Lawlessness Puts Strain on Kosovo Peace Effort

Gunfire continued to rip through this provincial capital over the weekend, snatching three more lives and highlighting the challenges facing international peacekeepers as they struggle to rein in the violence in Kosovo.

The victims included a man and a woman who were found shot to death Sunday morning alongside a road in Dardanija, a northern suburb of Pristina. Authorities confirmed that at least one of the victims previously worked for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, though they acknowledged that OSCE identification cards were discovered on both bodies.

An OSCE representative later maintained that the killings had no connection to the group, which had observers in Kosovo before NATO’s air war against Yugoslavia began March 24.

Meanwhile Sunday, in a separate incident across town, a drunken gunman used a Dragonov sniper rifle to fire on a pair of uniformed British medics. The medics escaped injury, but the gunshot wound victim they had come to treat at a gas station parking lot later died. The rounds that killed the patient were apparently fired by a different assailant.

The killings were the latest in a string of homicides to hit the capital, where at least 16 people were discovered slain between Thursday and Sunday morning. With no official police force in place, NATO troops have had to take on the dual roles of peacekeepers and law enforcers throughout the province.

German NATO forces were positioned Sunday to curb brawls and looting in the southern city of Prizren by instituting a midnight-to-5-a.m. curfew tonight. At the same time, reports circulated that vengeful ethnic Albanians had ravaged a village just outside the city of Pec in the west, by first looting homes belonging to Serbs and then setting what amounted to virtually the entire village ablaze.

Local refugee officials in cities and towns elsewhere in southern Serbia said the chaos and revenge killings continued to drive thousands of Kosovo Serbs into their region. Those officials estimated this new population of displaced Kosovars to be at least 78,000.

“I believe in the next 15 days the last Serb will leave Kosovo,” said Ratko Jovanovic, the local refugee coordinator in the central Serbian city of Kragujevac. He said that since Serbian forces started their pullout, 15,794 Kosovo Serb refugees had registered with his office from just the four districts surrounding the city.

“Only about 55% have come to register,” he said. “Others are still moving around looking for shelter.”

Serbian officials have estimated that about 70,000 Kosovo Serbs fled the province during the air war, and the prewar census put the Serbian population of Kosovo, which is a province of Serbia, at 200,000.

Jovanovic said that the postwar flow of refugees into his city has been a steady 600 to 650 a day and that 600 are scattered in makeshift camps set up in banquet halls, schools and other emergency shelters. The overwhelming majority, he said, are staying with friends or relatives. In some cases, he said, they are living 50 to a house.

While the ethnic tensions that paved the way for the NATO air war are well known, still unclear are the motives behind nearly all of the recent killings in Pristina. A key reason is that British peacekeepers have established a policy of withholding the ethnicities of crime suspects and victims to avoid stoking ethnic tensions.

Details about the bodies discovered in Dardanija revealed little more than that one of the victims had worked at an OSCE office in Pristina on the Kosovo Verification Mission, that one of the two victims was a translator and that both victims were wearing civilian clothes.

“There’s no indication that this individual was specifically targeted because of an OSCE affiliation,” said Sandra Mitchell, a member of the organization’s assessment team. “The incident reflects the current situation in Kosovo.”

Members of the international peacekeeping force--known as KFOR, for Kosovo Force--have sought to stamp out violence by greatly reducing the number of guns, grenades and knives on the streets. Toward that end, they have seized hundreds, if not thousands, of weapons at various security checkpoints.

Even more arms are expected to be removed starting at midnight tonight, according to U.S. Army Capt. Paul Swiergosv, when a deadline will kick in that requires members of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army to quit wearing their uniforms or carrying weapons anywhere other than their assembly locations.

Lirak Celaj, a spokesman for the KLA’s northern regional command, said Sunday that KLA members will honor all terms of the agreement that their leaders struck with NATO peacekeepers.

“Many of us will demilitarize because we’re volunteers who believe the war is over,” Celaj said during an interview at a villa that serves as the group’s headquarters in northern Kosovo.

Expected earlier today is the arrival in the province of the first caravan of returning ethnic Albanian refugees organized by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Seven buses are scheduled to ferry 400 refugees from the Stankovac camp in Macedonia to Pristina.

Spokesman Ron Redmond said the agency was set to provide food and other assistance to the refugees in order to ensure their smooth return. So far, more than 380,000 ethnic Albanian refugees have come back to Kosovo since the war ended.

Awaiting them is a much different province from the one they left behind, as change continues to sweep through the region.

Thousands of Kosovo Albanians are reclaiming jobs that were taken from them under the regime of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic--a move that is altering the face of the province in ways both big and small.

The ethnic Albanians launched their latest challenge at the Grand Hotel in Pristina on Sunday. A group of them showed up at the Grand, the city’s main hotel, asked for their jobs back and then went behind the bar as if they were going to begin work.

Hotel managers called KFOR, which managed to end the standoff by scheduling a Tuesday meeting between the hotel’s management and the workers.

Another sign of change became obvious Sunday in the devaluation of the Yugoslav dinar--previously the main form of currency in Kosovo but one that appears to be quickly on its way out, principally in favor of the German mark.

In the cafes of Pristina, patrons could be overheard counseling one another to dump their dinars, and some shops posted signs warning patrons that the bills would no longer be accepted.

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Times staff writer Mark Fineman in Kragujevac contributed to this report.