At Least 45 Villagers in Kosovo Are Massacred

Black-hooded attackers wearing Yugoslav army and police uniforms massacred at least 45 ethnic Albanian villagers, including a child, in the breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo in what appears to have been the worst such rampage in a nearly year-old conflict.

U.S. Ambassador William Walker, who heads a multinational team trying to monitor Kosovo’s collapsing cease-fire, accused Serbian security forces of mass murder after seeing more than 20 of the dead lying on a hillside Saturday, most of them old men shot in the head at point-blank range.

In Washington, President Clinton condemned the killings “in the strongest possible terms” and called them “a clear violation” of the Serbs’ cease-fire agreement with NATO.

“This was a deliberate and indiscriminate act of murder designed to sow fear among the people of Kosovo,” Clinton said Saturday.

Also Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called for a meeting of NATO ambassadors in Brussels today.

Albright conferred with fellow NATO foreign ministers and demanded that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic bring those responsible to justice, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said.

Rubin declined to say what options Washington will pursue when the NATO session convenes today. Milosevic agreed to let the monitors in after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization threatened airstrikes if he did not pull most of his security forces from Kosovo, where ethnic Albanian guerrillas are fighting for independence.

NATO has authorized its forces since October to hit Yugoslav military targets if the government in Belgrade violates pledges to seek a peaceful solution to the conflict with ethnic Albanian separatists.

In the wake of the massacre, Rubin said, Albright is demanding that Milosevic “identify who gave the orders and who took this action, and ensure that those perpetrators are then brought to justice.”

Speaking to reporters after touring the grisly scene, Walker said he had no doubt that Serbian government forces had committed a crime “against humanity.”

As Walker picked his way among the scattered corpses, villagers seething with rage or shocked into numb silence searched the bloodied faces to identify their missing relatives and friends.

One man found his brother’s decapitated corpse and then went in search of the head.

Walker called on the international war crimes tribunal at The Hague to send investigators to Kosovo, even if Belgrade refuses to give them visas.

“Although I am not a lawyer, from what I personally saw, I do not hesitate to describe the event as a massacre, obviously a crime very much against humanity,” Walker told reporters. “Nor do I hesitate to accuse the government security forces of responsibility.”

U.N. Mission to Head to Province

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan demanded a full investigation. In Amsterdam, U.N. spokesman Christian Chartier said that chief war crimes prosecutor Louise Arbour will head a mission to Kosovo.

“Arbour has launched an investigation into the most recent massacre in Kosovo. She is making arrangements to head a field mission,” Chartier said Saturday, adding that she expected to depart for Kosovo within the next 48 hours.

The Yugoslav government has blocked previous attempts by U.N. investigators to secure visas that would allow them into Kosovo.

“The time of stalling over visas and jurisdiction is past. This is a time for legal action,” Chartier said.

A massacre survivor, an elderly woman named Sandije Ramadani, wept as she related how she took cover in the locked basement of a farmhouse with 25 women and children after shells started falling about 7 a.m. Friday.

Three police officers in blue camouflage uniforms came into the basement and demanded to know where guns were stashed, Ramadani said. One of the men wore a black mask and gloves and spoke fluent Albanian, but the others were Serbs, she said.

“I told the police: ‘If you find any weapons here, you are free to do whatever you want with us. You can execute all of us,’ ” she said.

The police looked everywhere, even in sacks of flour, but found no guns, Ramadani added. Then they left and locked the door behind them.

About 26 men sought shelter in a cattle pen nearby. One of them was Ramadani’s brother, Sadik. She later found him dead.

“They told the men to put their hands above their heads, and then we just heard the men screaming,” Ramadani said. “It sounded like animals.”

After a few hours, when all seemed quiet, Ramadani used a knife to cut through a cloth covering on the only window and climbed out into the yard. She could hear gunshots in the distance.

Evidence Supports Albanian Claims

By witnessing the horrific aftermath of Friday’s massacre, Walker’s team has damning evidence of atrocities such as those ethnic Albanians say they have been suffering for years.

Walker heads a mission of more than 700 unarmed civilian monitors that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe sent to Kosovo to watch for cease-fire violations in the province.

NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana said he is outraged by the killings and warned in Brussels that NATO “will not tolerate a return to all-out fighting and a policy of repression in Kosovo.”

Racak is a tiny village just southwest of the town of Stimlje, which is about 16 miles south of Kosovo’s capital, Pristina.

