Yugoslav Police Try to Divert Serbs Fleeing Kosovo

As Yugoslav troops neared the end of their pullout from Kosovo, authorities in Serbia moved Saturday to limit the flight of tens of thousands of Serbian civilians in the army’s wake and offered to lead them back to the war-shattered province over the next 48 hours.

Serbs from many villages said that the troop withdrawal, which began 11 days ago, enabled armed ethnic Albanian separatists to attack their homes before NATO-led peacekeepers could protect them. NATO increased the number of its security checkpoints Saturday and said it was close to an agreement with the rebels on how they would disarm.

Yugoslav police set up checkpoints in southern Serbia to prevent tractor-drawn wagons full of fearful, exhausted Serbs who had left Kosovo from advancing farther north, and officials refused to give them additional rations of scarce fuel.

The measures were part of an increasingly desperate campaign to reverse the Serbian exodus, or at least limit its visibility, in hopes of minimizing political damage to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

More than one-fourth of as many as 200,000 Serbs in Kosovo have left since Milosevic agreed to cede military control of the southernmost Serbian province after 11 weeks of NATO bombing aimed at halting repression of its ethnic Albanian majority. Serbia is Yugoslavia’s main republic.

Outside this Serbian city 35 miles north of the Kosovo line, police Saturday diverted scores of northbound tractor-wagon rigs off Highway 22 to a warehouse parking lot that had become a makeshift refugee camp.

“You look very tired,” a police officer told each of them. “Stay here and get some rest.”

“I know what that cop is really thinking,” said Dejan Markovic, 28, who was fleeing the Kosovo village of Drenovac, near Klina. “He doesn’t want us to ruin Slobo.” Slobo is Milosevic’s nickname.

Despite official Serbian appeals, seconded by leaders of the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo and by Serbia’s Orthodox Church, the Serbian civilian exodus continued apace as tonight’s midnight troop pullout deadline neared.

Of the 40,000 Yugoslav troops who were in Kosovo when an international peace deal ended NATO’s bombing June 9, just 3,000 to 5,000 remained Saturday, and “it would not be unreasonable to expect” that all could be gone 12 hours ahead of schedule, peacekeepers’ spokesman Lt. Col. Robin Clifford said.

NATO removed an obstacle to meeting the deadline by agreeing to allow Yugoslav troops to return in the future to recover vehicles and gear they cannot take out in time because of fuel shortages.

Civilian Serbs said a spirit of reprisal was growing as unarmed ethnic Albanians, driven from Kosovo this spring in the deadly purge by Milosevic’s forces, were returning en masse to their villages along with the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army.

Although NATO said it was nearing an agreement on disarming the KLA, a spokesman for the rebel group said the talks with NATO were aimed simply at turning the rebels into an armed national guard.

U.N. officials said that, as of Saturday, 26,000 ethnic Albanian refugees had returned from neighboring Albania and Macedonia, to which nearly a million had fled.

NATO troops returning ahead of them had found the sites of 90 mass graves of apparent victims of the Serbs’ rampage. The first group of investigators from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia arrived Saturday to begin inspecting those sites.

The anger that ethnic Albanians are bringing back to Kosovo, where they made up 90% of a prewar population of 2 million, was evident Saturday in Zlokucani. Ethnic Albanians returning to the village used a tractor to smash down a Serbian sculpture symbolizing ethnic harmony.

Alarmed by such scenes, NATO commanders began joining Zoran Andjelkovic, Kosovo’s Serbian governor, in a series of nightly television assurances to the Serbs that they will be protected by impartial peacekeeping troops if they remain in the province. The United Nations is also stressing that Serbs will be included in the Kosovo government that it will create.

Patriarch Pavle, leader of Serbia’s Orthodox Church, has pleaded with his flock to stay in Kosovo, which Serbs consider the cradle of their religious heritage and culture. To set an example, he moved Friday from Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, to the Kosovo city of Pec.

On Saturday, Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Milovan Bojic said the government would organize convoys starting today for Serbs willing to return to Kosovo. But he warned on television that the next 48 hours would be crucial.

“If you don’t use this period, conditions for returning and reclaiming your property will be more difficult,” he said.

The short time frame was a sign that Serbian officials might abandon any hope of a Serbian presence in Kosovo--and leave themselves--if the exodus continues.

In fact, Serbs in Kosovo are getting mixed signals.

In Orahovac, a delegation led by Lt. Gen. Obrad Stevanovic of the Serbian special police urged the last 3,000 Serbs in town to leave Saturday because they were not safe from the KLA.

One day last week, Serbian government minister Branislav Ivkovic urged Serbs in Istok to stay and accept NATO’s protection. The next morning, KLA guerrillas were advancing toward town, NATO was nowhere in sight, and the town’s Serbian leaders were urging people to buy gasoline and leave, residents said.

“When the big shots leave and take their children, why should I stay?” asked Zoja Avdiju, 54, a Gypsy who left Istok with eight members of her family and her Serbian neighbors.

Some Serbs were so certain of not returning that they were burning their houses and farms as they went, rather than leaving them intact for ethnic Albanians. Nearly every house in the wholly Serb hamlet of Nakto, near Pec, was ablaze Saturday. Flames leaped from one gasoline-soaked structure to another, according to reporters.

Milosevic, who rose to power 12 years ago by championing the cause of Serbian dominance in Kosovo, has tried to portray the peace deal as a victory, in that it preserved Yugoslavia’s formal sovereignty over the region.

That claim will ring hollow if most Serbs leave.

To conceal the exodus, Serbian state television has referred to it as “temporary” and not mentioned its scale or shown images of the despairing faces of departing Serbs.

And the Serbian government has usurped from city halls the task of controlling the refugees along their route.

When the refugees started flooding north a week ago, local authorities in Kraljevo, a city of 126,000 people controlled by the democratic opposition, accepted an offer from an international relief agency to pitch 3,000 tents in an unused airfield. The refugees were to have been sheltered there temporarily until they could find jobs and housing elsewhere in Serbia.

Serbian authorities, however, vetoed the tent city and scattered Kraljevo’s 15,000 refugees among several schools, parks, vacant lots and factories.

Boudreaux reported from Kraljevo and Fineman from Pristina. Times staff writers Valerie Reitman, Julie Tamaki and Paul Watson in Pristina contributed to this report.