NATO Escorts Last Serb Officer Out of Kosovo

With a signature on a document, a whiskey shared with his British counterpart and a handshake at Serbian police headquarters here, the last Serbian officer to leave Kosovo stepped into a Mercedes-Benz at 6 p.m. Sunday and sped off for the Yugoslav capital with British tank escorts--leaving behind a shattered province now fully occupied by a foreign force.

In Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana declared the alliance’s air war officially over.

The Serbian forces’ departure marked the beginning of what Kosovo’s new U.N. civil administrator hours earlier called the broadest, most important and most far-reaching task in United Nations history: to build from scratch a new provincial order in an ethnically torn province that technically remains part of Yugoslavia, while the NATO-led peacekeeping force attempts to restore peace and security in the land the alliance bombed for 78 straight days.

When the U.N. flag was hoisted for the first time Sunday morning outside the now vacant Yugoslav army building that will house the U.N. administrative offices, it symbolized “a takeover of peace, tolerance, democracy--of international principle over force,” declared Sergio Vieira de Mello, the Brazilian-born U.N. special representative who will run all civilian affairs in Kosovo for the time being.

Yet, even as he outlined his ambitious plan to establish a new police force, judicial system and even a government in the months ahead--a job the U.N. has attempted with little success elsewhere in the past--peacekeeping commanders faced the immediate challenge of protecting the very community whose leadership it had targeted for more than two months.

Panic spread deeper through the province’s Serbian minority Sunday. Many continued to leave for other areas of Serbia and for Montenegro, the other Yugoslav republic, despite assurances from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that they are safe. And the exodus continued despite reports from Belgrade that several hundred of the more than 50,000 who earlier fled had returned to Kosovo on Sunday in a homecoming that was widely publicized in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital.

Early this morning, the Kosovo Liberation Army, which waged a guerrilla war to create an independent state in Kosovo for the estimated 90% ethnic Albanian majority, finalized an agreement with NATO to demilitarize. British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, head of alliance forces in Kosovo, and Hashim Thaci, political head of the KLA, signed the pact, with State Department spokesman James P. Rubin present.

According to NATO sources, the KLA waited to sign the expected agreement until after the last Serb in uniform left the province.

The pact requires that the KLA store all weapons larger than a sidearm within a month, cede authority to the peacekeepers on all security matters and expel from the province all its foreign members.

But after a week that has seen armed KLA fighters seize Serbian property, attack Serbs and attempt to form a de facto government in the vacuum of the withdrawing Serbian forces, it was clear that real peace will come haltingly to Kosovo.

An atmosphere of reprisal prevailed in Pristina, the capital of the province where the Serbian army and police drove nearly 1 million ethnic Albanians into exile during the NATO air war through a campaign of killing, burning, looting and terror that scarred the Kosovo landscape and the Albanian soul.

In villages where Serbs trashed and burned ethnic Albanian homes during the war, Serbs were fleeing attacks by KLA rebels. And in Pristina, the headquarters of the peacekeeping force--called KFOR, or Kosovo Force--offices were flooded with frightened and angry Serbs reporting alleged KLA looting, kidnappings, shootings and evictions.

Bogdan Kecman, the Serbian director of Yugoslavia’s state-run petroleum company, stormed into one office to angrily report that all 24 of the company’s gas stations had been seized by ethnic Albanians, who had looted some and taken over others that were profiting from long lines in a fuel-short city.

“I would say 99% of the Serbs feel insecure here,” Kecman said after a peacekeeping officer turned him away. “It’s a human catastrophe. What is happening today with our refugees is the beginning of the disappearance of the Serbs.”

From Belgrade, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has sought to deter the fleeing Kosovo Serbs and encourage those who have left to return.

Serbian state television devoted most of its evening newscast Sunday to the carefully orchestrated return of several hundred Serbian refugees to Kosovo in five government-run convoys from separate cities in southern Serbia. It reported the Yugoslav military withdrawal only briefly.

“Serbs who left their residences because of fear that KFOR couldn’t guarantee their security are returning en masse,” the newscaster said. “This is the best proof that the situation in Kosovo is rapidly normalizing.”

Although hardly normal, the Pristina that the last of the withdrawing Yugoslav troops left behind was a city just beginning to resume the most basic level of urban life. Children on the streets kicked a ball with a British soldier. Trucks rolled in with fruit, vegetables, cigarettes and cooking oil from neighboring Macedonia, and the downtown market set up shop even on a Sunday.

The city still lacks running water, electricity and other services. Fuel is expensive and in short supply, and gunshots punctuate the night.

On Sunday, at intersections where armored vehicles thundered through on patrol, KFOR units displayed arrays of confiscated assault rifles, grenades, rockets and ammunition. The seizures were the result of the British 1st Paratrooper Battalion’s “rat traps”--a strategy formulated in Northern Ireland: mobile roadblocks and armed searches of passing cars.

In the countryside, ethnic Albanian refugees who had fled the province were returning on foot, in buses, cars and tractors--their families riding in flatbed trailers atop blankets amid the few possessions they had taken with them.

The United Nations said more than 103,000 refugees had passed through the long lines at the Macedonian and Albanian borders during the first week since NATO’s troops began to roll in. Far more Kosovars who had moved many times inside the province were also heading back to their homes.

Clearing the way for those returnees was an almost seamless cooperation between the Serbian and NATO commanders who oversaw the Yugoslav withdrawal--military and police officers who had praise for one another.

In the week since those commanders fought through deep mistrust and signed the military agreement that mapped out the Yugoslav withdrawal and suspended NATO’s air war, the two sides have worked closely.

“The Yugoslavs have carried out this operation with great professionalism,” said Brig. Gen. Jonathan Bailey, the British chief liaison officer who managed the pullout for KFOR together with Yugoslavia’s assistant interior minister, Gen. Obrad Stevanovic.

Bailey’s aides said they witnessed a transformation in the attitude of the Serbian commanders during the withdrawal. At first, they said, their counterparts were combative and angry--the result, most understood, of the thousands of bombs and missiles that rained on Serbia.

But Sunday, Stevanovic’s deputy politely asked the British force to escort an unarmed convoy as it moved through ethnic Albanian villages and towns and still-armed KLA checkpoints toward the border.

“The wheel has gone full circle,” said one incredulous British officer, who mistakenly believed Pristina’s former police commander was among the departing Serbian officers. “He’s exterminated people all up and down that bloody road, and now he wants us to escort him out.”

In reality, the nine-car convoy that brought up the rear for the departing Serbs included only the police officers who were recently assigned here to implement the withdrawal agreement. In fact, Stevanovic personally signed it on behalf of the Serbian police.

And Bailey said it was most appropriate to send three of his mini-tanks to guard his counterparts as they left--and share a drink to celebrate a job well done.

“We are here to protect everybody,” he said. “We are the only ones with legal authorization here, and we will not tolerate anybody shooting at anybody.”

Besides, it was clear that the two commanders had come to understand and respect each other through a delicate mission.

After Stevanovic signed the document certifying that the last armed soldiers and police officers were gone from Pristina’s government offices, he insisted that Bailey and a few aides join him for a farewell drink at police headquarters. He gave them bottles of Serbian brandy and cognac.

Then, after the Serbian general, wearing blue jeans and a sport shirt, climbed into his Mercedes and left a building most ethnic Albanians long dreaded, Bailey said he understood how they felt.

“For them,” the British brigadier said of the Serbs, “they are walking out of their country and handing it over to foreigners.”

Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux in Belgrade and Julie Tamaki in Skopje, Macedonia, contributed to this report.