U.S. Holds First POW as Refugee Flow Rises

As exhausted and terrified Kosovo Albanians poured into Macedonia and Albania in accelerating numbers Friday, the Pentagon announced that it is holding its first prisoner of war from the Balkan campaign, a Yugoslav army officer captured by the insurgent Kosovo Liberation Army.

The Pentagon said the officer was seized by the KLA in an overnight ground operation Wednesday near Junik, on the Yugoslav border with Albania. The KLA turned him over to the Albanian government, which delivered him to U.S. custody Friday.

“He was flown on a U.S. helicopter from northern Albania to Tirana, where he is currently under the control of U.S. military authorities,” the Pentagon said in a statement.

One of the most significant aspects of the capture is that it demonstrates that the KLA, earlier thought to have been ravaged by a fierce Yugoslav offensive, is still a fighting force. In addition, by holding a POW, the United States may be in a position to arrange a trade that would return three U.S. soldiers captured last month on the Kosovo-Macedonian border.

On Friday, about 6,000 refugees entered Macedonia at two border crossings, according to State Department spokesman James P. Rubin, while 3,000 reached Albania and a staggering 7,000 ethnic Albanians fled to Montenegro, Serbia’s junior partner in the two-republic Yugoslavia. Up to 100,000 more may be on their way to Macedonia, one U.N. official said.

Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said the new influx was caused by a combination of stepped-up attacks by Serbian forces and food shortages among refugees who have fled to the mountains inside Kosovo.

The U.S. and its NATO allies neared agreement on a plan to give private humanitarian groups the job of trying to get food to hundreds of thousands of displaced people trapped in Kosovo, a province of Serbia.

“It may be the only realistic chance” to aid the ethnic Albanians who have been unable to reach Kosovo’s borders, one U.S. official said of the proposal to rely on nongovernmental relief workers.

The fate of the internally displaced, estimated to number between 250,000 and 500,000, has been a matter of increasing concern within NATO because the people are cut off from even the rudimentary food, medicine and shelter that is available to the refugees who have reached neighboring countries.

On Monday, North Atlantic Treaty Organization foreign ministers instructed the organization’s military command to come up with a way to aid the internally displaced population.

But U.S. officials say the only two plausible military options--airdrops of supplies from low-flying transport planes and the use of ground troops to open and then secure relief supply lines--have been ruled out because they would be too dangerous for allied military personnel.

That left the option of allowing private aid workers to try to get permission from the Yugoslav government to enter the separatist province. A Greek organization is working there now, but it is too small to accomplish the job.

The surge of refugees out of Kosovo on Friday was punctuated by new reports of mass killing inside the province. “We are developing evidence that is rather compelling . . . that in west central Kosovo, west of Pristina, there is evidence of mass killings and graves associated with those mass killings,” Rubin said. He added that the graves numbered “more than a few dozen” and had not been reported previously.

In London, Gen. Charles Guthrie, chief of the Defense Staff, quoted refugee witnesses as saying that near the town of Srbica, “the area is full of unburied cadavers. Everywhere you go you see killings, everywhere you move, all you can see is bodies.”

At Brazda, in Macedonia near the border with Yugoslavia, refugees arrived telling harrowing stories of hiding in the woods for days on end or traveling from village to village, sleeping in basements to evade their Serbian tormentors.

Hankije Ahmeti, 22, and her family were forced out of their tiny family farm in Lojza, a village near Urosevac, two weeks ago. They had spent most of the days since then hiding in the woods near the village of Stimlje with about 500 people who were camped out in makeshift shelters constructed from plastic bags. Serbian forces knew the Kosovo Albanians were in the area and fired grenades at it, the refugees said.

“It was like a nightmare,” Ahmeti said about the time she spent hiding in the woods. “I couldn’t sleep more than a few hours a night, because I never felt safe. I was always frightened for my life.”

In the Detroit suburbs Friday, President Clinton faced a crowd of about 200 Serbian American demonstrators, who blew whistles and chanted. “Serbia today, who next,” one sign read as Clinton’s motorcade rolled by.

Undeterred, Clinton repeated his defense of the NATO bombing campaign, telling listeners that in the face of Serbia’s brutal “ethnic cleansing” campaign, the United States must not have to ask “why we couldn’t lift a finger to do anything about it.”

In the air war, NATO planes pounded targets in Serbia and Montenegro, taking advantage of improved flying weather, according to Brig. Gen. Giuseppe Marani of the Italian air force, who briefed reporters at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels.

Earlier, Montenegro had been bombed sparingly because the U.S. and its allies have no quarrel with the republic’s democratically elected government. But in attacks Thursday night and Friday, warplanes hit Montenegro’s Podgorica Airfield, a base for Yugoslav military aircraft.

