Thousands Flee From Kosovo; NATO Presses Bombardment

On foot, on carts and in old buses, Kosovo Albanians by the thousands fled an onslaught of Serbian terror Monday, while NATO forces unleashed round-the-clock strikes on Yugoslavia, and Russia said it would dispatch its prime minister to Belgrade in a search for peace.

But apart from the effort to take advantage of Moscow’s ties with Yugoslavia, there were no signs of any steps that could halt the brutality gripping the troubled southeastern corner of Europe.

“This is a campaign that is a long way from being over militarily,” said Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO’s supreme military commander.

In Washington and Brussels, officials spoke only of stepping up their aerial bombardment to restrain Yugoslavia’s president, Slobodan Milosevic, even as they insisted that they would not send in ground troops.

“We are confident that with our air assets we can make a decisive difference,” said NATO spokesman Jamie Shea.

“We’re on plan, we’re on timetable, and we’re on target,” he added. “And we’re going in the next few days to progressively tighten the noose around the Serb war machine in Kosovo.”

The alliance estimated that 280,000 of Kosovo’s roughly 2 million people have been displaced but remain in the province. The U.N. refugee agency said that since the bombing started, as many as 100,000 people have fled to Albania, Macedonia and into Montenegro, the other republic of Yugoslavia besides Serbia. Other reports indicated that 4,000 people were arriving each hour at the Albanian border.

“It’s an absolutely horrendous figure, and it is going up, unfortunately, all the time,” Shea said.

A senior State Department official expressed surprise at the scale of the refugee tide.

“What we didn’t expect is that the floods would be intensified so much over the last several days,” said Julia Taft, assistant secretary of State.

In other developments:

* A NATO military spokesman, David Wilby, said that reliable sources had reported that Fehmi Agani, one of the signatories of the Rambouillet accords--the peace agreement signed in France by the Kosovo Albanian delegation but not by the Serbs--was executed after attending the funeral Sunday of a prominent Kosovo Albanian lawyer slain with his two sons. Four other prominent ethnic Albanians were also reported executed Sunday, including Baton Haxhiu, the editor in chief of the territory’s biggest newspaper, he said.

* The Yugoslav antiaircraft commander claimed that his forces had shot down seven NATO airplanes, three helicopters, 30 cruise missiles and three remote-controlled reconnaissance aircraft since the airstrikes began Wednesday. But Pentagon officials said the alliance has lost only one plane, the F-117A Stealth fighter that went down Saturday, and no pilots. They said Yugoslavia was spreading misinformation.

* French sources said the NATO allies have destroyed half of Yugoslavia’s 15 advanced MIG-29 fighter jets.

* The Pentagon said it was deploying an additional five B-1 bombers, from Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, and that four more B-52 bombers had joined the fleet based at the Royal Air Force Base at Fairford, England. The B-1s drop cluster munitions, used to destroy tanks and other armored vehicles and precision bombs guided by satellite signals; the B-52s are armed with cruise missiles.

* Milosevic, quoted by the official Yugoslav press agency Tanjug, said in a telephone conversation with President Alexander G. Lukashenko of Belarus that his nation will resist the “aggression of NATO criminals.”

* A poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that Americans favor the airstrikes by a margin of 60% to 30%, and 38% rate the ethnic conflict in Kosovo a very serious problem for the United States, behind nuclear weapons issues in North Korea, India, Pakistan and China, and drug corruption in Mexico, among other foreign policy issues.

President Clinton spent about an hour with his national security advisors, said David Leavy, a spokesman for the National Security Council staff. He said Clinton also spoke with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and dispatched a note to French President Jacques Chirac focusing on the new, wider phase of the air campaign.

“There is total unanimity in pressing ahead with the military campaign,” Leavy said. “The atrocities on the ground just reinforce the need to stay vigilant. Everyone agreed with that.”

Serbs Reportedly Set Fire to 10 Villages

The flow of refugees that began last week turned into a flood Monday. According to a NATO report, Serbian forces were hounding refugees from helicopters and had set at least 10 villages afire.

