Refugee Trickle Will Be Flood, Observers Say

For days, her family had huddled in their basement in Pristina, not daring to go outside except for food because of armed Serbian paramilitary forces roaming the streets. Nearby, houses had been set on fire and others were attacked with hand grenades. Shops were closed and looted, and rumors of an impending blood bath swept the neighborhood.

By Sunday morning, Ganimet, who was afraid to give her last name, decided she’d had enough. She bundled up her three young children and left with a friend in a beaten-up taxi for the Macedonian border, leaving behind her husband, who she feared would be murdered on the road if he tried to go with them.

“I was crying when I left. It is impossible to don’t cry,” said the bespectacled 26-year-old in broken English, after crossing into Macedonia on Sunday afternoon.

She said leaflets had appeared on the streets--purportedly from the Kosovo Liberation Army, the rebel group fighting for Kosovo’s independence--advising ethnic Albanians to flee the Serbian province because they would be killed and the KLA would be unable to protect them. She took it as a final warning.

“I thought we were going to be massacred, me and my children,” Ganimet said. She recounted her story as she held her 1-year-old and stood, safe at last, on the road just inside Macedonia. To be allowed to leave, she said, she had to pay Serbian troops along the way about $220 worth of German marks.

A steady trickle of ethnic Albanians leaving Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia, the dominant republic in Yugoslavia, looked set to turn into a torrent this week. New arrivals to this Macedonian capital Sunday described a campaign of terror being waged against ethnic Albanians that has only intensified since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s bombing of Yugoslavia began five days ago.

According to the accounts, ethnic Albanians are being chased or burned out of villages across Kosovo, which is about the size of Los Angeles County.

On Sunday alone, 1,200 refugees crossed the border into Macedonia, more than double the previous day. The influx into Albania and the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, which also border Kosovo, was reportedly much higher.

In many cases, said Arceem Zekoli, who cares for refugees in Macedonia for the Islamic charity El Hilal, special army troops give the Kosovo ethnic Albanians only one or two hours to clear out of their houses.

“ ‘Ethnic cleansing’ is in progress,” he said. “Presently a huge, huge number of refugees is wanting to leave Kosovo, but the problem is how to cross the checkpoints. Some don’t have transport. Some don’t have money. Some are just scared.”

Zekoli, who said he was in contact with people inside Kosovo, said that “whole parts of some big towns were set ablaze. . . . People are being told, ‘If you want to stay and die, you can, or else move out of Kosovo and never come back.’ ”

In Albania and Macedonia, government officials said tens of thousands of frightened refugees are reportedly massing to get out of Kosovo.

An estimated 500,000 ethnic Albanians, a quarter of the entire population of Kosovo, have been forced out of their homes, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said in Brussels, warning of a humanitarian crisis “the likes of which we have not seen in Europe since the closing stages of World War II.”

Most of the refugees remain displaced inside Kosovo. Lulizim Koxha, a physics and mathematics teacher from Kacanik, about five miles from the border with Macedonia, said that about 5,000 people were seeking shelter in his small town alone, having been driven out of surrounding villages.

“They are afraid,” he said. “Paramilitary troops are in Kacanik, asking for documents and harassing the displaced people.”

Members of another family who arrived in Skopje on Sunday, and who asked not to be identified by name, said they saw numerous towns in flames and Yugoslav troops firing on Albanian villages in the hills.

In their town, Mitrovica, intellectuals and other potential community leaders were being taken out and killed, they said. These and other refugee claims of Serbian atrocities could not be independently verified.

“It is a catastrophe,” said one member of the family, a woman in her 40s. “They are beating youngsters in the street just like that. I saw this with my own eyes--police come and beat young people with no reason, no sense.”

Ramiz Neziri, a 52-year-old farmer, said police officers and special army troops told the 70 families of his village, about 25 miles south of Pristina, to evacuate last Monday afternoon. “ ‘We are going to have a little war here and some ethnic cleansing,’ ” Neziri said the villagers were told.

To underline their threat, the soldiers dragged out three men and beat them with their rifles “nearly to death,” he said.

Neziri said he fled into the woods behind his house as Serbian guns fired after him. He said he ran all night and crawled through snow across the border shortly before dawn Tuesday.

Although grateful to have escaped, he described himself as so worried about relatives left behind that he cannot eat.

“The Albanians in Kosovo are totally unprotected now,” he said, looking dejected as he sat on a broken chair. “They are just in the hands of God.”