Allies’ Own Weaponry Poses Threat in Kosovo

As NATO-led peacekeepers warned that Kosovo remains a deeply dangerous land, evidence emerged Tuesday that the alliance itself contributed heavily to one of the most serious threats facing its troops and the civilians they came to protect.

British officers confirmed that two Gurkha Field Squadron explosives experts, who became NATO’s first casualties of the Kosovo occupation, and two Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers were killed Monday while trying to destroy about 60 “bomblets” from cluster bombs that alliance warplanes had dropped on a rural school during an 11-week air war. A civilian bystander also was killed.

British Lt. Col. Nick Clissitt also confirmed that unexploded ordnance from the air campaign litters villages and residential neighborhoods throughout the province, adding to a lethal landscape of antipersonnel mines and booby traps that departing Yugoslav forces left behind.

“Tragic as it is, this incident does serve to highlight how dangerous the province of Kosovo really is,” said British Lt. Col. Robin Clifford, spokesman for the peacekeeping force. “It is not safe yet.”

The explosion in the village of Arlat--near the remote mountaintop where armed and uniformed KLA soldiers mourned their two dead comrades in the rain with three crisp gunshots--was just one of the reminders Tuesday of the many dangers facing the more than 170,000 ethnic Albanian refugees who have returned to Kosovo.

Land mines also killed a young child in one village and a farmer in another, as Britain’s contingent in the international peacekeeping force cleared explosives from the long-shuttered airport in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital.

Kosovo Serbs continued to fear or flee reprisals by ethnic Albanians, who are emerging from hiding in the mountains or returning to the province from refugee camps in neighboring nations, where about 800,000 of them remain.

Monks and nuns in a Serbian Orthodox Church monastery in Pec appealed to Italian troops for protection, and 130 departing Serbs requested escorts from the international peacekeeping force--known as KFOR, or Kosovo Force--during their flight from Kosovo to other regions of Yugoslavia, Clifford said at a daily briefing here.

In other developments Tuesday:

* Russian volunteers fought in Kosovo alongside Yugoslav forces, and their role will be part of an international war crimes investigation, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon said. He had been asked to comment on a report in Newsday that dozens of Russian volunteers participated in the killing of hundreds of ethnic Albanians and the destruction of towns and villages around Prizren in southern Kosovo. “I do not have verification that there were units or groups of the size that Newsday reports,” he said. “But we do believe that there was some Russian participation.” The Newsday report cited ethnic Albanian and Serbian security sources.

* The Pentagon announced that 12 Air Force B-52 bombers are expected to begin returning to their U.S. bases today from Britain, where they flew strike missions against Yugoslavia throughout NATO’s bombing campaign. In all, nearly 400 U.S. planes will return to normal duty in coming weeks, the Pentagon announced.

* Apparent acts of revenge were reported in several sites around the province. Serbs’ houses burned in the western city of Pec, and a Serbian power company worker was shot in Pristina.

* British peacekeepers in the provincial capital defused a bomb only 100 feet from the Grand Hotel, Pristina’s biggest hotel and a major gathering place for foreign journalists, the state-run Tanjug news agency said. It was unclear who placed the bomb.

Cluster Bomb Deaths Confirmed

The five deaths in Monday’s blast were first attributed to booby traps--explosive devices left behind in homes and civilian buildings that Yugoslav forces occupied during the air war. But in a briefing with reporters Tuesday, Clissitt revealed that cluster bombs were involved.

During the war, NATO officials downplayed their use of the weapon, which is a large bomb usually containing 202 “bomblets” that scatter over a wide area to kill and injure large groups of enemy soldiers.

On Tuesday, though, Clissitt said: “There is explosive material from a variety of origins spread widely across Kosovo.”

Later, he said British engineers are using NATO’s target maps and other intelligence data to locate sites hit by cluster bombs. But pinpointing the “bomblets,” he said, is far more difficult.

A cluster bomb is generally designed to break up in the air, sending “bomblets” showering down in a cigar-shaped pattern over an area determined by the altitude of the jet that dropped the device. That area varies from 200 to 300 yards in length and 20 to 30 yards in width.

