Serbs Mourn 14 Farmers as Violence Continues

Fourteen Serbian farmers, whose mass slaying marked the worst act of violence in Kosovo since NATO troops occupied the province June 12, were buried Wednesday, their coffins drawn to the village graveyard behind the tractors they used to work their fields.

Hundreds of Serbs from neighboring villages convened in this tiny farming town outside Pristina, the provincial capital, for services led by the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church and attended by top Serbian politicians and the ranking United Nations representative in Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia’s main republic, Serbia.

Even as the dead were laid to rest, North Atlantic Treaty Organization investigators were questioning at least four men in connection with Friday’s massacre in which the victims were gunned down on the edge of a wheat field they had just finished harvesting.

The four were taken in after military police searched four houses in Lipljan, a mainly ethnic Albanian town about a mile from Gracko. A fifth house was searched in the village itself. NATO officials declined to say what, if anything, was taken during the searches and stopped short of calling the men suspects.

The killings, which Serbs suspect were committed by ethnic Albanians, have focused attention on the lingering ethnic tension and violence in postwar Kosovo. Serbs complain that NATO is not protecting them. Church leaders and international officials at the funeral focused on what could be done to end the cycle of violence.

On Wednesday, the death toll in Kosovo since the war ended topped 200: Two more Serbs were killed in a hail of automatic gunfire in the northern part of the province, and three ethnic Albanians and one Bosnian were found slain in a house in the western town of Pec.

During the hourlong prayer service held on a basketball court in the village square, women in black veils wailed and pressed their faces to the flower-covered coffins of their loved ones. The youngest of the dead missed his 18th birthday by two days.

“Tell the world,” one villager said, addressing a throng of reporters. “You tell the world what they did.”

The funeral was marked by the soft singing of prayers and the ringing of bells. But there also was rhetoric. Villager Stevo Lalic read from a statement on behalf of his fellow residents in which he lashed out at ethnic Albanians. He ended by saying that Serbs and Albanians would continue to fight one another, even from their graves.

The service was led by Patriarch Pavle, head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, who was joined by several other top church leaders.

“The only good thing about this misfortune is that you left this world not as criminals but as innocent victims,” said Pavle, his words punctuated by the sobs of the mourners. “If 1,000 years pass by, we could forget what has happened here. But what we must try to do is find our way forward, like our ancestors, so we can continue to live here.”

Also at the service were Yugoslav Deputy Foreign Minister Nebojsa Vujovic, other prominent Serbian politicians and Bernard Kouchner, the U.N.’s top representative in Kosovo.

Kouchner called the mass slaying a “horrifying crime” and said those who are responsible must be caught.

After the ceremony, he knelt at several of the coffins in a show of support for the grieving relatives.

“I saw those poor families--poor in all the senses of the word--and I was so moved,” Kouchner said. “How can we cut the circle of hatred?”

Braced for the possibility of more violence, nearly 200 peacekeepers guarded the route from the center of the village to the cemetery about half a mile away. At one point, the procession of mourners walking behind the tractors towing the dead came to a T-intersection.

The scene offered a snapshot of the “cycle of violence” U.N. peacekeepers say they are trying to break: A few hundred yards to the left, toward Lipljan, were the charred shells of Albanian houses torched during the “ethnic cleansing” rampage by troops of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. To the right was the cemetery where the Serbian men were to be buried.

“If this had been an isolated incident, we Serbs could put up with it, but it wasn’t,” Zoran Andjelkovic, the Serbian governor of Kosovo, said of the massacre.

After the attack, villagers accused NATO troops of ignoring their request to be provided protection while they did their harvesting. But British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, NATO’s top commander in Kosovo, said the accusations were false. Jackson said that soldiers had agreed to provide a protective patrol the next day but that the farmers decided not to wait.

Standing outside the cemetery gates, Serbian politician Momcilo Trajkovic, a foe of Milosevic and a member of Kosovo’s postwar transition council, was not swayed.

He called on peacekeepers to “do their job” and protect Kosovo’s Serbs from vengeful ethnic Albanians. Otherwise, he said, “their mission of peace will fail.”

At the United Nations on Wednesday, it was announced that about 18,000 applications had been distributed in Kosovo in an effort to recruit a police force.

Almost 6,000 people filled out the forms, and their names were entered into a database for selection of the first class of trainees who are expected to enter the police academy in mid-August.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said that, despite condemnation of the massacre of the 14 Serbian farmers, attacks continued.

“Efforts to protect all of Kosovo’s residents have taken on a new urgency,” the refugee agency said.

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Times staff writer John J. Goldman at the United Nations contributed to this report.