Up to 30,000 Refugees Flee Kosovo in Single Day

Refugees poured out of Kosovo on Saturday at a rate that officials said would soon empty the Serbian province of its ethnic Albanians, and NATO said the flood was loosed by some of the most vicious tactics yet pursued by the forces of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

As many as 23,000 refugees crossed into Albania on Saturday, and 7,000 more of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians escaped into Macedonian refugee camps that a hard rain had turned into muddy pits. Serbian guards turned back as many as 3,000 others at the Macedonian border because they lacked passports, a new policy that split many families.

For the most part, Saturday’s new arrivals--many of whom probably have been living in the open since being expelled from their homes weeks ago--were weaker and sicker than the hundreds of thousands of refugees who preceded them. Those who crossed into Macedonia were crammed as many as 100 to a shelter after having spent up to five days crossing steep mountain passes on foot.

And these, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea suggested, were the lucky ones. Refugees told of two recent instances of mass killings inside Kosovo, one claiming 60 lives and the other 45, Shea said, and alliance reconnaissance planes have spotted evidence of several new mass graves.

“Some refugees have even reported that Kosovar Albanians have been forced to dig these mass graves and put the bodies in,” Shea said. Since NATO began its bombing campaign 25 days ago to stop “ethnic cleansing,” the alliance estimates that 3,200 people have been killed in Kosovo.

At the Albanian border post of Morine, refugees were arriving at the rate of up to 1,000 an hour on Saturday, only to find refugee camps already full.

“I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” said Dutch police officer Den Ouden, who was assisting Albanian border guards. “For three days, I’ve seen this line of people. I can’t imagine what they’ve been through.”

It was not clear why, after recently choking off the exodus of refugees, Milosevic’s forces had increased the expulsions into Macedonia again.

But the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said that rebels from the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, which has continued to fight the Serbs, also had managed to open a corridor for trapped refugees to escape to the Albanian border. The NATO officials did not elaborate.

Among the refugees who crossed into Albania on Saturday was a young couple who pushed a baby carriage holding their infant son and the family possessions they managed to save.

“Someday, I’m going to tell my son that our land is very valuable, and that all that blood lost by KLA soldiers meant freedom for us,” said the young mother, 22-year-old Naallbani Baruti.

Her 24-year-old husband, Ylli, had hidden among a group of women to avoid capture by Serbian soldiers. He vowed to return one day to their hometown, Djakovica, in western Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia, the dominant republic in Yugoslavia.

Joining the KLA on Saturday were more than 100 Albanian Americans who arrived in the Albanian capital, Tirana. They ranged in age from a 70-year-old man to a 16-year-old girl.

Yugoslav forces appear able to roust people from their homes practically at will despite what NATO insists has been an extremely successful bombing campaign.

Ethnic Albanians made up about 90% of Kosovo’s 2 million people, but the U.N. refugee agency has estimated that no more than 600,000 of the ethnic Albanians who lived in Kosovo in 1991 remain there.

Some fled during a year of fighting between Serbian forces and the KLA that preceded the NATO bombing campaign. More than 550,000 have fled since the bombing started, including more than 100,000 to Macedonia and more than 300,000 to Albania.

The reason for the Yugoslavs’ apparent success, alliance officials indicated Saturday, lies in the mismatch between NATO’s air war and the nature of “ethnic cleansing.”

Because NATO fears a public backlash against its aerial campaign if Yugoslav antiaircraft batteries kill even a single pilot, its planes have been releasing their bombs only from high altitudes. From a typical altitude of 15,000 feet, the planes can take out air defense systems, oil depots, transportation lines, command-and-control facilities and even some tanks--but not the bulk of the Yugoslav forces themselves.

The Pentagon has determined that NATO strikes have begun to hurt Yugoslavia’s air defense system, which is no longer as “robust” or “sophisticated” as it was, said Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Wald, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

But the Yugoslav military has been able to “patch things up,” Wald said. “They still have a very dangerous and capable air defense system.”

“We cannot totally prevent ethnic cleansing,” said Italian air force Brig. Gen. Giuseppe Marani, especially if NATO puts a high premium on avoiding civilian casualties. “But I wouldn’t at all say that there is not much we can do to prevent ethnic cleansing with air power.”

