American Forces Guard Possible Mass Grave Site

NATO forces pounded across Kosovo’s borders Monday to secure abandoned towns for awaiting refugees, and U.S. troops took up positions guarding a suspected mass grave site that could be the first to verify claims of Serbian atrocities.

Accounts varied of how many bodies lie under a 3-foot mound of fresh dirt in an otherwise overgrown cemetery. An ethnic Albanian rebel said 35 were interred there and an additional 10 at another undisclosed grave in the town--all victims of an April 9 massacre by Serbs.

Another villager, Shaban Emin Bela, said the toll was far higher and from a different event: 118 killed just 15 to 20 days ago.

By late afternoon, U.S. forces were in place guarding the site to prevent evidence-tampering before officials from the international war crimes tribunal can begin an investigation.

About 15,300 NATO troops, including 450 soldiers and 1,200 Marines from the U.S., were on the ground by nightfall of the third day of the NATO-led mission, with two-thirds of the multinational peacekeeping force still to come.

The peacekeepers’ commander, British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, said he was satisfied with the pace of the deployment and the Serbian withdrawal. He continued to downplay a dispute over the presence of about 200 Russian troops at the airport in Pristina, the provincial capital. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, the dominant republic in Yugoslavia.

“We have met our deadlines. We have got to where we said we would get on time, and the whole operation is pretty much on schedule,” Jackson told reporters in Pristina.

The troops were moving into a new phase of their mission: securing the area for the safe return of refugees. The task involves confiscating weapons at border posts and special checkpoints as part of a demilitarization effort. At one checkpoint, U.S. Army soldiers confiscated two rifles and a fragmentation grenade. At the border post going into Kosovo from Macedonia, they collected a few guns; one man was attempting to bring in his loaded pistol.

Serbs, both military and civilian, continued to flee. NATO estimated that about 15,000 of the 40,000-member armed forces in the province had left by Monday. Red Cross officials said thousands of civilians, fearing reprisals from ethnic Albanians, had joined the Serbian forces. Convoys of departing Serbs sometimes faced jeering, gesticulating and stone-throwing Albanians.

Other ethnic Albanians celebrated wildly in the streets, or emerged from fearful seclusion in the wilds of the province or in their own homes. An advance team of U.N. relief workers said it found nearly 20,000 Albanians, many of them malnourished and in poor health, living in the open at Glogovac, a hilly, heavily wooded area west of Pristina.

In Washington, Defense Department spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon said some troops’ progress had been slowed by the tortuous mountain road between the Macedonian border and the southern Kosovo town of Urosevac.

Troops needed eight hours to make an 18-mile trip, he said, and their advance was further slowed when French soldiers discovered land mines in the area.

Clinton administration officials also strove to put the best face on the dispute with Russia despite having no visible progress to report.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told reporters at a White House briefing that she and Defense Secretary William S. Cohen will meet with their Russian counterparts in Helsinki, Finland, soon to discuss Russia’s peacekeeping role in Kosovo.

National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger said Jackson is to meet again today with the Russian officer on the scene in Kosovo.

“Hopefully, that will produce real progress in terms of the immediate airport issues,” Berger said.

The stalemate persisted despite high-level telephone consultations Monday, including one between President Clinton and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin.

“I don’t think we need to exaggerate this problem,” Albright said. “This is something that can be worked out. . . . We have said we want the Russians to be a part of it. . . . We’ll work the Russian part out, because there’s goodwill, and we want to be able to work it out.”

A North Atlantic Treaty Organization spokesman said the Western alliance was setting up a temporary headquarters south of Pristina, ending a weekend standoff with the Russians for control of the airport.

In Pristina, ethnic Albanians reclaimed their streets in joyous scenes of liberation from the departing Serbian forces. They embraced British paratroops and festooned armored personnel carriers with roses and wildflowers.

“For the last three months, we’ve been hidden--almost like dead people,” said Merita Ahmeti, a 27-year-old ethnic Albanian lawyer who gathered Monday on a street of Pristina’s Vranovac neighborhood with friends she hadn’t seen all spring. “Only if we needed food, the family would send out one person to get it quickly and hurry home.

“We knew during the whole war that NATO was trying to end our suffering, and now NATO is here,” she said. “We are crying and happy at once. Finally, we will be able to live normal lives--with some kind of democracy.”

