By the Thousands, Kosovo Albanians Flee to Neighboring Montenegro

Fighting back tears of sorrow and fear, 13-year-old Albertina Nikqi wandered among the thousands of Kosovo Albanian refugees streaming into this town Monday, desperately searching for the father she knew was almost surely dead.

“I have seen it when they arrested my father,” she said through her tears. “They had black paint on their faces. Two days ago, they arrested him. When we left our home, there was a crowd of people leaving their houses, and someone from the police called him: ‘Come here. You are the man we are searching for.’

“They say he is dead.”

A human rights official from the girl’s hometown of Pec, which is in Kosovo about 10 miles from the border with Montenegro, said here Monday that he was told that Albertina’s father had indeed been killed.

Tahir Demaj said the man, owner of a small bus company, apparently was killed as Serbian police, soldiers and paramilitary forces sent tens of thousands of the town’s residents fleeing in recent days.

Demaj estimated that 80% of the ethnic Albanians living in the urban area of Pec, roughly 60,000 people, have fled their homes since NATO bombing began last week and Serbian forces retaliated by driving people out.

Similar scenes are being repeated in many parts of Kosovo, Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic said at a tense news conference Monday evening in the republic’s capital, Podgorica.

Montenegro is Serbia’s small partner in what is left of Yugoslavia. Although it is formally part of Yugoslavia, its government is sharply at odds with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, and it has refused to formally recognize the national “state of war.” For now, at least, this republic is a safe area for refugees from Kosovo.

Djukanovic called on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Milosevic to back off from their military confrontation and reopen peace talks.

“Force has not only failed to resolve the problem, but it appears today that we are further than ever from a solution,” Djukanovic said. “Kosovo . . . is now up in flames. The Albanians, as well as the population of other religions and ethnicities, are being killed and displaced from Kosovo. . . . The most convincing confirmation that the agony in Kosovo is continuing is the fact that, only today, over 10,000 refugees have crossed into Montenegro.”

Asked Sunday how many refugees might flee in any direction from Kosovo in the next 30 days, Montenegrin Foreign Minister Branko Perovic said: “According to some reliable sources, people are already talking about this being the worst humanitarian catastrophe [in Europe] since the Second World War. Some people are already talking about half a million refugees.”

Those coming to Montenegro would be in addition to the 30,000 who fled here during 1998 and this year before the bombing began, Perovic said.

As of Monday evening, according to a representative of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 20,000 people had fled to Montenegro from Kosovo since the bombing began Wednesday night.

Serbian steps to drive people out of Pec accelerated over the weekend, refugees said.

“At 10 a.m. yesterday, three, four, five soldiers came to my door and said, ‘Go, go; take something and go,’ ” said Bessim Dereshaj, 29.

When police appeared at their doors, added 39-year-old Osman Nikqi, who is no relation to Albertina, they said: “You like NATO and [President] Clinton. Go to Albania or Montenegro.”

Perovic said Montenegro will not close its border to such refugees. “We know people are in a much, much more difficult situation than last year, even if our situation is not better. We think the international community will react urgently to face the needs.”

Even as NATO bombing focuses on destroying the Yugoslav army, Milosevic is using the time to “press ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, which is already taking place,” Perovic said.

“Then he will have a different situation: Kosovo will be empty,” Perovic said. “That is the only way for these people. If they stay, they will be killed probably.”

Within a few weeks, Perovic said, Milosevic’s army may be largely destroyed, but Kosovo will have a much-reduced ethnic Albanian population. Any settlement, he implied, would then have to be based on these new facts.

So far in Pec, action by Serbian forces appears primarily to be use of terror to drive people out, rather than large-scale massacres.

Shaqir Zhushi, 39, a worker in a Pec battery factory, said he saw three bodies in Pec--a woman killed by a sniper and two men killed by shells fired by Serbian forces--and said he barely cheated death.

He told of being in a crowd of 2,000 or more people seeking to flee his neighborhood when he was pulled aside at a checkpoint on a bridge by a Serbian man named Jura, who was a fellow factory employee.

Jura and several other officers took him to a building under the bridge, kicked him in the back and legs, and told him to choose his executioner.

“Jura said, ‘Choose which one you want to kill you,’ ” Zhushi said. “I said to Jura, ‘My brother saw you when you picked me out, and he knows you too.’ ”

“He said, ‘Where is your brother?’ I said, ‘He is gone,’ and then I was released.”

Many refugees arriving here said police or soldiers had demanded money and jewelry from them before allowing them to escape.

“When they entered our home, they asked about money,” said Haxhi Smajlaj, 73, a retired farmer. “I gave them 200 German marks and the jewels from the necks of my daughters-in-law. Seven men came. They were all in black and had big crosses hanging on chains from their necks.”

As the family filed out of their yard, his youngest son, Rexhep Smajlaj, 17, was last in line.

“They took him,” Haxhi Smajlaj said. “I went back to help and they hit me. They took him and put him behind the house, and we were forced to leave.”

The family hasn’t received any information about the youth since. “They just said: ‘If you want to leave, you may leave. If you stay here, you will be killed,’ ” he said.