Shea said the Yugoslav shock troops who have been burning ethnic Albanians out of their homes depend on tanks for cover. As those tanks are knocked out, the troops will find themselves vulnerable.

NATO claimed it destroyed seven more tanks overnight Friday.

U.S. Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, commander of NATO forces, confirmed earlier reports that some of the U.S. Apache helicopters to be used against Serbian forces would arrive in Albania “very shortly.” Clark flew to Albania and Macedonia to launch NATO’s own refugee assistance program.

He warned Milosevic to change his policies or see his military machine destroyed.

U.S. troops were covering the ground of the rain-soaked airport in Tirana with metal matting to prevent the choppers from sinking. The tank-killing AH-64s, which were highly effective against Iraqi ground forces in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, were in Italy awaiting the last leg of their journey from U.S. bases in Germany.

Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, commander of Yugoslav forces in Kosovo and elsewhere in southern Yugoslavia, warned NATO that it would face 150,000 armed men if it mounted a ground assault on Kosovo--a strategy that NATO is not now contemplating.

“Even if every third bullet [my men] fire hits a target,” Pavkovic said, “it will be a price the aggressor will have to pay for coming into our country.”

The new onslaught of refugees has so strained the U.N. refugee agency’s capacity that U.N. officials are contemplating a resumption of airlifts to more distant countries. It is the U.N. refugee agency’s goal to keep as many refugees as close to Kosovo as possible to make it easier for them to return home.

About 10,000 refugees have already been evacuated from Macedonia to Germany, and 6,000 more have been sent to Turkey and other NATO members. France and Belgium are expected to receive their first refugees today.

The U.S. has said it could take 20,000 refugees at its Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, but few of the refugees have expressed any interest in going there. Canada has offered to take 10,000. Germany, as chair of the European Union, suggested that the West as a whole might take in 100,000. In Washington, the Pentagon said Saturday that Guantanamo would be ready to receive the first wave of 500 to 700 refugees within a couple of days.

In other developments:

* Yugoslav media reported that in air strikes late Saturday and early today, a 3-year-old child was killed and five people were injured in a Belgrade suburb, and that NATO planes raided a refinery in the city of Novi Sad.

* Pristina, the provincial capital of Kosovo, came under renewed airstrikes early today following an unusually quiet Saturday. A heavy explosion shook central Pristina before dawn as targets on the city’s fringe were hit during several waves of attacks by NATO warplanes.

* A car filled with refugees fleeing their homes in Kosovo struck a land mine as it approached the Yugoslav border with Albania today, killing five people, international observers said. Andrea Angeli, spokesman for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said the vehicle exploded in flames about 20 yards before the border crossing at Morine.

* In its strongest language yet, the Vatican denounced the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo as an atrocity that is “un-Christian and inhuman.”

* The Serbian prisoner of war captured by the KLA and eventually turned over to the U.S. military was allowed to write to his family and has seen a doctor, who described his condition as “good,” the Pentagon said. The prisoner, a lieutenant whose name has not been disclosed, is being treated as a POW and afforded the rights guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions, deputy Pentagon spokesman Michael Doubleday said.

Doubleday said it was “premature” to consider a possible swap for one or more of the three American servicemen.

* The Pentagon said the proposal to call up about 30,000 reservists was still on the drawing board and would not be ready to forward to the White House until sometime next week.

* In an indication of jitters in the region about possible future ground operations, Hungary on Saturday ruled out the possibility of becoming a staging area. “Using Hungary as a base . . . is out of the question,” Defense Minister Janos Szabo was quoted as telling the state-run MTI news agency. Hungary joined NATO last month.

*

Havemann reported from Brussels and Wright from Washington. Times staff writers Paul Watson in Pristina, T. Christian Miller in Macedonia and Marc Lacey in Albania also contributed to this report.

Many charities are accepting contributions to help refugees from Kosovo. The list may be found at https://www.latimes.com/kosovoaid.

* BORDER BLOCKADE: Serbian guards are stopping refugees without passports from entering Macedonia. A20

* THE OTHER BALKAN CONFLICT: Yugoslavia’s invisible fault line of religion has two faiths seeking regional dominance. A21