Tens of thousands of Albanians bearing grim stories of chaos, killings and “ethnic cleansing” by Serbian paramilitary forces and army troops poured out of Kosovo, clogging roads and threatening to overwhelm the meager humanitarian resources of neighboring Albania, Montenegro and Macedonia.

One Kosovo Albanian leader told Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in a telephone call, according to State Department spokesman James P. Rubin, that Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, had been turned into a “dead city.”

By this account, Rubin said, 37 ethnic Albanians were executed in one community and more than 60,000 in Kosovska Mitrovica had fled to the mountains; in another town, 22 teachers were killed in front of their students, and 20,000 people, mostly women and children from the Drenica region, were being held in what the ethnic Albanian called a kind of concentration camp in a munitions factory. There was no independent confirmation of the reports. There are virtually no international aid workers in Kosovo, and it is difficult and dangerous for the few international journalists there to move around.

A United Nations refugee official said the stream of refugees represented the biggest such crisis in Europe since the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina earlier this decade.

Since Friday, at least 70,000 ethnic Albanians have fled into northern Albania, 12,000 into Montenegro and 7,000 into Macedonia, said Kris Janowski, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, speaking to The Times from Geneva.

Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic told a news conference that the figure for his republic was much higher. He said 10,000 people crossed into Montenegro on Monday alone.

Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro all issued appeals for international assistance.

Mostly women and children, the refugees were exhausted. Many were in a state of shock, Albania’s deputy prime minister, Ilir Meta, told the BBC.

At the Blace border crossing near the Macedonian capital of Skopje, more than 4,000 showed up Monday. They came in tattered clothing and carrying few belongings, riding on tractors or walking along a road that winds through a narrow valley. Most hoped to find places to stay with relatives.

Echoing persistent reports from refugees, Alaidin Demiri, a prominent ethnic Albanian politician from the Macedonian city of Tetovo, said that Serbian forces were extorting money from the Albanians in Kosovo in order to allow them to leave.

“Seven hundred German marks. That’s how much a human life is worth over in Kosovo,” he said. Some were too terrified to try leaving their homes, unaware, he added, if their neighbors were alive or dead.

Two sisters, Teuta Hoti, 33, and Lindita Podvorica, 31, escaped from the town of Vucitrn, north of Pristina. They ran away with Podvorica’s three children, leaving their parents and Podvorica’s husband behind.

Refugees from villages torched by Serbian irregulars had swollen Vucitrn’s population of 15,000 to more than 35,000, they said.

On Saturday night, they said, masked men set fire to shops on the ground floor of apartment buildings. Screams could be heard from the apartments above.

“Everything is chaos,” Hoti said, fighting back tears. “Our parents said, ‘You go, save yourselves, and we’ll stay.’ ”

She said ethnic Albanians were not afraid of North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing, but were waiting for the alliance to save them.

In Brussels, the NATO spokesmen said that refugees reported that at the border, Serbs stripped them of their identity cards, passports and other personal papers so they will no longer be able to prove they once lived in Yugoslavia.

Taft, the State Department official, said airstrikes had not caused the refugee crisis. “It’s actually been going on for a year,” she said.

She said the United States will spend $8.5 million on relief efforts, for food, tents, blankets and other supplies.

Meanwhile, the International Rescue Committee asked NATO to provide protection for its operations in northern Albania. “It’s a real dangerous area, with criminal gangs that operate at will,” said Mark Bartolini, an official with the relief agency.

Aerial Operations Target Army, Police

In the military campaign, the major aerial operations shifted to targeting Yugoslav army, police and paramilitary units in Kosovo, said Wilby, the spokesman for Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, NATO’s European command headquarters in Mons, Belgium.

“In short, we are now engaging all of the fielded forces in Kosovo itself, while retaining the flexibility to reattack the FRY [Former Republic of Yugoslavia] air-defense assets,” said Wilby, an air commodore of the British Royal Air Force.

Among the attacks reported Sunday night: a strike at the headquarters of the 243rd Combat Group, a Yugoslav army unit that NATO officials said had participated in “ethnic cleansing” and other anti-Albanian actions in southern Kosovo.

