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             NEWS: KOSOVA UPDATE, AUGUST 03, 1998

' Serb troops then moved into the villages, looting everything of value, dousing the homes with gasoline and setting them on fire.'

Quoted from CNN.
'Fighting aggravates refugee situation in Kosovo'
08.02.1998
____________________________________

Taken without permission, for fair use only.

Serbian forces put torch to Kosovo villages
Fighting aggravates refugee situation in Kosovo
Refugees hide from renewed Kosovo fighting
Serbs Press Attacks in Kosovo
___________________________________

THE TIMES
08.02.98

Serbian forces put torch to Kosovo villages

FROM TOM WALKER IN ORAHOVAC

VILLAGES were burning across central Kosovo yesterday, sending thousands more ethnic Albanians fleeing into the surrounding woods. Only last week President Milosevic of Yugoslavia claimed that the security operation in the area was over.
     As the United Nations, the Red Cross and other aid agencies began delivering food and medicine to prevent a catastrophe, the Serbian police were almost blasé about the humanitarian crisis as they continued their "ethnic-cleansing" operations. Some even waved to reporters as their colleagues wandered around deserted Albanian settlements, a Kalashnikov in one hand and a jerrycan of petrol in the other.
     Pretty stone-walled villages in rolling countryside were punctured by shell and grenade holes as smoke billowed from the gutted interiors. The police merrily torched haystacks. German television filmed officers firing flares into maize fields. Along the main roads, which the Serbs are intent on keeping open, a scorched-earth policy was being implemented.
     The misery of the bewildered refugees was compounded by the sadness of what they had left behind; their devastated villages are full of livestock slowly dying without food and water. Pockets of Kosovo Liberation Army rebels sit in the woods and attempt night raids to rescue some of the animals. But it is a hazardous mission.
     Yesterday the Serbs claimed that the guerrillas had fired at traffic on the east-west Pristina to Pec road, which was promptly closed so that bombardments could go unseen by observers of the five-nation Contact Group and journalists. Kosovans reported heavy attacks against villages in central Drenica, around Llaushe, and further west around the town of Klina.
Shells were reported falling near houses crammed with refugees.
     In Orahovac, where the Yugoslav Army helped the police to repulse the first KLA attack on an urban area ten days ago, Kosovans were being allowed back. Mostly men, they formed a pathetic queue at a sandbagged police checkpoint, where they were re-registered before being allowed into a town where angry Serb mobs still linger on most corners.
     Police have closed off areas of the town, and there are persistent rumours of a mass grave hidden somewhere in the surrounding hills. But Orahovac is still no place to ask questions, and even Contact Group monitors, who held secret talks with Kosovans, were shadowed by Serb thugs on Friday.
     "It is quite hypocritical of Milosevic to say that the international agencies can escort refugees back to their villages," said a journalist at the Pristina daily Bujku. "At least 30 per cent will never return. And do you think Milosevic is going to rebuild houses?"
     Police and army units in the midst of this wasteland were in high spirits, blithely unaware of the public relations disaster they were presenting. The primitive nature of Kosovo's conflict depressed diplomats, many of whom felt that they had been cynically deceived by Mr Milosevic. "A few weeks ago the Kosovans were poking the Serbs in the eye," said one. "Then several days later we get this Balkan thing: the Serbs have poked the Albanians in both eyes. But nobody is fooled by Milosevic any longer."
___________________________________

CNN

Fighting aggravates refugee situation in Kosovo

In this story:

•Shooting, looting, burning
•Tension among Kosovo separatists
•UNHCR again seeks international aid
•Related stories and sites

August 2, 1998
Web posted at: 11:47 a.m. EDT (1547 GMT)

