NATO Can’t Find Serbs Rumored to Be Held Captive

Italian NATO troops in Kosovo searched Sunday for sites where the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army is rumored to be holding ethnic Serb prisoners, but the attempt turned up only four unidentified bodies that had been dead for at least a month.

The daylong air-and-ground operation by 350 troops to find a KLA detention center in southwest Kosovo underscored the ongoing uncertainty over whether such secret prisons for Serbs exist, as alleged by the government-controlled mass media in Yugoslavia. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, the Yugoslav federation’s dominant republic.

International peacekeepers and nongovernmental organizations believe that such prisons are at least a possibility, but if any proof exists, NATO isn’t talking.

“That is a matter of intelligence, and we do not discuss intelligence matters,” said French Capt. Bernard Sandretto, a NATO military spokesman in Pristina, the provincial capital.

There have been repeated unconfirmed reports of ethnic Serbs and Gypsies being abducted by ethnic Albanians or the KLA, especially since the withdrawal of all Yugoslav army and police units from Kosovo last month, said Daloni Carlisle, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Pristina.

As of March 23, one day before the start of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, the Red Cross had on file 140 complaints of Serbs disappearing or being abducted. Since then, Carlisle said, there have been “many, many” other such allegations of abductions of Serbian civilians or Gypsies.

“It is certainly a big source of grief for the families involved,” she said.

Although the Red Cross has an ongoing dialogue with the KLA, she said the rebels have denied any responsibility: “They are saying, ‘We don’t have anybody.’ ”

Gypsies have become targets for ethnic Albanians because some Gypsies allegedly assisted the Serbian forces that carried out war crimes--including looting, armed robbery, arson, rape and mass killings--during the forced expulsion of 850,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo in March, April, May and June.

Sandretto, the NATO spokesman, said the search for the “supposed” KLA detention center involved Italian troops escorted by two helicopters covering a wide area east of the city of Djakovica. The bodies that were discovered were spotted inside the Djakovica industrial zone, an area through which ethnic Albanians from the Djakovica and Pec region passed in April on their way to the Albanian border.

Officially, the KLA has been disarmed in accordance with a pledge its leadership made to NATO. Its soldiers are barred from wearing uniforms or carrying arms in public.

However, the KLA still exists as a powerful organization and commands wide loyalty among ethnic Albanians across Kosovo, and its relationship with NATO has been tense on occasion.

In theory, the KLA could be holding prisoners in small groups without NATO knowing. For instance, the captives could be concealed on remote farms or in city basements where NATO patrols would be unlikely to look.

There is also the possibility that some of the people reported abducted have been killed by ethnic Albanians as war criminals or collaborators.

Until Sunday, the issue of Serbian prisoners in Kosovo had been overshadowed by the hundreds of ethnic Albanians known to be held prisoner in Serbia proper, many of whom were shipped out of Kosovo a few days before the arrival of NATO.

These prisoners now are being acknowledged by the Yugoslav government, with prisoner lists gradually being turned over to Red Cross representatives.

Carlisle said it was too early for her to try to estimate the number of ethnic Albanians who have gone missing over the last several months.

Among those missing, she said, are some who were simply separated from family members during the chaos of the forced deportation of Albanians by Yugoslav forces, others who are believed to have been taken as prisoners to Yugoslavia and still others who were among the massacred.

The British government has estimated that at least 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed by Serbian forces during the 78-day NATO bombing campaign, but the majority of those victims have not yet been identified.

Their remains either lie in mass graves scattered throughout the countryside or have been rendered unidentifiable by mutilation or by the systematic burning of corpses.

Since the arrival of NATO, some individual Serbs and Gypsies have been killed. These isolated reprisals have been occurring steadily, but on a smaller scale than the many mass killings of ethnic Albanians that occurred during NATO’s air war.

The majority of Serbs had time to flee the province. Serbs and Gypsies who remain keep to themselves in enclaves closely monitored by NATO for their own protection.

Also Sunday, the U.S. military said that its peacekeeping forces came under fire several times the previous day in southeastern Kosovo. No Americans were reported hurt in the shootings Saturday, but an Army spokesman said the U.S. soldiers believed that they shot and killed one gunman and wounded another.