The British officer said there was no sign of the Yugoslav leadership buckling because of the hammering its military has been taking from the air since Wednesday.

“President Milosevic has adopted what can only be described as a siege mentality,” Wilby said. “He believes he can realign his ethnic problems in one week, and that NATO unity will crack in that same period.”

He said NATO operations were driven by a sense of urgency that many human lives were at stake.

“We have already started daylight attacks, in one way, shape or form. And these attacks will continue to go around the clock, around the full clock, to make sure we get our pressure up,” Wilby said.

Asked whether NATO could “catch up” with the Serbian effort to force ethnic Albanians from their homes, he replied: “We will have to catch up.”

All told, the United States is dispatching an additional 20 airplanes to the fight. Kenneth H. Bacon, the Pentagon spokesman, balked at discussing how an F-117A radar-avoiding fighter was knocked down from the sky on Saturday night. Any discussion could reveal vulnerabilities in technology, tactics and even the routes used by the $45-million plane, he said.

Citing security, Bacon declined to discuss how many targets have been damaged or destroyed since the air campaign began on Wednesday.

U.S. Officials Make the Best of Russian Move

The sudden readiness of Russia to inject itself into the dispute, announced with a flurry of diplomatic phone calls from Moscow on Monday, raised unsettling prospects for the Clinton administration. But officials sought to make the best of it.

Russia, sharing a Slavic ethnicity, has had long-standing emotional and political ties with Yugoslavia. While not wanting to break with the nations of the West on which it relies for financial support, Moscow has been unyielding in its opposition to the military attacks. At the same time, it hopes to glean some global prestige by brokering an agreement.

Clinton kept a low profile Monday, but his spokesman, Joe Lockhart, emphasized that there would be no letup in the military action while Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov visits Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, today. Belgrade has insisted that NATO halt the bombing before any negotiations take place.

Primakov’s challenge will be to extract a meaningful compromise from Milosevic that would be acceptable to NATO.

“What he has to do is convince President Milosevic to stop the killings,” NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana said in Brussels.

“Although we know that they have a profound disagreement with us over the NATO mission,” Lockhart said of the Russians, “we’ve always said that those who have influence with Milosevic--who can bring the stark message of embracing peace versus continuing to face NATO airstrikes--[are] useful.”

Primakov spoke Monday evening with Schroeder, the German chancellor, and he plans to fly to Bonn after the Belgrade talks, a Russian government spokeswoman told Itar-Tass news agency.

He also spoke with Chirac and Italian Premier Massimo D’Alema.

Primakov, a skilled negotiator who knows Milosevic, has been in phone contact with the Yugoslav leader since NATO bombing began. Working out a deal on Kosovo would not only enhance his international credibility, but could also boost his domestic political standing.

Russian analysts believe that Primakov would not travel to Belgrade unless there was a good chance of a breakthrough.

“Primakov would never commit the folly of going to Belgrade if he did not know the mission would be a success,” said Andrei A. Piontkovsky, director of the Independent Institute for Strategic Studies.

Meanwhile, in a signal of a further split between Moscow and the West, the Russian mission to NATO told the alliance it would no longer need quarters there, and cleared the offices of computers and other equipment.

*

Gerstenzang reported from Washington and Dahlburg from Brussels. Times staff writers John Daniszewski in Skopje, Robyn Dixon in Moscow and Elizabeth Shogren, Paul Richter, and Doyle McManus in Washington contributed to this report.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Refugees Stream Across Borders

More than 500,000 ethnic Albanians, about a quarter of Kosovo’s population, have now been displaced by the crisis--the biggest population shift in Europe since 1945. Many have been displaced within Kosovo.

MONTENEGRO

About 10,000 Kosovo Albanians crossed Monday; 40,000 are already there.

ALBANIA

About 60,000 Kosovo Albanian refugees were in northern Albania as of Monday.

MACEDONIA

About 1,250 refugees entered Sunday. There are 20,000 already in the country.

* UNKNOWN TERRITORY: Ground war in mountainous terrain would be risky. A18

* MUSLIM EXODUS: More than 20,000 flood into Bosnia in fear of Serbs. A20