U.N. Vows to Improve Protection for Serbs

United Nations officials and a top aide to the leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army on Thursday condemned the apparent execution-style slayings of dozens of Serbs in what investigators suspect is a campaign of revenge by ethnic Albanians.

“In what appears to be a ratcheting up of pressure on the Serbs with these continuing attacks, we’re stepping up our plans for protection,” said Kevin Kennedy, a spokesman for U.N. Special Representative Bernard Kouchner. “There’s a strong feeling that more needs to be done, and we’re going to do it.”

Kennedy was responding to a report in The Times in which Maj. John Wooldridge, a British criminal investigator with the NATO-led peacekeeping force known as KFOR, said that dozens of Serbs have been killed in execution-style shootings in the British-controlled sector in and around the provincial capital, Pristina, in the weeks since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization occupied Kosovo on June 12.

He said the killings shared common characteristics, such as the victims having their hands bound and being made to kneel before being shot in the head. Many also were blindfolded. Seven bodies were found within a few hundred yards of one another during a three-week period last month at a popular trash dumping site.

Reacting to the violence, Kennedy said officials were “pulling out all the stops” in an effort to have officers from the U.N.’s fledgling police force on the streets patrolling with NATO troops by next week. He said there also were immediate plans to place kiosk-style police substations at “strategic” sites around Kosovo, predominantly in and around areas with minority populations.

“We’re doing everything we can,” Kennedy said.

Regjep Selimi, minister of order for the quasi-government made up chiefly of members of the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army, also denounced the slayings.

“This is not only a concern for the military police of NATO, it concerns us too,” said Selimi, a confidant of KLA political leader Hashim Thaci. “One reason it concerns us is that people are being killed. Another reason it concerns us is that it’s being blamed on the KLA.”

Military investigators have not implicated the KLA in connection with the attacks, but many Serbs suspect the former rebel army and its affiliates of committing the killings in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s main republic.

“It’s not logical to think the KLA is doing all this,” Selimi said. “Many people are frustrated because they lost a member of their family and these people don’t have the patience for the Serbs to be tried in a court. If they are angry, they will shoot them immediately.”

Meanwhile, the commander of U.S. forces in Kosovo expressed optimism that peacekeepers are starting to get control over such revenge killings.

“It’s tough work, it’s difficult and complex, but it’s starting to work,” Army Brig. Gen. John Craddock said in a telephone news conference with reporters at the Pentagon. “We believe the situation is better now than it was a week ago or a few days ago.”

He said U.S. peacekeepers have increased their emphasis on crime prevention and on encouraging Serbs to remain in their homes.

State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said it is unrealistic to expect the NATO-led peacekeepers to prevent all revenge attacks.

“It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, after 10 long years of repression and crackdown and attacks on the rights of . . . the Albanian people of Kosovo, that when the Albanians were freed from these shackles, that there would be the potential for revenge and retaliation against Serbs,” Rubin said. “And it is simply not possible for NATO to be in a position to ensure that all the Serbs stay or that every Serb is free from violence.”

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