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (CNN) -- Serbian forces and separatist guerrillas fought again Sunday for control of territory in Kosovo, with most of the focus apparently on a key road in the heart of the Serbian province.
     The fighting has forced yet more civilians to abandon their homes and join the thousands of others already displaced and dependent on emergency aid from international agencies.
     Most of Sunday's fighting was reported from the region of the Pristina-Pec road, which had been used by international aid convoys Saturday.
     But on Sunday, journalists were turned back by Serbian security forces while traveling on the road. The journalists reported seeing columns of smoke in the distance, and heavily armored military vehicles were present with their guns pointing at nearby hills.
     The fighting continued even though Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic last week had pledged to end the latest military operation against separatist Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas fighting for independence of the predominantly ethnic Albanian Kosovo province.
     Local independent media reports said Serbian forces were continuing what they described as their anti-terrorist operations in several villages in the northwestern Drenica region.
     Unconfirmed KLA reports said the operations affected 13 villages.
     Mortar fire could be heard near the village of Likovac, west of the provincial capital Pristina Sunday. Likovac was said to be a headquarters for the KLA.
     A few miles away, convoys of panicked refugees from other villages fled by foot, tractor or car along rocky dirt roads.
     They were headed toward Likovac, where they hoped to find KLA protection. Many said they had nowhere else to go.
     Further fighting was reported around the village of Srbica, west of Pristina, as well as the central village of Nekovce.

Shooting, looting, burning

All refugees from that area told the same story of Serb destruction: Serbs fired indiscriminately at the villages; terrified civilians gathered family members and fled for their lives, leaving behind all their possessions.
     Serb troops then moved into the villages, looting everything of value, dousing the homes with gasoline and setting them on fire.
     "My house was burned today," Sanje Berisha, 33, sobbed as she and about 100 others took refuge in a courtyard of a house near Likovac.
     "Europe must help us because the situation is critical," said another refugee.
     The tactics were reminiscent of the campaign of "ethnic cleansing," or the forced removal of rival ethnic groups, that marked brutal conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, which had been part of Yugoslavia.

Tension among Kosovo separatists

At Likovac, a dusty, hilltop cluster of a dozen buildings around a rocky, open square, a KLA commander boasted that "we have not been defeated" and that "Serb attacks only make us stronger."
     But other KLA members, who refused to give their names for fear of punishment by their commanders, admitted that they have been unable to blunt the Serb advance and protect ethnic Albanian villages.
     "We are underarmed and we cannot defend them," one rebel said of the dozen villages in the area that have come under Serbian attack since Milosevic declared the offensive over.
     The Kosovo guerrillas were expected to announce this week whether they will endorse a U.S. plan for peace talks between Milosevic and ethnic Albanian politicians led by Ibrahim Rugova, whom the KLA had rejected because of his non-violent stand.
     Shkelzen Maliqi, an official who was a member of a team set up to negotiate peace with Milosevic, pointed an accusing finger at the KLA.
     "According to my information ... there is a great deal of discontent among civilians at the way the KLA has been conducting its offensive, abandoning the population afterwards," Maliqi told the independent radio station B92.

UNHCR again seeks international aid

Eduard Arboleda of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees office in Kosovo, issued another international appeal for aid.
     "There's no aid in the pipeline. The world expects us to do everything here but gives us little means to do so," Arboleda said.
     He said most refugees would not be able to hold out for much longer because they were sleeping in wooded hill areas, where there was no water, shelter or food.
     About 1,000 refugees, mostly children, women and elderly, received emergency aid from several aid groups on Saturday.
     The UNHCR has estimated that about 120,000 people have been displaced in Kosovo since the Serbian crackdown against the KLA began in February. About 500 people are reported to have been killed.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
___________________________________

