Angry Kosovo Serbs Bury Couple Killed by Mortars

With an American tank keeping guard nearby, a procession of angry Kosovo Serbs on Tuesday buried a young couple killed by a volley of mortar fire from the neighboring ethnic Albanian village.

A Serbian Orthodox priest and young men bearing two large crosses and wreaths led the way for the coffins, carried on tractor-drawn carts, as wailing mourners blamed NATO peacekeepers for failing to protect them.

Nine mortar rounds slammed into Klokot late Monday, and one shell hit a fence post, killing a man and a woman standing nearby, said U.S. Cpl. Michael Sibert, who was on foot patrol during the attack and had to take cover.

Two large bloodstains marked the gravel road by the fence, near a pile of bandages, rubber gloves and other medical debris. The woman was killed instantly, and U.S. soldiers gave first aid to the man for 10 minutes before he died, Sibert said. The man and woman were ages 24 and 23, villagers said.

The attack underscored the failure of the NATO-led peacekeeping force to halt the unrest that has rocked Kosovo since Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic launched a bloody crackdown on ethnic Albanian rebels.

In a separate incident, an 8-year-old ethnic Albanian boy was shot and wounded late Monday in the village of Petrovce, near Klokot in the sector patrolled by U.S. troops about 25 miles from Pristina.

Attacks against Serbs by revenge-minded ethnic Albanians have persisted since North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Russian troops entered Kosovo on June 12 to enforce a Western-dictated peace plan that ended the 78-day NATO bombing campaign of Yugoslavia.

Most of Kosovo’s 200,000 Serbs have fled the Yugoslav province, despite a U.N. and NATO commitment to a multiethnic Kosovo.

During the Serbian crackdown, Milosevic’s forces drove more than 800,000 ethnic Albanians from their homes. An estimated 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed.

Residents of Klokot have watched as Serbs in neighboring mixed-ethnicity towns, like Zitinje, fled and ethnic Albanians burned their vacated homes. But Klokot’s Serbs insisted that they would remain.

“We don’t have anywhere to go,” cried Ljubica Marinkovic, an elderly woman outside a house with a mortar hole in the roof. “Should we just go on the street?”

Villagers blamed the Kosovo Liberation Army for the attack, but there was no indication whether the ethnic Albanian guerrilla group was behind the mortar fire. Under a demilitarization agreement signed in June, the KLA is supposed to have turned in all its mortars to NATO peacekeepers.