Serbs Unleash Firestorm of Intimidation

Far from the front lines, the thick plumes of gray and black smoke rising from clusters of farmhouses signal another sinister side of Kosovo’s war.

Nazmi Pliana, 60, and his cousin Arsim Shahini, 24, were among the last four ethnic Albanian holdouts in this village Monday. Just over the back wall of the house where they were hiding, three neighbors’ homes were on fire.

While the men stood by a shed, using a tall haystack as a shield against sniper fire, another deserted house began to burn on the next hill, in the village of Kolla.

“The [Serbian] paramilitaries, and the soldiers in the uniforms of special units, start the fires,” Pliana said, as a single rifle shot cracked in the distance.

Pliana pointed toward the black smoke pouring from the house in Kolla, his home village until Sunday, and described the men who had come and ordered everyone to leave that morning.

“There was one Serbian soldier and two policemen,” Pliana said through an interpreter. “They told us, ‘You have 15 minutes to get out, and don’t touch anything.’

“Then they brought in some machines to destroy our home appliances. Anything they can’t carry, they are destroying.”

This region around the town of Vucitrn is one of the last in the Serbian province of Kosovo where members of the shrinking Serbian minority still live in farming villages. Some are suspected of belonging to secret paramilitary units that kill ethnic Albanians, who make up 90% of the population.

Serbs accuse the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army, which is fighting to win independence for the province, of killing civilians too.

The KLA admitted to kidnapping five elderly Serbs in the same area Jan. 21. They were later released in a prisoner swap for nine KLA guerrillas who were captured while smuggling weapons into Kosovo.

But Yugoslav soldiers and Serbian police have driven out the KLA fighters in an escalating offensive that many here see as a final attempt to crush the guerrillas in Serbia, the dominant of Yugoslavia’s two republics.

An armored convoy of Yugoslav soldiers, many of them wearing black ski masks, pulled out of Novolan about noon Monday, and their morale appeared high as they sped along the highway south.

One of the soldiers thrust a victory salute from his machine-gun turret as the convoy passed journalists who were headed in the other direction. Another soldier raised his middle finger.

The house fires spreading on the mountainside behind them didn’t look like simple Serbian defiance of NATO’s bombing threat. They looked more like a dare.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been warning for half a year that it will launch airstrikes against Yugoslavia if President Slobodan Milosevic doesn’t make peace in Kosovo.

But army troops and special police units are repeating the same scorched-earth campaign that destroyed large swaths of Kosovo last summer. About 25,000 ethnic Albanians have fled their homes in just the past week, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates.

Houses are on fire in several areas of Kosovo, including the town of Srbica, where witnesses claimed in recent interviews that masked gunmen ordered thousands of people out of their homes and into the cold with only the clothes they were wearing.

The ethnic Albanian Kosovo Information Center says it has the names of 16 people who have been executed in Srbica over the past few days, but police insist that only seven guerrilla fighters have been killed.

Novolan is empty, as are most of the ethnic Albanian villages overlooking Vucitrn, northwest of the provincial capital, Pristina. Closer to the main highway, Serbian farmers’ homes haven’t been touched.

“They burn only two houses here and there just to make us all afraid,” Pliana said. “After me and my cousin, there are only two old people left in our village.

“We aren’t afraid. We left with the others, but we turned back here to check the house. They have stolen everything.”

Just as Pliana was about to go inside his cousin’s house to offer proof, a camouflaged armored personnel carrier from a special police unit came from behind a nearby hill and headed for the house.

The gunner swiveled the turret to line up his sights with Shahini’s front gate. Two other police in blue and green camouflage fatigues got out with a Serb in civilian clothes who spoke fluent Albanian.

The officer in charge had field radios in both of his shoulder pockets and a large army knife strapped across his chest. He was carrying a machine gun.

Villagers know him as Vucina, or “The Wolf,” and say he commands the special police in Vucitrn. The civilian with him goes by the name Milos.

After checking the papers of Pliana’s visitors, the commander looked at him and asked him to testify to how well the police had treated him.

“Tell them, did any of the police beat you?” the commander asked the old man. “Did you have any problems with Serbs?”

“No, I didn’t,” Pliana replied. His weathered hands were trembling, and the smoke was still rising from the neighbors’ houses, no more than 200 yards behind him.

The commander then turned to Shahini and paid him a compliment.

“I know this man’s cousin,” he said. “He is an honest man. I know these are good people.”

But not everyone is good in the mountains above Vucitrn, the commander warned.

“Next time, you should come and visit us first,” he said to the visitors. “There is shooting around here. Someone could get hurt.”

After the police got back into their armored vehicle and headed back down the road toward Vucitrn, Pliana and Shahini rushed into the house to gather a couple of plastic bags stuffed with clothes, and a treasured wall clock.

Then they fled Novolan, abandoning the village to the elderly couple, a few wandering farm animals and the people who come each day to set fires.