Monday August 3 7:41 AM EDT

Refugees hide from renewed Kosovo fighting

By Mark Heinrich

PRISTINA, Serbia (Reuters) - Thousands of refugees were hiding out in Kosovo's villages, hills and forests on Monday as fighting between ethnic Albanian separatists and Serbian security forces appeared to be continuing.
     Reuters reporters were turned back for a second consecutive day on the main Pristina-Pec road cutting east-west across the embattled Serbian province.
     Clashes had closed the road Sunday. Reporters said on Monday smoke could be seen in the distance but security forces seemed less tense than a day earlier.
     Fighting erupted across Kosovo, a Serbian province with a 90 percent ethnic Albanian majority, Sunday after a couple of days of relative quiet.
     This followed a pledge by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to end a fierce drive against Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas fighting for independence.
     Kosovo Albanians accused the Serbs of launching a large-scale offensive in central Kosovo, including widespread shelling, and said the security forces were continuing their operations in the west near the border with northern Albania.
     Serbian sources said Yugoslav army and police units had been attacked by guerrillas and responded in various places, notably in the west.
     The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said Monday that the offensive leading up to the weekend fighting had displaced as many as 30,000 people, taking the total number of refugees and displaced persons to 180,000 since February.
     Many of the refugees are huddled in the hills and villages of Kosovo, some caught in the cross-fire between security forces and the KLA.
     Mans Nyberg of the UNHCR said a total figure for those in the hills was hard to calculate because access to them had been severely limited.
     "Police have been stopping us at checkpoints," he said.
     Milosevic said last week that he would allow international aid agencies access to refugees and a U.N. truck did make a delivery near Malisevo Saturday.
     The aid workers said they found thousands of Albanian civilians with children and some newborn infants sheltering on slopes above Malisevo, a former KLA stronghold.
     Refugees are scattered through the province, sheltering in houses, barns and the wooded hillsides. Their plight has been worsened by blazing heat that is hitting the region.
     In Nekovce Sunday, Reuters reporters saw Serbian shells landing in fields and hills around the central Kosovo village. One just missed a two-storey house where refugees were huddled, and terrified villagers scrambled for cover.
     The village, normally with a population of 3,500 but now swelled by 5,000 refugees from the fighting, was caught in the cross-fire between Serbian forces and the KLA.
     It was not clear whether the fighting that renewed Sunday was a deliberate operation by security forces or an attempt to retain control over the vast areas recaptured from the KLA in the recent offensive.
     Although the KLA was sent reeling by the offensive, ethnic Albanians say it is far from beaten.
     Former Kosovo Albanian communist leader Mahmut Bakalli was quoted by the Belgrade V.I.P. daily newsletter as saying the losses had been tactical.
     "(The KLA) has not lost the war," he said.
___________________________________

