a heart attack when he saw Serbian police beating his son, a humanitarian aid worker said.

One of the new arrivals, a 26-year-old student named Hajrije Maksutaj, told how she was abused by the soldiers who entered her home. They demanded money and made her undress to prove she had not hidden any on her person.

“I tried to cover myself, and they were laughing at me,” she said, tears streaming down both cheeks. “They said: ‘Why are you upset? Hasn’t your husband ever touched you?’ ”

Doda, the radio station employee, said he saw an old man trying to retrieve his tractor for the journey to the Albanian border. This angered a soldier who thought he was taking too long, and the soldier shot him through the head. “Today, if you kill an Albanian in Kosovo, even the greatest intellectual,” Doda said bitterly, “it is like shooting a dog.”

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Daniszewski reported from Kukes and Shogren from Blace, Macedonia.