U.S. Marines Take Fire, Kill 1 in Kosovo Attack

As NATO troops struggled to stop the spread of robbery, arson and revenge attacks across Kosovo, U.S. Marines came under fire Wednesday at a rural roadblock and shot back, killing at least one person and wounding two others, U.S. officials said.

No U.S. personnel were hurt, but officials said the incident reflects the increasing friction between peacekeepers and some residents of Kosovo. On Monday, U.S. soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division came under fire as they entered a southeastern Kosovo village, though no one was killed or injured in the incident.

U.S. officials said the affiliation of the assailants who fired on the Marines on Wednesday remained unclear. The incident took place in the southeastern Kosovo town of Zegra, less than two miles south of the U.S. forces’ headquarters at Gnjilane.

The Marines were manning the checkpoint when the gunfire erupted from a cluster of nearby buildings. With support from AH-64 Apache helicopters, they returned fire, surrounded the buildings and urged the assailants to surrender.

The two injured were treated, and one member of the group was detained, Army Brig. Gen. John Craddock, commander of the U.S. forces in Kosovo, told a Pentagon briefing by telephone from the region. U.S. officials could provide few details of the incident, and it was unclear whether any of the assailants escaped.

A statement released by the U.S. forces in Kosovo said that the attackers reportedly were wearing civilian clothes and that their motives were unknown.

Craddock said NATO-led peacekeeping troops are at risk from “rogue elements” among both ethnic Albanians and Serbs.

“We have become the targets of violent acts,” Craddock said.

The southeastern area patrolled by U.S. forces has been considered one of the more peaceful sectors of Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia’s main republic, Serbia. Zegra was the site of a standoff last week between U.S. forces and about 100 Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, rebels who resisted orders to surrender weapons until the Marines called in attack helicopters.

Earlier Wednesday, four foreign ministers from key North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations ended a victory tour of Kosovo with a news conference in Pristina, the provincial capital.

“We can win the peace when we have justice and democracy,” said German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who visited Kosovo with his counterparts from Britain, France and Italy.

For the moment, 19,000 NATO soldiers are in the province, out of an expected force of about 50,000. The Kosovo Force, or KFOR, peacekeepers are spread very thin and are having a difficult time restoring order.

In Pristina, there are mounting reports of ethnic Albanians breaking into apartments owned by Serbs who have fled, or knocking on the doors of those who remain and ordering them to leave.

On Wednesday, looters smashed display windows and carried off new shoes by the armful from several stores across the street from the NATO media center where the four foreign ministers spoke to reporters hours later.

The thieves, all of them men, spoke Albanian to each other as they heaped the stolen shoes and other booty into the trunks of four cars and then drove away. There wasn’t a NATO soldier in sight.

The withdrawal of Yugoslav army and security forces, completed Sunday, has left the shattered province without police, courts or jails, and the United Nations says it will take several months to fill the vacuum.

The U.N. is setting up a police force of about 3,000 experienced officers from several countries, U.N. spokesman Kevin Kennedy said, but it will take 12 weeks or more to deploy them.

An advance team of about 80 U.N. police officers is expected to start work this week, mainly as advisors on civilian issues to NATO brigade commanders who are responsible for initially restoring law and order, Kennedy said.

In time, the U.N. police force will be replaced by one staffed by Kosovo citizens, and the guerrilla KLA hopes that many of the jobs will go to its demobilized fighters.

The U.N. says new police officers will be chosen according to their qualifications and must not have committed any crimes themselves.

With such widespread destruction in Kosovo and so many allegations of past atrocities, former Serbian police may have a tough time qualifying for the new force.

In other developments Wednesday:

* Russian Defense Minister Igor D. Sergeyev said Russian peacekeepers could join NATO forces in Kosovo as early as Friday. Sergeyev said the troops will be ready to deploy in three hours if Russia’s upper house of parliament gives its approval, as expected, that day. About 3,600 Russian soldiers are expected to take part in peacekeeping operations. About 200 Russian troops are already in Pristina.

* Ten ethnic Serbs have been detained and five charged with terrorism in an attack in front of a NATO command center in Macedonia on Friday, police said. The explosion in the capital, Skopje, destroyed a NATO truck but caused no injuries.

* Ethnic Albanian refugees were ignoring warnings about land mines and flooding back into the province at an alarming rate. About 207,000 had returned over an eight-day period ending Wednesday, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. “This is a phenomenal rate--absolutely staggering,” said Rupert Colville, an agency spokesman in Prizren, Kosovo’s second-largest city.

Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, meanwhile, are still venting their rage at Serbs for the actions of Yugoslav forces during the recent war. Vandals ransacked a Serbian Orthodox church in the town of Vucitrn, about 18 miles northwest of Pristina, damaging the priest’s home, his offices and the church.

Torn religious icons lay on the floor among shattered window glass, a ripped Cyrillic language Bible and the priest’s vestments, which were soiled by dirty boot prints.

The letters UCK, the Albanian acronym for the separatist KLA, were painted in white on a wall in one of the church’s offices, while on the compounds walls, red graffiti welcomed the French peacekeepers and NATO.

Ethnic Albanians blamed the church attack on anger provoked by Serbian atrocities and the destruction of mosques. Serbs, in turn, accused NATO of breaking its promise to be evenhanded in its enforcement of peace in Kosovo.

The looted church is within a stone’s throw of a French army checkpoint, and while ethnic Albanians regularly accuse the French of siding with the Serbs, this time it was the other way around.

Defending his soldiers’ neutrality, French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine said at the news conference in Pristina that French troops are operating in one of the province’s most volatile regions, the northwest, which includes the divided city of Kosovska Mitrovica.

Serbian Orthodox leaders have raised “concerns regarding some incidents that have occurred” as NATO takes over responsibility for security in Kosovo, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said at the news conference.

Cook insisted that NATO wants to protect Kosovo’s multiethnic and religious mix and appealed to survivors of alleged Serbian atrocities to avoid revenge and let the international police officers and other authorities bring justice.

Serbs, who once made up less than 10% of Kosovo’s prewar population of 2 million, continued to flee from what they consider Serbia’s cultural heartland.

Cook said he was encouraged by assurances from Hashim Thaci, political chief of the Kosovo Liberation Army rebels, that the ethnic Albanian leader wanted the Serbian minority to stay in Kosovo.

Despite continuing fear among Serbs, Cook declared, some who left during the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces are returning. Cook said about 7,000 Serbian refugees have come back to Kosovo from elsewhere in Serbia and Montenegro, the other Yugoslav republic, during the past two days.

Earlier Wednesday, Cook visited Velika Krusa, about 30 miles southwest of Pristina, listed by an international war crimes tribunal’s indictment last month as a site where ethnic Albanians were massacred. The indictment charged Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and four top lieutenants with war crimes.

Cook called the burned-out shell of a village house “a vision of hell.” Serbs allegedly shot about 105 ethnic Albanian men and boys there March 26 and then set the bodies on fire.

Some of the victims survived to tell their stories.

To help investigate such allegations of war crimes in the province, a team of about 60 FBI agents and evidence specialists began work at two alleged massacre sites Wednesday, FBI officials in Washington said.

The killings at the sites in the southwestern city of Djakovica also were included in last month’s war crimes indictment.

The personnel deployed to Kosovo include special agents, crime scene investigators, scientists and forensics experts. The agency said 56 FBI personnel flew to Macedonia on Tuesday to join three people already in Kosovo.

The investigators will be working with prosecutors for the war crimes tribunal. “The province of Kosovo is now one of the largest crime scenes in history,” FBI Director Louis J. Freeh declared in announcing the deployment.

The U.S. investigators will join teams from other nations, including Britain, France and Canada.

The deputy prosecutor of the war crimes tribunal said Wednesday that forensics teams working on priority sites in Kosovo had to be careful because the situation was still dangerous and booby traps had been found.

In remarks to the media in Geneva that were relayed to United Nations headquarters in New York, Graham Blewitt said it was too early to tell whether evidence from the sites had been destroyed.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

REBUILDING KOSOVO

The KLA: What It Is, What Its Roles Will Be Starting as a small band of rural guerrilla fighters in a society built on personal connections and clan relationships, the Kosovo Liberation Army has grown over a few years of conflict into the dominant force among Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians. In the aftermath of NATO’s air war against the forces of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, the KLA has agreed to hand over its weapons to Kosovo’s NATO-led peacekeeping force. Its power structure remains loose and overlapping, and little is known about many of its leading figures. But the KLA has ambitious plans to form a civil administration for Kosovo and a force akin to a national guard.

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Watson reported from Pristina and Richter from Washington. Times staff writers Stephen Fuzesi in Washington and John J. Goldman at the United Nations and Associated Press contributed to this report.

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* HARD LESSONS

Albanian refugee children are being schooled in how to avoid injury from explosives. A10

* FEAR OF GANGS

Serbs in Kosovo Polje lament violence by bands of ethnic Albanians. A11