Monday August 3 9:49 AM EDT

Serbs Press Attacks in Kosovo

ANNE THOMPSON Associated Press Writer

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AP) - Serb forces overran another ethnic Albanian stronghold today and pressed their attacks elsewhere in Kosovo, after a weekend of fighting that displaced tens of thousands of people.
     The U.N. relief agency estimated 35,000 people fled their homes during the weekend. The Red Cross reported finding twice that number in one area alone.
     U.S. envoy Christopher Hill called the offensive a setback to American and European peace efforts and declared "we are on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe."
     Ethnic Albanian sources reported widespread fighting today throughout Kosovo and said six villages had been leveled in the rebellious province, where ethnic Albanian militants are fighting for independence from Serbia, the dominant republic in Yugoslavia.
     Kosovo's population of 2 million is 90 percent ethnic Albanian.
     The government's Tanjug news agency said police entered Smonica early today. Serb military sources said troops shelled the village near the Albanian border for days and killed at least a dozen Kovoso Liberation Army fighters.
     Serb sources also said troops continued today to lay siege to another border village, Junik. Independent media in the Yugoslav capital Belgrade said most KLA fighters had slipped out of the village for sanctuaries in nearby Albania, leaving a few dozen insurgents who have encircled their positions with land mines.
     The latest fighting broke out after Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic promised a European Union delegation last week that the latest offensive against the KLA was over.
     Milosevic also promised that international aid organizations would be granted access to the refugees and that diplomatic observers could escort them back to their homes.
     In Pristina, Hill said he was waiting for signs those promises would be fulfilled. "I'm not interested in anyone's assurances," he said. "We don't have facts on the grounds as far as I can see."
     An official of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Mons Nyberg, said access had been "on and off," with police sometimes holding his teams at checkpoints for hours before allowing them to proceed.
     He said it was unclear whether this was due to a "lack of communication or a systematic plan to stop of slow access." Nyberg estimated at least 35,000 people fled the weekend fighting, swelling the total number of refugees to about 180,000 since the government launched its crackdown on Albanian militants in February.
     In Geneva, Red Cross spokeswoman Amanda Williamson said a team found between 60,000 and 80,000 refugees hiding on the slopes of Mount Berisa south of Pristina, Kosovo's capital.
     She said the Red Cross was trying to organize an aid convoy from Belgrade.
     The campaign against Albanian civilians was reminiscent of the forcible removal of rival ethnic groups that marked conflicts in the former Yugoslav republics of Bosnia and Croatia earlier this decade.
     In Albania's capital, Tirana, a Kosovo Albanian party courted by the United States accused the Serb-led Yugoslav government of trying "to make it impossible for thousands of Albanians to return to their homes."
     The statement was issued by the Albanian Democratic Movement, whose leader, Mehmet Hajrizi, has been mentioned as a key figure in a planned Albanian team that U.S. diplomats hope can negotiate Kosovo's future with Milosevic.
     Milosevic has promised to restore Kosovo's autonomy, which he canceled in 1989. But he and major world powers oppose independence for Kosovo.
     The United States and European nations fear independence could lead to demands by Albanian-speaking communities in Macedonia and Yugoslavia's other republic, Montenegro, to establish a "Greater Albania" in the southern Balkans.
     KLA leaders are expected to announce this week whether they will accept a U.S. plan for Albanian politicians to enter peace talks with Milosevic. The current Serb offensive appears designed to deliver a strong blow against the rebels and force them to negotiate from a position of weakness.

3 August 98
The Times

Serbian forces put torch to Kosovo villages
FROM TOM WALKER IN ORAHOVAC

VILLAGES were burning across central Kosovo yesterday, sending thousands more ethnic Albanians fleeing into the surrounding woods. Only last week President Milosevic of Yugoslavia claimed that the security operation in the area was over.
As the United Nations, the Red Cross and other aid agencies began delivering food and medicine to prevent a catastrophe, the Serbian police were almost blasé about the humanitarian crisis as they continued their "ethnic-cleansing" operations. Some even waved to reporters as their colleagues wandered around deserted Albanian settlements, a Kalashnikov in one hand and a jerrycan of petrol in the other.
Pretty stone-walled villages in rolling countryside were punctured by shell and grenade holes as smoke billowed from the gutted interiors. The police merrily torched haystacks. German television filmed officers firing flares into maize fields. Along the main roads, which the Serbs are intent on keeping open, a scorched-earth policy was being implemented.
The misery of the bewildered refugees was compounded by the sadness of what they had left behind; their devastated villages are full of livestock slowly dying without food and water. Pockets of Kosovo Liberation Army rebels sit in the woods and attempt night raids to rescue some of the animals. But it is a hazardous mission.
Yesterday the Serbs claimed that the guerrillas had fired at traffic on the east-west Pristina to Pec road, which was promptly closed so that bombardments could go unseen by observers of the five-nation Contact Group and journalists. Kosovans reported heavy attacks against villages in central Drenica, around Llaushe, and further west around the town of Klina. Shells were reported falling near houses crammed with refugees.
In Orahovac, where the Yugoslav Army helped the police to repulse the first KLA attack on an urban area ten days ago, Kosovans were being allowed back. Mostly men, they formed a pathetic queue at a sandbagged police checkpoint, where they were re-registered before being allowed into a town where angry Serb mobs still linger on most corners. Police have closed off areas of the town, and there are persistent rumours of a mass grave hidden somewhere in the surrounding hills. But Orahovac is still no place to ask questions, and even Contact Group monitors, who held secret talks with Kosovans, were shadowed by Serb thugs on Friday.
"It is quite hypocritical of Milosevic to say that the international agencies can escort refugees back to their villages," said a journalist at the Pristina daily Bujku. "At least 30 per cent will never return. And do you think Milosevic is going to rebuild houses?"
Police and army units in the midst of this wasteland were in high spirits, blithely unaware of the public relations disaster they were presenting. The primitive nature of Kosovo's conflict depressed diplomats, many of whom felt that they had been cynically deceived by Mr Milosevic. "A few weeks ago the Kosovans were poking the Serbs in the eye," said one. "Then several days later we get this Balkan thing: the Serbs have poked the Albanians in both eyes. But nobody is fooled by Milosevic any longer."
Amsterdam: The Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal is to launch an internal inquiry into the death at the weekend of a suspect, the second in a little more than a month. Milan Kovacevic, 57, a Bosnian Serb, died in his cell of a heart attack. (Reuters)
 

