Crowds Cheer Albright in Kosovo

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright came, saw and was treated like a conquering hero Thursday in Kosovo.

Thousands of residents jammed a downtown plaza, lined streets and stood on trucks and balconies to chant “USA! USA!” and “Albright! Albright!” in a tumultuous and triumphant welcome for a woman whom many Kosovo Albanians view as a liberator, and some affectionately call “Mother.”

Albright grinned broadly, jabbed her thumbs in the air and waved gleefully at the crowd. She was still exultant hours later when she had finished visiting U.S. troops and aid workers, meeting local politicians and religious leaders, and peering from a clattering Black Hawk helicopter at burned-out villages and bombed-out oil tanks below.

“I always knew we were doing the right thing, but it’s great to have it validated this way,” declared Albright, one of the prime proponents of the 11-week North Atlantic Treaty Organization air war that forced Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his forces from Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic.

Not everyone was enthusiastic, however. Someone fired a gunshot near United Nations offices in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, while Albright was inside. No one was injured, but NATO soldiers who quickly cleared the tense street were unable to apprehend four men reportedly seen with weapons.

And the cheers turned to jeers when Albright drove to Gracanica, a Serbian stronghold about five miles south of Pristina, to meet Archbishop Artemije Radosavljevic and local leaders in the town’s graceful Serbian Orthodox church. A hundred or so sullen-faced Serbs stood across from the 14th-century monastery and angrily shouted insults, spit at her motorcade and thrust rude hand gestures in the air.

“I was greeted by a rent-a-crowd from Belgrade [the Yugoslav and Serbian capital] that was not very happy to see me,” she later told U.S. troops in full combat gear at Camp Bondsteel, the dusty tent encampment in southern Kosovo that is headquarters for thousands of U.S. soldiers in the international peacekeeping force in Kosovo.

Albright’s eight-hour visit to Kosovo, her first as secretary of State, gave her a firsthand view of the divisions and destruction left by the conflict--and the vast challenges of peace--as she heads to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, today to join President Clinton.

They will take part in a summit meeting with more than 30 European and other foreign leaders to launch the Balkan “stability pact,” an ambitious effort to help bring political and economic reforms to southeastern Europe.

Albright met in private at the U.N. offices with Hashim Thaci, political leader of the ethnic Albanian rebels’ Kosovo Liberation Army. A U.S. official at the meeting later quoted Thaci as saying he was ready to work with the U.N. and as disavowing violent reprisals by ethnic Albanians against Serbs.

Albright also met with two vice presidents from the badly riven Democratic League of Kosovo political party led by Ibrahim Rugova, who was twice elected Kosovo’s “president” in informal polls by fellow ethnic Albanians. “She said she was surprised Rugova wasn’t here to meet her,” the U.S. official said.

State Department spokesman James P. Rubin later said Albright met Rugova on Thursday night in Rome and persuaded him to return to Kosovo. Rubin said Rugova told Albright he will return today to stay and agreed to participate in a transitional council.

After briefings by U.N. Special Representative Bernard Kouchner and Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, the British commander of the NATO-led peacekeeping force that is known as KFOR, Albright defended the U.N. against criticism that it has been slow to restore civil institutions in Kosovo.

Albright also urged local Serbs, fearful after the massacre last Friday of 14 Serbian farmers in the village of Gracko, not to run away in fear of revenge killings.

“The system is set up in order to protect them,” she said. “They should stay.”

Officials estimate that more than 100,000 of about 200,000 Serbs have fled Kosovo since the war ended. In some cases, ethnic Albanians, whose own homes were burned or destroyed during the war, have forced Serbs from their homes at gunpoint.

“We think the war is beginning now in Kosovo,” said Sister Theodora, a black-robed Serbian nun at the Gracanica church. “There will be revenge. It’s horrible. . . . And when it finishes, I don’t know.”

In Albright’s speech in downtown Pristina, the centerpiece of her visit, the secretary stood under hot, hazy skies as helicopter gunships circled overhead and U.S. snipers and soldiers scanned bushes and rooftops.

“Let there be no mistake,” she told the cheering crowd. “As long as you choose, Kosovo will remain your home.”

They booed loudly when she said Milosevic “should answer for his crimes” but were largely silent when she urged them to forsake revenge against the Serbs.

“I hope that today, we may pledge here in Kosovo, never again will people with guns come in the night,” she added emotionally. “Never again will houses and villages be burned. And never again will there be massacres and mass graves.”