In Kosovo, the Foes Agree: ’99 Will Be Every Bit as Grim

Sitting behind a black desk at the Kosovo Liberation Army headquarters here, a 27-year-old rebel commander known as Remi lighted his Dunhill cigarettes with a camouflage lighter and issued his grim prediction for 1999.

“In the next year, I expect to win and lose a lot of battles,” said Remi, who buried two of his fellow ethnic Albanian soldiers Thursday. “But in the end, we will win the war.”

A couple of miles away in the town of Podujevo, Milovan Tomcic, the Serbian mayor, sounded just as bleak. “I am convinced 1999 will be as hard as ‘98,” he said after leaving a meeting in the town hall with local men who have sent their wives and children away because of the recent clashes here in the north of this Serbian province.

The guns that over Christmas shattered a two-month truce between Kosovo’s separatist ethnic Albanian rebels and Serbian government forces have fallen silent. But as celebratory New Year’s Eve gunfire rang out across Kosovo on Thursday night, there was little optimism on either side that renewed warfare can be avoided.

“I think there has been enough blood spilled and killing,” Tomcic said. “But the situation is very tense, very difficult.”

Serbian civilians have fled villages around Podujevo in recent days, and local officials have called on the government in Belgrade, capital of both Yugoslavia and Serbia, its dominant republic, to guarantee their security. “We have asked our country to intervene,” Tomcic said.

The ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, which began as a ragtag peasant resistance movement, has after 10 months of fighting become a high-tech, mobile guerrilla force and, come spring, it expects renewed heavy conflict.

“The Serbian regime will attack us again,” said Adem Demaci, the group’s general political representative. “But the KLA has become a sophisticated force. They are working very energetically to prepare themselves.”

Near here, on roads bathed in dense fog, the general sense of foreboding found apt expression.

Serbian Tanks Pass Near Rebel Forces

A column of Serbian tanks and trucks carrying troops moved along the main roads between Pristina, the Kosovo capital, and Podujevo, 15 miles to the north. Serbian police, accompanied by armored vehicles, manned roadblocks at the entrances to Podujevo, which teemed with people moving around the streets before nightfall.

Down a small side road, about 200 yards from where the Serbian column passed, ethnic Albanian rebels wearing black uniforms and carrying automatic weapons and sniper rifles stood guard warily.

And in a stark vista in Pristina, heavily armed Serbian police moved along the main drag passing children lined up to sit on the lap of a Santa Claus who was perched under a Happy New Year sign.

“I would assess the situation as still tense, but at the moment the agreement is holding,” said Sandy Blyth, a spokesman for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, which negotiated an end to fighting between the warring parties on Sunday after four days of clashes.

About 700 unarmed OSCE personnel have arrived in Kosovo to monitor an October cease-fire agreed to by U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. By early in the new year, a full force of 2,000 OSCE monitors is expected.

Thursday, the OSCE’s orange jeeps were visible in this area, sometimes parked down the street from Serbian police checkpoints.

But in the rebel stronghold here, the war that ripped Kosovo apart this summer, leaving more than 1,000 people dead and about 300,000 homeless, seems only in temporary abeyance. Most victims of the fighting were ethnic Albanians, who outnumber Serbs in the province 9 to 1.

For two miles along a barely passable dirt road, knots of guerrillas, some wearing wool hats with the letters FBI emblazoned across the front, stood on ridges and emerged from abandoned farmhouses toting their weapons.

Separatists Defended KLA Regional Office

Further along what at times becomes a track across fields, stood a two-story cream-colored house: the regional KLA headquarters. It was this dwelling that government forces, with tanks and armored vehicles, attempted to take in a two-pronged attack on Christmas Eve that was repulsed by the rebels.

For days after, the guerrillas and Serbian forces exchanged fire, leaving at least 14 people dead, including Serbian and ethnic Albanian civilians.

Each side blamed the other for starting the clashes, but William Walker, the U.S. ambassador heading the OSCE monitoring mission, said they were both spoiling for a fight.

The atmosphere around the headquarters is tense and, fearing renewed fighting, Remi said there would be no celebrations at midnight. “We have forgotten about New Year’s Eve,” he said.

Among the Serbs of Podujevo, the air is just as poisoned.

“Half the Serbian population of this area has fled,” Tomcic said. “Seven villages have been ‘ethnically cleansed’ of Serbs. People are afraid for their lives.

“Nobody is celebrating New Year’s Eve,” he continued. “We have nothing to look forward to.”