Financial Times

KOSOVO: New fighting blocks UN aid
By Guy Dinmore in Belgrade

Thousands of ethnic Albanians fled heavy fighting in Serbia's Kosovo province yesterday, just days after the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, assured western envoys in Belgrade that government forces had halted their latest offensive against separatist rebels.
Serbian police yesterday also blocked a UN aid convoy from reaching refugees near the central town of Malisevo and prevented other aid workers from going to the village of Ade, near the provincial capital Pristina.
Mr Milosevic had promised international relief workers full access to tens of thousands of refugees. Two small convoys got through on Saturday. Aid agencies fear an outbreak of cholera and other epidemics soon.
The UN refugee agency estimates that some 150,000 people, mostly ethnic Albanians, have been displaced in the five-month conflict. Many of those fleeing on foot and aboard tractors yesterday had already been forced to evacuate burning villages during earlier offensives.
Diplomats and foreign reporters in Kosovo said government forces were attacking Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) rebels on several fronts in the south-west near the border with Albania, around the central village of Nekovce and further north in the Drenica area where several settlements had been burned by police.
Large numbers of Yugoslav army tanks were seen moving to the front line around the Drenica towns of Glogovac and Srbica. The main road from Pristina to the western town of Pec, used by aid workers on Saturday to get to Malisevo, was cut off again.
The Serbian authorities blamed the renewed fighting on attacks by the KLA but western diplomats said it appeared the police and army were resuming their "scorched earth" tactics. Diplomats were dismayed at the extent of the operation so soon after Mr Milosevic had assured European Union envoys on Thursday and US ambassador Chris Hill the next day that the week-long offensive was over.
Despite what western envoys described as the wanton destruction of villages over the past week, the US and its European allies have shown little inclination to match their threats of Nato intervention with action.
The KLA and leaders of the Kosovo Albanian majority accuse western governments of giving Mr Milosevic the "green light" to attack the pro- independence rebels in order to weaken their position ahead of the possible resumption of peace talks.
· The death in custody of Milan Kovacevic, a Bosnian Serb accused of genocide against Croats and Moslems, has prompted a protest by his Belgrade lawyer, Igor Pantelic, who said the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague had refused to give him adequate medical treatment. Mr Kovacevic, who was known to be in ill health, died in his cell on Saturday of a heart attack.
 

The Guardian

Kosovo refugees find no haven on Big Bad Mountain

Despite Belgrade's assurances that the offensive against Albanian separatists has ended, civilians continue to suffer. Forced from their homes, they are being pounded by artillery in their forest refuge,
writes Peter Beaumont in Divljaka

