Kosovo Rebels Catch Peacekeepers Off Guard

On Day One of NATO’s peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, Dragan Radakovic stood at the edge of Serbia’s largest coal mine and watched it pass from one army’s control to another’s with clockwork precision.

Serbian infantrymen who had guarded the Belacevic open pit mine during 16 months of guerrilla war pulled out at 8 a.m. Saturday. Their army’s withdrawal from Kosovo was supposed to be tightly synchronized with the arrival of NATO-led troops to pacify the province.

Instead, the advancing foot soldiers the mine director saw in his binoculars were from the Kosovo Liberation Army. Much to his alarm, the ethnic Albanian separatists who looked all but defeated several weeks ago had returned in force to seize one of the mine’s two giant pits, its administration building and four employees.

The swift takeover of a strategic economic target shows the KLA’s determination to move into the vacuum between the departing Serbs and a lumbering, 48,000-strong NATO-led force already slowed by scattered Serbian resistance and feuds with Russian peacekeepers. About 350 guerrillas are believed to have participated in the mine takeover six miles northwest of the provincial capital, Pristina.

Russian and Serbian officials voiced irritation Sunday over the increasingly cocky guerrillas, saying the peacekeepers’ failure to disarm them promptly could undermine the accord that ended the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 11-week bombing assault of Yugoslavia on Thursday.

The mine, which produces coal to power electric generating plants feeding much of Serbia, remained under KLA control Sunday. A Canadian army reconnaissance patrol watched from a hilltop and asked by radio for instructions, but the NATO-led force--known as the Kosovo Force, or KFOR--took no action.

Under the peace accord, the force is occupying Kosovo to safeguard the return of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians expelled in a bloody purge by President Slobodan Milosevic’s Serb-led Yugoslav army and the Serbian police, which are supposed to be out of Kosovo by Sunday.

KFOR also is supposed to protect Serbian civilians in Kosovo--a mainly ethnic Albanian province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic--and “demilitarize” the KLA.

The guerrillas, who were not party to the agreement, promised to disarm only after the last Serbian soldier leaves--a condition that NATO officials knew might cause trouble during the transition.

“There’s lots and lots of weapons in this region. We’re not going to be able to go from house to house and backyard to backyard and dig up buried rifles,” U.S. Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the supreme allied commander in Europe, told reporters Sunday in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia.

“We can’t do it for the KLA and we can’t do it for the Serbs.”

The peacekeepers were clearly unprepared to deal so suddenly with a guerrilla takeover as bold as the one near this mining town.

“We’ve heard about it, but we’re still establishing ourselves in the area,” said a British military officer, whose army controls the Pristina zone. “We’re determined to enforce the agreement fairly and firmly, but it’s a massive task and will take time.”

The Belacevic mine, comprising two adjacent pits, has been a popular target of the guerrillas. They harassed it for two weeks last summer and kidnapped 10 mine workers, who never reappeared. The mine’s executives, who are Serbs, say the guerrillas are trying to claim ethnic Albanian control of the enterprise in hopes that KFOR will let them keep it.

Radakovic said he was informed last week that the 50-man infantry unit protecting the mine would soon leave, but no one told him it would be as early as Saturday. About 20 minutes after seeing the retreating soldiers drive north, he and Miroslav Krnetic, another mine official, heard shooting.

“We thought it was just the Serbs celebrating as they left,” Krnetic said. “Then we realized it was coming from another direction and knew something was wrong.”

From the wooded hills to the west, the two men saw a couple of dozen guerrillas advancing toward the mine and probing its defenses with occasional bursts of automatic weapons fire. No one fired back, and 2 1/2 hours later, the entire attacking force of the KLA’s 117th Brigade arrived, driving about 60 mine workers to the opposite side of one pit, which is a mile wide.

By 2:30 p.m., six hours after the KLA had appeared, the pit was abandoned. Its few security guards retreated under fire to protect the perimeter of the adjacent pit, which kept functioning. The driver of a food truck passing through the area was slightly wounded in the shooting.

Half an hour later, Zvonimir Stepic, 31, was driving nine Serbian night-shift employees to the mine in a bus from the nearby town of Kosovo Polje. Unaware of the rebel takeover, they drove to the mine’s administration building and right into a KLA trap.

Six people escaped and told police in Kosovo Polje that the rebels were holding Stepic and the other passengers.

The driver’s distraught father, Sivojin Stepic, said the police could do nothing. “It’s up to Kosovo’s new army,” he said the police told him, referring to the peacekeepers.

Although the mine takeover was reported on Serbian radio and television Saturday, the peacekeepers knew nothing about it until Radakovic, escorting two American journalists up a hill Sunday afternoon to view the mine from a distance, ran into the Canadian army reconnaissance team.

For the next hour, Radakovic and his security chief knelt in the roadway with a map, briefing Lt. Chris Hunt, the Canadian unit commander, on what had happened.

Hunt said it was not the job of his unit, parked in four armored personnel carriers on the hill, to retake the mine.

“I’m going to send a report to the guys in headquarters, and they’ll probably have some questions,” he told the mine director. “Then they’ll make a decision.”

An hour later, the lieutenant still was waiting for instructions. He explained that the British army unit he had contacted said it did not have jurisdiction of the area around the mine. He was trying to call someone else.

The mine is dotted at the edges by four small ethnic Albanian villages. Their inhabitants, including ethnic Albanians who worked in the mine, fled during the Serbs’ brutal purge of Kosovo after NATO started bombing. The villages remained shattered and empty until the KLA filtered back into the area from Albania in recent days.

After retreating toward Pristina on Saturday, the Yugoslav army lobbed artillery at one of those villages, Belacevic, and the rebels fired artillery back. The deafening exchange prevented the reporters from getting to the mine’s administration building on the edge of the village.

The rebels were still there Sunday, using a two-way radio to taunt the Serbian executives at another office a few miles away.

“Go back to Serbia,” one rebel told them.

Times staff writer Julie Tamaki in Skopje contributed to this report.

* PAINFUL HOMECOMING

Kosovo refugees find their villages deserted and their homes ransacked and vandalized. A14

* A CALL FOR ASSISTANCE

Yugoslav opposition figure says it would be a mistake to block aid until Milosevic departs. A18