Yugoslavia Orders U.S. Envoy in Kosovo to Go

Angrily defying Western threats and demands for restraint, Yugoslavia on Monday ordered an American diplomat who accused Serbian security forces of the mass murder of ethnic Albanian villagers to leave the country.

President Slobodan Milosevic’s government declared Ambassador William Walker persona non grata and gave him 48 hours to get out of Yugoslavia. The order came two days after Walker accused Serbian forces of massacring 45 people in the embattled province of Kosovo.

The government in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, accused Walker of violating his mandate as head of an international team set up by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, to verify Kosovo’s cease-fire, which is quickly collapsing.

The move against Walker was part of an intensifying campaign of defiance by Serbian authorities. Louise Arbour, the Canadian chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, was turned back at the border Monday. Serbs also ignored NATO demands to stop attacking ethnic Albanian villages, and forced two NATO generals to delay a trip to Belgrade.

In Washington, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin used the word “outrage” to describe the Clinton administration’s reaction to the threatened expulsion of Walker.

“It is unacceptable for the Serbs to be [interfering with] monitors bravely there trying to do their work, and to expel those who are simply trying to tell the truth about what they saw,” Rubin said. “Milosevic is playing with fire here.”

Walker was in Belgrade when the official Tanjug News Agency announced Monday evening that he was being expelled. However, he said the government hadn’t notified him directly.

“Nobody has informed me yet officially that I have been declared persona non grata,” independent B-92 Radio quoted Walker as saying. “They could have had the decency to inform me personally about this.”

OSCE officials said they wanted to see the exact wording of Belgrade’s decree before deciding on their next move.

Walker’s team of about 700 monitors, including about 80 Americans, was a key part of the Oct. 12 deal on Kosovo between Milosevic and U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke that averted NATO airstrikes against Serbian forces.

“The cease-fire, in fact, doesn’t exist,” guerrilla Ismet Cakiqi, a regional spokesman for the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, said in an interview in the village of Lapastica in northern Kosovo.

“All that exists is the restraint of the KLA and one agreement between Milosevic and Holbrooke, which we only know from the media,” Cakiqi said.

Kosovo is a province of Serbia, but 90% of its population is composed of ethnic Albanians, and most of them say they want independence.

As Cakiqi spoke in a two-story farmhouse, Yugoslav army soldiers used a front-end loader to dig trenches beside the main highway about a mile away, where three antiaircraft guns and at least as many tanks were aimed toward KLA-held territory.

The KLA hadn’t retaliated for Friday’s killings in Racak, about 16 miles south of Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, because it wanted to plan its reaction rather than “acting out of emotion,” Cakiqi said.

Walker, who saw 20 of the corpses lying in Racak on Saturday and got reports on about 25 more from other foreign monitors, called the killings “an unspeakable atrocity” and “a crime very much against humanity.”

One of the victims was a 12-year-old boy. One man had been decapitated. Walker said victims looked as though they had been executed at close range because their only bullet wounds were in the fronts, tops and backs of their heads.

In interviews Saturday and Sunday, survivors said that police, some of them disguised in black ski masks, shelled Racak for two hours and then rounded up villagers hiding in basements and barns.

After separating the men from women and children, the police ordered the men to run and opened fire from several directions, witnesses said.

But top officials, including Serbian President Milan Milutinovic, insisted that the massacre allegations were lies and labeled Walker a representative of the KLA.

The fact that none of the victims were wearing uniforms didn’t mean they weren’t rebel fighters because “terrorists” often wear civilian clothes, authorities insisted.

Walker said Saturday that the Serbs apparently targeted Racak in retaliation for the killing of a police officer five days earlier.

In a sign that tensions were escalating, Associated Press reported Monday that ethnic Albanian rebels had attacked a Serbian vehicle earlier in the day and wounded five policemen in an ambush in northern Kosovo.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization ambassadors meeting in Brussels on Sunday issued what the alliance called its final warning to Milosevic to comply with the October cease-fire.

But Serbian forces Monday intensified their assault on Racak and neighboring villages.

NATO’s supreme commander, U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, and German Gen. Klaus Naumann were supposed to meet with Milosevic on Monday to spell out the alliance’s latest demands.

At the State Department, Rubin said the two generals were also going to demand a reversal of Walker’s expulsion order and the names of those responsible for it.

But the Yugoslav president refused to give them an appointment, and the NATO generals were expected to travel instead today.

Ethnic Albanians complain that NATO has been too soft on Milosevic by sending Holbrooke, Clark and Naumann to deliver repeated warnings instead of delivering on the alliance’s bombing threat.

At the United Nations, the Security Council “strongly condemned” the Racak massacre and demanded an immediate, full investigation.

In a statement read by Brazilian Ambassador Celso L. N. Amorim, it also deplored the intended expulsion of Walker and called on Yugoslavia to rescind it.

Arbour, the chief prosecutor on the war crimes tribunal, was turned back from the border Monday as she attempted to cross into Serbia from Macedonia.

Arbour had notified Yugoslavia’s embassy in The Hague and the Justice Ministry that she was coming, but an immigration officer said she couldn’t enter the country without a visa.

Arbour said she insisted to a Yugoslav border official that her mandate from the U.N. Security Council entitled her to enter Yugoslavia, but he refused to let her in or contact his superiors.

Arbour told reporters that she would keep trying to get into Kosovo with her investigators to probe the massacre allegations.

“I will not know who is responsible for--and by that I mean who is criminally responsible for--the massacre that was committed in Racak until my investigation is completed and until my investigators are granted access,” she said. “It is therefore not clear who is responsible for that, but it is very clear who is preventing us from ascertaining the truth.”

Belgrade insists that Arbour’s tribunal has no jurisdiction in Yugoslavia and that local officials are conducting their own investigation of the Racak killings.

After Serbian paramilitary police hammered Racak for a second straight day Monday, driving out the few people still living there, police removed 40 bodies of massacre victims from the village mosque.

They will deliver the bodies for official forensic examinations required under Yugoslav law, the government said.

That makes it even less likely that Arbour’s experts will be allowed to see corpses and test Walker’s assertion that the victims were executed at close range and, in some cases, mutilated by their killers.

Times staff writers Tyler Marshall in Washington and John J. Goldman at the United Nations contributed to this report.