Monday August 3, 1998

The explosion came first - a dull thud echoing through the woods of Kosovo's Banjice Gorge. A minute later came a second shell, scything above our heads with an audible whoosh towards its target higher up the mountain.
Fehmi Goshi, an ethnic-Albanian refugee from the village of Orlate, on the other side of the mountain, winced and paused as he told how he brought his family of 20 to live in the gorge last week after his home was shelled by Serbian forces and his village was cleared.
Mr Goshi used to teach French in the village school; now he lives under the trees. He is a trim, neat man, despite having slept on the ground in his only clothes for seven nights.
His joy at finding a French-speaker to carry his story to the outside world produced a moment of quiet catharsis: how his family was driven from their home by Serb soldiers and police and has survived on scraps of food provided by local villagers and guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who patrol the gorge and mountainside.
"We came only with what we were wearing," he said. "The police came with the soldiers, supported by a large number of tanks. They shelled everything. There were around 50 people injured. Then they burnt our corn."
But while Mr Goshi is able to scrape a hard living for himself and the younger members of his family, life in the woods for his 80-year-old father and his mother is desperate. His father sits bolt upright with his crutches on the family's only chair. Under his felt cap his expression is of a man crushed by the expulsion, broken by being forced to walk 10 miles across the mountains on almost crippled feet to find sanctuary.
Now even the gorge is no longer safe. The shelling from the Serb- controlled town of Komorane has driven many who sought shelter back down the mountain track, in a sorry caravan of crowded tractor trailers.
It is what the Serb authorities want. Last week a plane dropped leaflets urging the refugees to return and assuring them that they were safe. It is an assurance the refugees do not believe. But they know they cannot stay on this high ground, marked on the maps as "Big Bad Mountain".
Surrounded by the Serbs on three sides, the KLA is coming under renewed pressure in this fastness. And as in Junik - also under siege from Serb guns - the civilians are suffering grievously.
"We would like to go back to our homes but we cannot," Mr Goshi said. "Our Serb neighbours are our enemies now. They have destroyed our homes and our lives. We are living here like animals - injured animals."
The refugees of Orlate and neighbouring villages believe they have been abandoned by the world. What they see happening is a clear contradiction of claims by the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, that the Serb offensive against the KLA is over. For below these mountain villages the Serb onslaught - which has displaced up to 60,000 refugees - continues.
If anything has happened, it is that the rolling offensive has simply moved on to try to crush all resistance to the Kosovar uprising.
Despite Belgrade's claims that the KLA guerrillas fighting in these hills are foreigners from Albania and elsewhere, it is clear that the men in this sector are locals who are struggling for their survival and the survival of their families.
Higher up the mountains - above Divljaka, where the limestone track runs out - it is impossible to tell what is happening to the KLA, reeling from a series of defeats in recent weeks. Its fighters are unwilling to escort reporters any higher.
All that the officer in charge will volunteer is: "We are not politicians; we are simply fighting for our people. We are looking after them."
Hasan Bytyzi, from a nearby village, is less guarded. "Look around you. Milosevic says he is fighting terrorists. We are not terrorists. These refugees are women, old people and children. They are shelling from all sides."
Another refugee sums up the anger of those living in these hills. "Where are your European leaders? Where is the world? Tell them the Serbian forces are killing women and children in these woods."
--
Kosova Information Centre - London

