Serb Exodus Widens as Refugees Return

The flow of ethnic Albanian refugees rushing back to Kosovo behind peacekeeping forces escalated Wednesday as an even larger number of Serbs fled the province in fear for their lives.

About 9,000 ethnic Albanian refugees crossed into Kosovo from neighboring Albania, compared with 5,000 the day before. About 2,900 refugees, meanwhile, made the journey back into the province from Macedonia, just slightly more than Tuesday.

The mass departure heightened concerns among humanitarian aid workers who have pleaded with refugees to delay returning to their war-torn province until hundreds--and perhaps thousands--of land mines, booby traps and unexploded bombs are removed.

“This is our biggest concern, that before the area is declared safe, people are moving back in,” said Tehnaz J. Dastoor of UNICEF’s land-mine program. “It could be disastrous.

Already, at least two refugees have been killed by land mines while traveling from Macedonia to Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia’s main republic, Serbia. The deaths failed to deter the hundreds of refugees who crammed into vans, hopped into taxis, or simply relied on their feet Wednesday to carry them back to Kosovo through the Blace border crossing.

“We’re right now urgently trying to provide support to the returnees, especially the ones coming from Albania, since last night they’ve really been streaming across the border,” said Maki Shinohara, a representative of the Office of U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

The UNHCR set up way stations along the chief route from Albania to provide medical help, water and towropes for vehicles that might break down along the way.

By nightfall, scattered lights from apartment buildings and houses could be seen in southern Kosovo towns that just a day before had been dark and deserted.

At the same time that the ethnic Albanians were arriving home, Serbian residents were leaving Kosovo in even larger numbers. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported that more than 30,000 people, mostly Serbs, had fled the province as of Wednesday. Fearing reprisals from returning ethnic Albanians, who made up about 90% of Kosovo’s prewar population of about 2 million, the minority Serbs desperately sought seats on packed buses heading anywhere.

Yugoslav military and police forces also continued their retreat, begun last week as part of a peace agreement with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. About 26,000 of the 40,000 Yugoslav troops and police forces stationed in Kosovo during the war had left as of Wednesday.

In other developments Wednesday:

* Defense Secretary William S. Cohen met with Russian Defense Minister Igor D. Sergeyev in Helsinki, Finland, to discuss the role of Russia’s troops in the peacekeeping operation. Cohen said good progress had been made in the first day of a two-day session. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is scheduled to join the talks today.

* U.S. Marines disarmed 200 Kosovo Liberation Army fighters and arrested six of their leaders in the village of Zegra, about 25 miles southeast of the provincial capital, Pristina. The rebels at first refused to give up their weapons, but they relented when threatened by the Marines, who were equipped with armored personnel carriers and Cobra attack helicopters.

NATO officials and leaders of the rebel army are in negotiations over the role the KLA will have in the province and the extent to which the rebels will be permitted to bear arms and act as a police force.

* As peacekeepers of the international Kosovo Force, or KFOR, fanned out into central and northern Kosovo, more indications of alleged Serbian atrocities emerged. French troops found human remains in the ruins of a house in the southeastern Kosovo village of Vlastica, and more bodies were discovered in four wells near Pristina in a village where residents said as many as 100 ethnic Albanians were slaughtered by Serbs shortly before NATO peacekeepers entered Kosovo last week.

Here in the southern Kosovo town of Urosevac, about 20 miles south of Pristina, a convoy of tractors and cars carrying Serbs flowed out of town en route to other areas of Serbia.

As dusk began to fall, villagers took to the streets with whatever they could carry as they headed toward the city hall, where the Serbs were assembling.

A couple with half a dozen small bags said they were too afraid to stay. Members of the KLA had knocked on their door and asked them to give up their weapons, they said.

Pavlovic Zivorad said he didn’t have any weapons, but his son handed one over.

“We never had any problems with the Albanians, but I’m afraid,” said his wife, Olga.

As she and her husband stopped to talk, they gestured toward their 80-year-old neighbor, who was making his way up a hill carrying a blanket and small suitcase. He was followed by Dobrilla Ketorcic, 80, who cried as she joined her neighbors on the way to the City Hall.

“We worked all these years, and now we have to leave everything,” she said.

Not all the Serbs left. As the neighbors talked, a woman who appeared to be in her late 30s defiantly announced that she was staying. “I didn’t harass anyone, I didn’t do anything to anybody, and I don’t want anybody to do anything to me,” she said.

In Blace, the pace of ethnic Albanians returning to the province showed signs of improvement Wednesday as authorities ironed out bureaucratic kinks. Macedonian government officials, for example, struck a deal with the U.N. refugee officials to quit seizing the ethnic Albanians’ green cards, which would allow them reentry into Macedonia, as many returned to Kosovo to scout out conditions in towns and villages.

Aid workers had voiced concern that the previous policy was prompting refugees returning to Macedonia after such scouting trips to take potentially treacherous mountain passes riddled with land mines, for fear that they would not be allowed back in through the official border crossing.

As the refugees continued to flow into Kosovo, aid workers and peacekeeping troops worked to reduce the risk presented by land mines.

NATO forces have begun to verify maps recently provided by the Yugoslav government that show the sites of land mines, according to Donald K. Steinberg, President Clinton’s special representative on land-mine policy.

“Some are very, very accurate, but we know there are others they planted that we either don’t have maps for or for which the maps are incomplete,” Steinberg said as he quizzed children at a refugee camp Wednesday on land-mine safety.

So far, the U.S. government has committed $1.6 million to hire a private company that will survey the Kosovo landscape for land mines, and an additional $350,000 to print brochures, pamphlets and even special Superman comic books written in Albanian--all to warn children of the dangers.

“Every Angolan child grows up with land mines. . . . It’s a constant message that’s hammered into their heads,” said Steinberg, a former U.S. ambassador to Angola. “It’s going to be the same in Kosovo for the next three to five years. It’s something the kids there are going to have to live with on a daily basis.”

*

Times staff writers Paul Richter in Washington and John J. Goldman at the United Nations contributed to this report.