Most of the homes and shops in the area are scarred with shell and bullet holes from last year’s battles between ethnic Albanian rebels and government forces. Only the bravest villagers had returned, believing that the threat of NATO airstrikes made it safe.

Their village sits at the mouth of a narrow river valley surrounded by high hills that permit few escape routes.

The massacre victims were trying to flee a barrage of shells from army tanks and antiaircraft guns that soldiers aimed at farmhouses, apparently in retaliation for the killing of a police officer five days earlier, Walker said.

Ilaz Ymeri said he heard shells exploding early in the morning Friday. He ran to hide in a neighbor’s house with many other villagers.

About 8 a.m., police surrounded the house and ordered everyone to come outside, Ymeri said through an interpreter. They told the women and children to run but kept the men under gunpoint, he added.

The police forced the men to line up in front of a house belonging to one of his neighbors, Ajet Emini, who was already dead, Ymeri said.

“They separated some of us from the line and said, ‘You are the guys we are looking for,’ ” Ymeri said. “Then a policeman said to his colleague, ‘All of them are the same.’

“They told us to start running up the hill. As soon as we did, they started shooting at us from all sides.”

Ymeri said he and another man fell into a ditch and acted dead, hoping that the police would leave them there. They crawled out at 5 that evening, half a day after their terror began.

Survivors Lead Envoy to Corpses

Other survivors of the massacre led Walker up the side of a gully, where he saw first one body, then another and finally a group of about 15 corpses sprawled across the ground.

From the gaping wounds in the fronts, backs and tops of the victims’ heads, it appeared that the killers had fired their guns at “extremely close range,” Walker said.

There was “every appearance” that the men had been slain where they lay, he added.

Walker did not go any farther, but other peace monitors fanned out to look for more dead in the small villages overlooking Racak and reached a count of 45, including three women and a child.

“Unfortunately, I do not have the words to describe my personal revulsion, or that of all who were with me, at the site of what can only be described as an unspeakable atrocity,” Walker told reporters.

He ordered several of his unarmed monitors to spend the night in the villages to protect the crime scene and guard against more attacks. The monitors expected to find more bodies when the search resumes today.

Until full-scale war broke out in Kosovo last spring, the Kosovo Liberation Army was a small group of fighters overshadowed by a peaceful campaign for independence led by a popular pacifist, Ibrahim Rugova.

However, last year’s Serbian offensive, which was supposed to crush the guerrillas, only made them stronger, with many fresh recruits now among the young men who once worked on the farms and in shops that the security forces destroyed.

U.S. envoy Christopher Hill is trying to negotiate a lasting peace agreement, but neither the Serbian government nor the guerrillas are in the mood to compromise. Friday’s massacre makes a return to all-out war more likely.

Walker said he phoned the Yugoslav president’s foreign affairs advisor to tell him what he had seen and demand an investigation, but the official told him that Milosevic could not be reached Saturday night.

However, Serbian President Milan Milutinovic blasted Walker today, accusing him of taking sides with guerrillas in the province. Serbia is the dominant of the two republics that make up Yugoslavia.

“You’re acting as a prosecutor and a judge at the same time,” Milutinovic said of Walker in a statement broadcast by Serbian state television.

The government’s version of events came in a one-page press release from Serbia’s Ministry of Interior Affairs, which controls the paramilitary police forces that waged eight months of warfare last year.

Serbian Version of Grisly Events

According to the ministry, fighting broke out early Friday when police entered Racak to look for gunmen suspected of killing police officer Svetislava Przic five days earlier.

The police blocked off Racak, and, as they entered the village, “terrorists from trenches, bunkers and fortifications attacked them using automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and mortar bombs,” the Interior Ministry’s statement said.

The police fired back, and “several dozens of terrorists were killed, most of whom were in uniforms with the insignia of the terrorist, so-called Kosovo Liberation Army,” it said.

Police found one Browning machine gun, two other machine guns, 36 automatic rifles, two sniper rifles, ammunition, a field radio and other equipment, the press release said.

Immediately after the fighting, an investigative judge from Pristina and a deputy public prosecutor for the district tried to visit the site, but “terrorists that concentrated in the hills in the vicinity opened fire and prevented the investigation,” the statement said.

Walker insisted that the government provide the names of police officers and soldiers involved in operations in the area to help track down the killers and deliver them for trial at the international war crimes tribunal.

“We must know who gave the orders,” he said. “We must know who executed those orders. And justice must be done.”

Times wire services contributed to this report.