The Sunday Times

British troops set to join peace force in Kosovo
by Stephen Grey, Brussels

THOUSANDS of British troops could be sent to the war-torn province of Kosovo and neighbouring countries under a large-scale intervention plan to be finalised by Nato allies this week.
Nato commanders have devised a strategy to bring peace to the region that combines airstrikes on Serbian offensive positions within 18 hours of political approval; the enforcement of a no-fly zone over Kosovo; and deployment of 25,000 troops along the province's border with Albania to halt the supply of weapons to the separatist ethnic Albanian guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
In the event of a negotiated settlement to end the fighting, Nato could enforce it with up to 60,000 peacekeeping troops - as many as were deployed to prevent a resurgence of conflict in Bosnia. The options are set out in a detailed plan, hundreds of pages long, expected to be approved by Nato diplomats in Brussels on Wednesday.
Britain has taken a leading role in the planning, and its aircraft and troops would be part of any co-ordinated action. It already has four Harrier GR7 ground-attack jets based at Gioia del Colle, in southern Italy, just across the Adriatic from Albania and a short flying time from Kosovo. Also available for duty in Albania or Kosovo is Britain's Joint Rapid Reaction Force, which has the Parachute Regiment and Royal Marines at its disposal, as well as jets, helicopters and ships. A spearhead battalion comprising 600 men of the Royal Marines' 40 Commando is ready to be dispatched immediately for service abroad in any trouble spot.
"These are options and nothing will happen without further political decisions," said one western military commander. "But the Serbs should be aware we are in a position militarily to respond immediately if the politicians order intervention."
The Foreign Office said any decision to intervene would be guided by the principle of "proportionality". The Serbs' right to defend their territory from separatists was accepted, a spokesman said. "If the use of force by the Serbs is disproportionate to the threat they face that is not acceptable."
Britain and its allies believe that no ground troops should be sent into Kosovo itself while fighting there continues.
The use of troops to stop donkey trains of weapons moving into Kosovo from Albania's mountainous northern border and to close down guerrilla camps would be technically difficult, however, requiring substantial logistical support.
Even the deployment of foreign troops as peacekeepers following a settlement would be fraught with danger. "This would be an extremely difficult operation involving the rounding up of all weapons from the rebel forces and supervising the return of heavy weapons to barracks," said one Nato official.
At least 500 people have been killed and 150,000 displaced in five months of armed conflict in Kosovo, where the KLA is battling for independence from Yugoslavia. According to local estimates, 50,000 people were uprooted during last week's fighting alone, in which the KLA suffered heavy defeats. Many are now living rough in the hills, too fearful to return to their homes.
The fighting continued yesterday in western Kosovo, where Yugoslav forces have surrounded the rebel-held town of Junik. There is evidence of atrocities against the civilian population by the troops of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president.
Refugees abandoning their burning villages have demanded to know how much worse the violence must become before Nato decides that intervention is justified. Albert Rohan, an Austrian diplomat who led a three-strong European Union delegation to the province last week, said he was shocked by the scale of destruction. "It gives the clear impression of an excessive use of military force," he said. "The consequences to the civilian population seem totally out of proportion with any military targets."
It remains likely that Nato will wait until any possibility of a negotiated settlement has been exhausted before approving military intervention. However, its readiness to use force will be emphasised by an airborne exercise starting on August 17 in Albania.
Britain's Parachute Regiment will join French, German, Italian, Russian and local Albanian troops in an operation to demonstrate their ability to assemble and work together at short notice.
It is hoped that such a clear signal of western readiness to intervene will force Milosevic to the negotiating table. However, the KLA declared this weekend that it would "fight against the Serb barbarians until victory".

Additional reporting: James Pettifer, Belgrade
 

The Observer

Brutal Serb army has destruction of rebels in its sights as Kosovo goes up in flames

