Gaunt Faces of Prisoners Tell Tale of Deprivation

Free after 45 days in prison as suspected guerrilla fighters, 110 gaunt-faced and exhausted ethnic Albanian men walked silently on Thursday through the heart of this provincial capital.

A few of them winced in pain as they leaned on the shoulders of fellow prisoners after a 10-mile trek north from the town of Lipljan, where they had been locked up in the local prison.

Unlike hundreds of other Kosovo Albanian men who crossed into neighboring countries in recent weeks after Serbian police opened their cell doors, these freed prisoners were already on their way home.

The men, most of whom were of fighting age, all are from Podujevo, a 20-mile walk north of Pristina, one of them said. They were being allowed to return just as Serbs formed military convoys in the Podujevo area, formerly the base of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army’s most hard-line commander, and began to withdraw.

Most of the ethnic Albanians had shaved heads and looked like their Serbian jailers had fed them very little during more than six weeks of imprisonment.

Several carried plastic bags of small bunches of green onions, apparently their only meal before the last leg home to Podujevo, a northern Kosovo town from which Serbian forces withdrew earlier Thursday. One prisoner said they planned to spend the night along the road near Pristina before continuing their journey home.

They struggled to walk in small groups along both sides of Pristina’s main street about 5:30 p.m., past Serbian police in camouflage uniforms who carried assault rifles.

The freed prisoners were still too frightened to speak in any detail.

But their hollow cheeks and tired eyes left little doubt that they had suffered badly when Serbian police jailed them after the first month of NATO’s air war against Yugoslavia.

Such ethnic Albanian men recently freed from jails in Kosovo are a small fraction of the thousands of fighting-age men who are unaccounted for in the province.

Some freed prisoners who arrived as refugees in neighboring countries said they were imprisoned without charge after police pulled them out from columns of ethnic Albanians ordered from their homes.

With peacekeeping troops heavily dominated by NATO forces about to move in, there is no longer any reason for Serbian authorities to detain suspected guerrilla fighters. Gen. Vladimir Lazarevic, commander of Yugoslav army troops in Kosovo, considers guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army to be the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s problem now.

Lazarevic predicted Thursday that the KLA would eventually begin attacking the peacekeepers.

Senior KLA commanders have promised to disarm once the peacekeeping troops take full control of Kosovo. But the rebels also insist that the overwhelming majority of Kosovo Albanians want independence from Yugoslavia, a move that NATO rejects.

In the first stage of the Serbian security forces’ retreat from Kosovo, a convoy of about 85 army trucks, a few antiaircraft guns and at least one mobile surface-to-air missile launcher headed north just after noon Thursday.

Serbian military officials in northern Kosovo, where the convoy was spotted rolling past hundreds of gutted ethnic Albanian farmhouses and shops, said it had come from the Podujevo area.

Thick gray smoke was rising from three houses on the edge of Podujevo, apparently from fires set the night before, when Serbian generals formally accepted NATO’s terms for a pullout.

A convoy of 47 military ambulances and buses loaded with stretchers and other field hospital equipment waited to leave Podujevo. The streets were deserted except for a few police.

Serbian security forces drove out most of the local ethnic Albanian population in the early days of NATO’s air war, which began March 24, and then forced the local KLA commander, a law graduate who fought under the name Remi, from his headquarters in a farmhouse outside Podujevo. It is unclear what happened to Remi.

Serbian police allowed thousands of displaced Kosovo Albanians, many of them fighting-age men, to return to the Podujevo area several weeks ago.

In recent weeks, KLA attacks became more frequent. KLA guerrillas have fired on Serbian security force and civilian vehicles on the main road near Podujevo as recently as last weekend.

When two foreign journalists walked along one side street in Podujevo on Thursday, dozens of ethnic Albanian men and boys began to emerge from behind locked doors in several homes.

No one had ordered them to stay inside, one man said. And no one expected the KLA to enter the city as the Serbs withdrew, added another. They were waiting for NATO.

About 15 miles away in Kosovska Mitrovica, which was badly damaged by looting, arson and relentless NATO bombing, a convoy of 15 Serbian police vehicles withdrew about 3 p.m.

A couple of the trucks were pulling what appeared to be small antiaircraft guns covered under canvas. A large number of police remained in the city, but they plan to withdraw in stages during the next 10 days, an officer said.

Musa Furati, an ethnic Albanian man, sat barefoot in warmup pants and a T-shirt on a hillside to watch the Serbian police leave.

Furati, 36, chose to stay with his wife and two young children in their mixed neighborhood of Serbs, ethnic Albanians, ethnic Turks and Gypsies, even after Serbian police ordered others to leave.

“We have been helping each other,” Furati said. “I’ve been going to the city each day since the bombing began. Some of my friends have been wondering how I had the courage to go, but I just went and I didn’t have any problems.”

Smoke was rising from a hill on the city’s southern edge, and occasional gunshots crackled in Kosovska Mitrovica itself, but Furati said he wasn’t worried about new clashes breaking out as the police left.

“Incidents can only happen when the people who left come back and and find their fridges or TVs are gone,” Furati said. “I’m afraid that could lead to some incidents.”