Serbs Renew Attack at Massacre Site

Even as the frozen corpses of massacre victims lay waiting for burial, 40 bodies placed in rows that filled the mosque’s floor, Serbian security forces attacked this village again.

Yugoslav leaders ignored a world of condemnation, and pleas for restraint from foreign peace monitors, and cheered as paramilitary police hit Racak with machine guns and mortar bombs for several hours Sunday.

In what monitors of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe called a clear cease-fire violation, Serbian security forces also sealed off several villages in the area.

NATO ambassadors meeting in Brussels on Sunday decided not to order airstrikes against Serbian targets in reprisal for the renewed violence here in the Serbian province of Kosovo. Instead, the alliance will send its two top generals to Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, to deliver what NATO called a final warning to both sides.

But U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO’s supreme commander, and German Gen. Klaus Naumann have previously delivered ultimatums to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. And many ethnic Albanians, who make up 90% of Kosovo’s population, say they long ago gave up waiting for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to intervene.

In Racak on Sunday, unarmed international peace monitors, powerless to stop the Serbian advance, retreated swiftly to protect themselves, leaving scores of frightened refugees to find their own way down from the hills and across battle lines.

The refugees left behind their dead, most in the mosque-turned-morgue. Five or more victims still lay where they fell Friday as police moved through Racak in what they insist was a fight with terrorists who had attacked them.

One of the victims last week was 12-year-old Halim Beqiri, a sandy-haired boy whose body lay beside one of the mosque’s white walls, with the corpse of his father, Riza, on one side and that of an uncle, Zenel Beqiri, on the other.

Halim’s body was still fully dressed in several layers of clothes and thick socks he had worn to fight the cold. But his corpse had no shoes, and he was shrouded in a coarse gray blanket. A small towel covered his face.

One of the boy’s cousins, Aziz Beqiri, lifted it to show the child’s head and the bullet hole at the top, near the back of his skull. It was the only wound on his small body.

On the other side of the mosque, beyond several rows of corpses that also had wounds mostly to the head, the body of 18-year-old Hanem Shahe lay next to that of her father, Bajram Mehmeti.

On Sunday, the man’s bloodied white cap still sat among a few shattered pumpkins by a brook in Racak. Survivors said that’s where police shot him dead when he tried to save Hanem after police shot her.

She was helping her 7-year-old brother, who had a bullet wound in his shoulder, the witnesses said. The boy is hospitalized.

“These are not all of the dead,” Aziz Beqiri, gesturing around the mosque, said through an interpreter. “There are many left behind in the village and the mountains.”

As he spoke in the nearly deserted Racak, Serbian government leaders in Belgrade and in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, were more defiant than ever in the face of NATO condemnation.

Far from backing down, top Yugoslav leaders ordered U.S. Ambassador William Walker’s multinational team of about 700 peace monitors to mind its own business or get out of Kosovo.

The chief committee of Milosevic’s ruling Socialist Party responded to Walker’s allegations of mass murder with effusive praise for the security forces of Serbia, the dominant of Yugoslavia’s two republics.

Ethnic Albanian rebels known as the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, fought Serbian forces for about eight months until the threat of NATO airstrikes forced Milosevic to agree Oct. 12 that he would pull back most of his forces and halt all offensives.

That deal is quickly falling apart as attacks by both sides lead to counterattacks and Kosovo slides ever closer to all-out war again.

“Our responsibility is to destroy, at any cost and with any means, terrorism in Kosovo,” Vojislav Seselj, Serbia’s fiercely nationalistic deputy prime minister, said Sunday as politicians from several parties angrily condemned the massacre allegations as a foreign plot to destroy Serbia.

“And in that job, we are not going to give up. We will not be disturbed with some ‘Walker’s fraud,’ intrigues, frame-ups and unscrupulous attempts to attribute crimes to the Serbian people and Serbian police,” Seselj said.

Sunday’s fighting broke out when police moved against Racak without warning to clear the way for Yugoslav Judge Danica Marinkovic and a police colonel to conduct their own investigation of Friday’s killings of at least 45 ethnic Albanian villagers.

At the government’s request, British Gen. John Drewienkiewicz, deputy chief of the foreign monitors, negotiated with the guerrillas to let the judge visit so long as no armed police came with her.

Drewienkiewicz met with the judge and police officials in nearby Stimlje for more than 90 minutes Sunday morning, trying to convince them that the monitors could get her into Racak safely without police.

But at 11:05 a.m., while police set up mortars and armored vehicles along the road near Racak, the judge announced that she would go in with an armed force. The shooting started five minutes later, Drewienkiewicz said.

“I consider this to be a very provocative act and another breach of the cease-fire on the part of the Yugoslav authorities,” the British general said in a news release later Sunday.

Meanwhile, Serbian President Milan Milutinovic said in a statement broadcast hourly on state TV and radio Sunday that Walker had no right to accuse Serbian security forces of engaging in a massacre.

He called the KLA rebels the American diplomat’s proteges and attacked Walker as “a representative and protector of separatism and terrorism.”

The repeated tirades from Belgrade, and renewed attacks on the village, left few here doubting that the killers acted on orders.

“They wanted to do this. It was their plan to make us go into the woods and shoot us there,” said Imri Jakupi, a villager who survived Friday’s massacre by playing dead in an ice-cold brook.

Jakupi’s account of what happened corroborated almost precisely the stories told by other witnesses in weekend interviews.

On Friday, Jakupi was in a group of about 20 men rounded up by police, who suddenly ordered them to run up the steep hillside and then opened fire from three directions, he said.

The village had come under shellfire about 7 a.m., and two hours later police searched a house owned by Sadiq Osmani, where villagers were hiding, survivor Ram Shabani said.

The police separated about 25 women and children into one group and 29 men into another, added Shabani, who said he saw about 20 of the attackers with their faces covered by black ski masks.

The men were forced to lie face down in the snow and mud, with their hands behind their heads, while a police officer walked up and down the line, beating them with a large piece of wood, he said.

Shabani leaned forward to show a cut on the right side of his forehead, another on his scalp and a large lump on his head. He also had two small holes on the lower edge of his jacket, where he said a bullet tore through.

As the police officer beat the men and told them not to look up, Shabani heard a voice crackling over a walkie-talkie: “How many of them are there?”

“Twenty-nine,” someone nearby replied.

The men were ordered on their feet, and, while they were walking up the hillside, the police cursed and the panicked prisoners started running, Shabani said.

Police opened fire from about 20 yards away. Out of 29 men, only Shabani and three others were still alive when the shooting stopped.

After seeing 20 of the corpses Saturday, Walker was convinced the victims were executed where they lay, and called on the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague to send investigators immediately.

The tribunal’s Canadian head, Louise Arbour, later announced that she had opened an investigation, but Serbian government officials insist the court has no jurisdiction in Yugoslavia.

While police prepared to enter Racak on Sunday, nervous villagers pleaded with journalists to drive them someplace safer, or at least give them an escort--foreign peace monitors had refused.

Before he followed most of Racak’s remaining villagers down the hillside Sunday, Mehmet Ahmeti visited the mosque to identify the body of his cousin Jahja Emni, 43.

“I don’t know when the world will be convinced and see what they did to us,” Ahmeti said through an interpreter. “They were all massacred. No one was in uniform. They were all civilians.”