Freed Men Describe Brutality in Yugoslavia

More than 500 exhausted, emaciated Kosovo men of fighting age staggered across the border into Albania on Sunday, telling harrowing tales of being beaten, starved and forced to fight one another like gladiators before their Serbian captors.

Their arrival swelled to more than 1,000 the number of Kosovo Albanian males released from Serbian detention over the weekend in what appeared to be an effort by the government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to disprove reports that men and boys separated from earlier refugee columns had been killed in cold blood by Serbian soldiers and police.

“This is truly a return from the dead--but at least these individuals are alive,” NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said at alliance headquarters in Brussels.

The influx of hungry, disoriented and maltreated men did little, however, to solve an abiding mystery of the conflict over Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, Serbia. David Scheffer, the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues, said last week that he believed there were more than 225,000 ethnic Albanian males between the ages of 14 and 59 unaccounted for in the province.

Ethnic Albanians once made up 90% of Kosovo’s 2 million people, but most have been turned out of their homes by Serbian gunmen or have fled in fear since NATO airstrikes began two months ago, and those taking refuge in Albania have come bearing witness to robberies, rapes and massacres.

The ragged, unshaven men who crossed the border Sunday told aid workers at the Morine crossing that they had been held prisoner near the town of Kosovska Mitrovica since mid-April because the Serbian troops who expelled their families suspected all men of fighting age of being guerrillas with the Kosovo Liberation Army.

“They treated us like animals. They beat us. They cut some men’s ears. They beat us in front of our families,” Bahri Hyseni, 30, told a correspondent from the Reuters news agency, recalling the day he was separated from his family and put in prison.

“The first four days and nights, they gave us nothing to eat. After that, they gave us only one piece of bread a day,” Hyseni said. “There were 450 of us living in one room about [40 feet] square. We could not lie down, only sit.”

Some men told the Reuters correspondent that their Serbian captors had given them broomsticks and forced them to fight one another, sometimes pitting sons against fathers.

Despite the influx into Albania of more than 500 men on each of the past two days, some of the released prisoners said hundreds, if not thousands, more were still being held.

A spokesman for the Doctors Without Borders aid agency said that the freed Kosovars were dehydrated and malnourished and that they bore the scars of physical mistreatment.

“Physically, this is the worst group we’ve seen,” said Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, referring to the two-day influx.

In an opinion piece he wrote for Sunday’s New York Times, President Clinton accused Milosevic of “singling out whole peoples for destruction because of their ethnicity and faith” during his decade-long quest to build a greater Serbia.

“We are haunted by the images of people driven from their homes, pushing the elderly in wheelbarrows, telling stories of relatives murdered,” Clinton wrote. He insisted that NATO’s air campaign to end the crisis in the province is working.

“Our air campaign has destroyed or damaged one-third of Serbia’s armored vehicles in Kosovo, half its artillery, most of its ability to produce ammunition, all its capacity to refine fuel and done enormous damage to other sectors of its economy,” Clinton said.

“Serbian soldiers [are] abandoning their posts, Serbian civilians protesting the policies of their leader, young men avoiding conscription, prominent Serbs calling on Mr. Milosevic to accept NATO’s conditions,” Clinton said.

The president, who has been criticized by some members of Congress for not making plans for a ground attack, pointedly said he now does not rule out other options.

Despite disagreements on NATO strategy that have been readily apparent at alliance headquarters, Clinton maintained that the 19-nation organization is weathering the Kosovo crisis well and that, “instead of disunity in Brussels, there are growing signs of disaffection” in Yugoslavia.

Thanks to continued fair weather over Yugoslavia on Saturday, NATO said, the alliance was able to keep up an accelerated tempo of airstrikes. In the 24-hour period ending Sunday morning, alliance officials said, planes from allied air forces flew 222 attack missions against a multitude of military and strategic targets, and another 79 flights to blast components of Yugoslavia’s air-defense system.

Serbian tanks, military vehicles, armored personnel carriers and 10 artillery positions in Kosovo were struck, NATO military spokesman Maj. Gen. Walter Jertz told a news briefing in Brussels.

Jertz also said that new Serbian recruits were moving into position near the city of Pec in western Kosovo but that it was unclear whether the units were reinforcements or replacements.

“We have no sign of withdrawal,” Jertz said. “The contrary is correct.”

Meanwhile, the 2 million residents of Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, endured their longest stretch without power since NATO’s air war began March 24. The Western alliance, which attacked power plants Saturday, turned the lights off again Sunday across much of Serbia with a predawn rocket attack that set ablaze the country’s biggest coal-burning power plant, near Obrenovac, 20 miles southwest of Belgrade.

By late Sunday, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization resumed its assault on Serbia’s power grid, about 90% of Belgrade residents were without electricity for the second day in a row, officials said. The interruption of operations at electric filtration plants and pumping stations had deprived about seven in 10 people of tap water. Major hospitals were functioning on emergency generators, and people improvised by lighting charcoal fires outdoors to cook and boil water for bathing and washing dishes.

After NATO bombs blacked out the city for the first time three weeks ago, Belgraders got used to power cuts and stocked up on flashlights and bottled water. On Sunday, they lined up patiently in the rain at the few bakeries that were open.

“Most people think the blackout will be over in a day or two,” Ivan Stefanovic, 21, said as he left a bakery with his two-loaf limit.

The U.S. officer commanding the NATO operation, Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, said the air raids are going to become even more intense.

“The array of targets has been broadened and deepened, and so the air campaign is going to continue,” Clark told reporters during a visit to Vicenza air base in Italy. In other developments:

* The head of a U.N. team wrapping up a visit to Kosovo, emergency relief coordinator Sergio Vieira de Mello, expressed impatience with the results of the trip by 11 delegates from various international agencies trying to talk to ethnic Albanians driven from their homes. For 2 1/2 days, Yugoslav officials had taken the group to empty villages and towns and told them that places they wanted to see were out of bounds. “We now have a pattern of denial, which raises questions,” De Mello said.

* In the southeast Serbian town of Krusevac, reservists who last week abandoned their positions in Kosovo staged an angry protest, together with relatives, in response to an attempt to call them back to their units, state television reported in Montenegro, Serbia’s junior partner in the Yugoslav federation. About 2,000 to 3,000 demonstrators gathered at the town’s army recruiting headquarters, where an official told them that only those willing to return to Kosovo need report to duty and that the rest could go home, the station’s correspondent said. He added: “His words were greeted by those present with whistles and shouts of ‘Red gang!’ and ‘Bring us back our friends!’ ”

*

Williams reported from Tirana and Dahlburg from Brussels. Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Belgrade and David Holley in Podgorica, Yugoslavia, contributed to this report.