Other targets throughout Yugoslavia included tanks, artillery sites, radar installations, an ammunition plant, petroleum facility supply roads and army and police headquarters, NATO officials said.

At the Pentagon, Maj. Gen. Charles Wald, an aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said long-awaited Apache helicopters--one of the most potent weapons in the U.S. arsenal against tanks and troop formations--will begin arriving in Albania on Sunday.

Wald also disclosed that NATO is hitting targets 24 hours a day, a substantial escalation from the nighttime-only schedule of the early days of the war.

“It’s pretty routine round the clock, and the pressure is kept on all the time now,” Wald said.

Daytime bombing is more dangerous to pilots because antiaircraft missile crews get a better look at the aircraft, so the 24-hour schedule shows acceptance of substantially greater risks.

In other developments:

* The administration said it will ask Congress for an emergency appropriation of $6 billion to pay for U.S. military and humanitarian aid operations in the Balkans--a move that is likely to set off a new scramble over money on Capitol Hill. The request, to be sent to lawmakers Monday, is expected to include between $5.3 billion and $5.35 billion for continuing the military campaign and $650 million to $700 million for refugee aid. The figures cover the remainder of fiscal 1999, which ends Sept. 30.

* Russia’s lower house of parliament voted 293-54 in favor of bringing Yugoslavia into a three-way union with Russia and Belarus. Lawmakers suggested that making Yugoslavia a formal ally would force a halt to NATO’s bombing because Russia would then be in a position to enter the war. But the vote is not binding on President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government. The Yugoslav parliament voted earlier to seek membership in a Slavic federation uniting the three countries.

* Clinton met in Michigan with members of the family of Army Staff Sgt. Christopher J. Stone, one of three U.S. soldiers captured by Serbian forces near the Yugoslav border with Macedonia on March 31.

* Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in a recorded message to be broadcast to Serbia, said the Yugoslav government was deceiving the Serbian public about the conflict over Kosovo. Albright lived in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, as a child.

* The Yugoslav government rejected a week-old peace proposal by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, dismissing it as “more or less the same” as NATO’s own conditions for ending the bombing. U.N. Ambassador Vladislav Jovanovic delivered a letter from the Yugoslav foreign minister to Annan in a brief closed-door meeting late Friday afternoon.

In Brussels, the UNHCR said the flow of people out of Kosovo was expected to continue unabated Friday and into the weekend.

Total Kosovo Albanian refugees by country before the latest surge were: Montenegro, 74,000; Macedonia, 122,000; Albania, 321,000; Bosnia-Herzegovina, 31,000; other countries to which refugees have been airlifted, 15,000. The total of 548,000, in the weeks since the NATO campaign began, was expected to increase to at least 575,000 by the weekend.

At the Albanian border town of Morine, aid workers said many of the new arrivals were from villages in northern Kosovo that had not been depopulated until recently. Others had been roaming the countryside for weeks in search of a place to stay.

“We have been traveling in villages, in mountains, wherever we found safe houses,” said a visibly exhausted Naxhie Murati, 47, of Mitrovica, whose family was ordered out of their house three weeks ago.

The accounts given by the latest group of refugees matched those of previous influxes. “They’ve faced the standard harassment--robbing, looting, brutalizing, physical assaults,” said Duran Vienneau, a field worker for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, who is stationed at the border. “Unfortunately, all that has become standard.”

The refugees seemed extremely relieved to feel safe for the first time in a long time.

“Today,” said Ajshe Derguti, 47, from Vucitrn, “is the happiest day in my life.”

*

Kempster reported from Washington and Shogren reported from Brazda. Times staff writers Joel Havemann in Brussels; Marc Lacey in Morine, Albania; Maura Reynolds in Moscow; Paul Richter and Art Pine in Washington; and Janet Wilson at the United Nations also contributed to this report.

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War Wrap-Up

A roundup of events as NATO airstrikes continue in Yugoslavia:

* Brussels: NATO said the flow of refugees has suddenly accelerated.

* Kosovo: Evidence suggested U.S. cluster bombs may have hit refugee trucks.

* Michigan: Clinton met humanitarian groups to discuss the refugee crisis.

* Washington: Congress prepared to discuss emergency funding for mission.

Fact Sheet

Reservists sought for activation: 33,000

Reservists activated in Persian Gulf War: 200,000

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Flight Report

Showers today over Belgrade, partly cloudy Sunday, sunny Monday.

TIMES WEBSITE OFFERS UPDATE: latimes.com/yugo