In a move that would have been unthinkable a few days ago, the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army opened what it called a “representation office” in a school in the capital and hoisted a red Albanian flag--symbol of the separatist aspirations of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority.

Children, some wearing headbands reading KLA or NATO, made a path to the school entrance carrying red roses.

In southern Kosovo, U.S. forces that had set up camp late Sunday night in a remote field surrounded by other fields of wildflowers near Urosevac began policing their designated zone. The sprawling camp is in easy view of villages that are now charred, gutted and riddled with bullet holes.

The scenes registered on the soldiers.

“It’s sad,” said Army Spc. Charles Sheppard as he stood guard outside the camp, reachable after a drive along a pitted, rocky one-lane dirt road. “I wish we could have gotten here sooner.”

Spc. Omar Tejeda added: “Clinton should have moved in quicker--we’ve got to start thinking in political terms and do what we’ve got to do.”

The alleged mass grave was found next to an abandoned gas station here in Kacanik in southern Kosovo. British troops, who pushed into Kosovo first, discovered the grave. Next to the pile of dirt are a few dozen numbered wooden sticks.

Unless the grave is exhumed, differing accounts of a massacre in Kacanik will be difficult to reconcile.

KLA member Skender Zharku, 33, said his uncle is buried along with 44 others killed here April 9 when the Serbs went on a shooting rampage through town. Thirty-five are buried in the cemetery, while 10 are at another graveyard in town, he said.

Zharku didn’t see the massacre, though he said he watched the Serbian soldiers from his hide-out in the hills. The Serbs buried the bodies under the mound of dirt, he said, to hide what they’d done.

He said he didn’t know the significance of the numbered wooden sticks.

Bela, the other villager who claimed to have knowledge of the site, said the massacre involved 118 victims killed more recently. Other reports said there were 81 victims.

What is indisputable is the fact that Kacanik is destroyed. Houses have been looted: A pile of clothing and household goods stacked outside one apartment building suggested that someone went through the units and tossed their contents outside. Windows are broken, cars are burned. Bullet casings litter streets, and, on the site containing the graves, 4-inch-long antiaircraft bullet casings are abundant.

Americans also were in control Monday at the border post between Macedonia and Kosovo, the same entry point that thousands of refugees passed through after they were forced out of their homes by Serbian soldiers and police during the last few months.

In sight of the border post is a grim reminder of the exodus: a bombed-out cement factory parking lot that contains hundreds of cars and tractors the refugees used to get to the border. Most of the vehicles have been stripped: Hoods are popped, tires are missing, windows are smashed. Refugees began returning Monday to see if their vehicles were still intact.

The number of refugees crossing at the southern border post near Blace, Macedonia, has been growing each day, though it was just a few hundred Monday. Many refugees say they won’t go back till they know it’s safe. Those who were crossing the border made sure the Americans felt their elation.

Those in cars honked and shouted, stopping to hug others they saw along the way. Many kissed the ground.

Rizah Ferizi, 60, summed up his feelings as he crossed the border. “I feel like I’m flying,” he said, as he set out on foot for his 30-mile journey. All he carried was a carton of cigarettes, despite the scorching sun.

Many planted spontaneous kisses on the cheeks of the U.S. soldiers or murmured “Thank God and NATO” or “Thank God and the U.S.,” said Staff Sgt. Michael Fitzpatrick of Jackson, Mich. One cried.

Authorities also identified two German journalists killed Sunday near the town of Stimlje as reporter Gabriel Gruener, 35, and photographer Volker Kraemer, 56, both of the German magazine Stern. Their translator remained missing.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic toured the ruins of a destroyed bridge across the Danube River in Beska, 30 miles northwest of the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, Belgrade, and officially inaugurated the country’s reconstruction effort after NATO’s 11-week bombing campaign.

“Now that peace is here again, we face the task of rebuilding the country,” he was quoted as saying by the state-run Tanjug news agency.

Reitman reported from Kacanik and Boudreaux from Pristina. Times staff writers Edwin Chen and Paul Richter in Washington and Julie Tamaki in Skopje, Macedonia, contributed to this report.

* A NATO ESCORT FOR SERBS: German troops escort Serbs out of Kosovo city through gantlet of jeering ethnic Albanians. A16