None of the British officers who briefed the media Tuesday seemed surprised at the quantity of ordnance and mines the war left behind, but they said they could not estimate the number scattered across the Kosovo countryside.

In Washington, a Pentagon official said U.S. warplanes alone dropped about 1,100 cluster bombs on Yugoslavia during the air war. Based on Pentagon estimates that 5% of the 202 “bomblets” in each bomb did not detonate, at least 11,000 unexploded “bomblets” might be scattered around Yugoslavia.

The Pentagon also estimates that Yugoslav forces left behind several hundred thousand mines in Kosovo.

European military officers in KFOR have said the Yugoslav army maps pinpoint the location of 80% of the mines, which were planted to deter a possible invasion by NATO ground forces. Military personnel and civilian agencies are using those maps to begin the tedious job of removing the mines.

“We do not have an idea of exactly how many mines there are in Kosovo,” spokesman Clifford acknowledged Tuesday. When asked how long it will take to clear them, he said, “[It’s] quite impossible to tell.”

Kevin Kennedy, spokesman for a United Nations mission that is replacing Yugoslav officials as the civilian authority in Kosovo, said the danger lies not in the number of mines but in their location: “A single mine on a road to a school is infinitely more dangerous.”

After an air war in which NATO asserted that cluster bombs were dropped intentionally only on military targets, evidence at the scene of Monday’s blast showed that the Arlat school had been hit by such ordnance.

Yugoslav Troops May Have Used School

There was also evidence at the site--and villagers confirmed the finding--that the school was occupied at the time of the bombing not by children but by Yugoslav troops. The Yugoslavs apparently were using the school after they fled barracks buildings that were among NATO’s regular targets in the war.

Serbian graffiti on the school’s walls declared: “We will be back.” There were signs of fires and looting in all the hamlets surrounding the shrapnel-pocked public school, which catered to the region’s overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian majority.

Shyqyri Bujupi, the unarmed, uniformed KLA soldier guarding the school, where the locations of remaining cluster “bomblets” were marked with empty water bottles, said that, on Monday, fellow members of the separatist group had gathered about 60 “bomblets” scattered around the school.

And it was while they were helping the Gurkha engineers wire charges to the munitions to destroy them in a gully 100 yards from the school that KLA fighters Osman Krasniqi, 34, and Sami Gashi, 27, were killed instantly, along with the two Gurkhas and a civilian bystander.

But as Arlat buried the KLA soldiers Tuesday afternoon, there was no anger toward the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the United States for the lethal ordnance the war has left behind.

Said Beqir Thaci, the local imam for the Muslim ethnic Albanians: “If we compare the times before and after Serb forces withdrew, before we were waiting for death every moment. And now, it only happens randomly.

“NATO was trying to destroy the force that was hurting us. This was only an accident.”

Tuesday’s funeral was in a KLA cemetery for martyrs, in a mountaintop clearing high above Arlat where many of the villagers had lived in bitter cold while hiding from Yugoslav forces during the war. It was attended by dozens of uniformed KLA soldiers, some of them armed, and hundreds of townspeople.

The bodies were delivered in a hay truck wrapped in red, moth-eaten blankets bearing the KLA’s insignia. Women wailed as the bodies were placed in two graves, now marked by simple sticks hand-painted with the two men’s names.

Beside the graves, the fallen soldiers’ battalion commander read a letter from their general: “These two fighters didn’t want the war. The war came to them. . . . Two NATO soldiers also died, and we send our condolences to their families.”

Then, three members of the group solemnly fired their automatic rifles three times in unison in the direction of the village where their comrades had died.

As the sun poked through the rain, the battalion commander said, “We hope that these are the last martyrs for Kosovo’s freedom.”

*

Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington and Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Bomblets Blamed for Deaths

During the war, NATO used large cluster bombs packed with smaller bomblets to hit Serbian positions. It was a pile of these bomblets, wired for demolition, that killed five people Monday.

CBU-87 Bomb

CBU-87 is a gravity-guided weapon used to cause destruction over a wide area.