By Peter Beaumont in Pristina
Sunday August 2, 1998

The Serb gaolers who stuck the boot in to Destan Rukiqi did their job well: two days ago his kidneys packed up working. The ethnic Albanian lawyer never had a problem with his kidneys before. Now he is undergoing dialysis at the hospital in Pristana where he lies, he body snaking tubes, guarded by the Serbian police.
Mr Rukiqi's was gaoled for contempt. His real crime, however, has been to represent the burgeoning number of ethnic Albanians who have been accused of terrorism. Last month the Serbs found their excuse. He had the nerve to challenge a Serbian public prosecutor over access to a client's documents. Perhaps it is true that Mr Rukiqi got a little angry; used words he should not have done. But the response was to remove his immunity from prosecution. A few days later at his office he was arrested and sentenced to 60 days.
What happened to him in his time in prison is not clear. No-one has been allowed to talk to him, although the Red Cross has been allowed to see him to be assured that he is still alive.
His friends, however, say his gaolers beat him so badly that they literally kicked his kidneys in. "He had no problems at all with his kidneys before he was imprisoned," said one who knew him before his arrest.
The media is not allowed to talk to him. But increasingly in Kosovo the media is not allowed to talk to anyone. On Thursday the Serbian authorities changed the rules governing the use of interpretors by the international media refusing to allow their accreditation with their accompanying journalists.
Without accreditation they are too afraid to work - too many have been beaten or arrested at the Serbian checkpoints.
The Serbs are clamping down in Kosovo.
The smoke coils off the fields along the Pristina road. At dusk the fires lit by the villagers of Kosovo to scour their land after the harvest carve vivid shapes across the rolling central plain. But close by behind Serbian police and army roadblocks, the villages themselves are on fire, caught in the blitzkrieg of an overwhelmingly powerful Serb force and the rag-tag KLA guerilla army of Kosovo's Albanian majority. Inside Kosovo's sealed world of febrile violence and fleeing refugees, the killing is creeping closer to its heart. The war is now barely half an hour from Pristina's cafe society, which has survived in defiance of the conflict with its 'bulevars for the evening promenade.'
Officially the savage two week Serb offensive prosecuted by the JNA, the Yugoslav National Army, against the KLA has come to a conclusion. A smiling Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic says so. But what Mr Milosevic says and what is happening in the sealed off villages of of Kosovo are two very different things. On Thursday Mr Milosevic assured members of a European delegation that the recent military action had stopped and that he 'indicated flexibility' in his meetings with the diplomats how far self-government by the Albanian majority could go. But behind the Butcher of Belgrade's mincing words lies the harsh reality that his police and army have shelled more than 270 villages and forced at least 60,000 people onto the road in the offensive.
"We're on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe,"said Skelzen Maliqi of the Board for the Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms of Kosovo Albanians.
"The offensive was not meant to destroy the KLA, but to move out as much of the population as possible. The goal was ethnic cleansing," he said.
In the mountain fastness of Junik - where 1,000 fighters of the KLA are surrounded with civilians from the surrounding towns and villages - the bombardment goes on. In Loda also nearby the KLA are enclosed. Convoys of police and soldiers are still on the move. Those who have managed to get close enough have heard the sounds of battle echoing in the mountains. And Junik is not an isolated incident.
Mr Milosevic is counting on a sleight of hand that he has used before. What the world's media and aid agencies and diplomats can't see, he says, cannot be happening.
But something is happening behind the protective screen thrown up by Serbia's forces to keep out the eyes of the world. Reports filtering through from survivors of the scattered battlefields talk of houses destroyed; villages empty of their populations; acts of random murder. They talk ominously of the arrival of the 'Frankies', the nickname given to a Serb special force accused of ethnic cleansing in the ghost town of Decani and the villages around. President Milosevic tells the international community what they want to hear. Meanwhile, the war goes on.
The flames burning in the countryside are licking at the edge of Pec, Kosova's second city. The fighting has reached the southern suburbs of the city of 80,000 while from two high rise blocks Serb snipers are targetting 'terrorist positions' out in the country. Serb civilians too have taken to carrying arms in a city so frightened that in now shuts down at four.
Suddenly the KLA - which so recently paraded through the towns and roads it had captured for benefit of the world's media - is on the back foot.
The war it had prosecuted so easily is turning sour. The victims, as ever, are the civilians caught in between. In the towns of Orahovac and Malisevo the KLA have been driven out. Major roads, once impassable to the heavily armed Serbian 'police', have been retaken.
In two weeks the map of Kosovo has been redrawn again. The road linking Pristina to the city of Pec, barely 50 miles away, was reopened last week to Serbian forces after a rebel blockade that lasted two months. It is not a pleasant road to travel. 'Liberated' by the Serbs it is a dangerous, almost deserted highway. Where once almost 25,000 people lived in hamlets and small towns only hundreds remain, too scared to talk.
The setbacks to the KLA - fighting for independence and a Greater Albania for Kosovo's 90 per cent ethnic Albanian majority - have a flavour of hubris for a guerilla army that walked down from the hills and got burned trying to control the towns and major roads against an enemy armed with tanks and artillery.
But if the last two weeks have been a disaster for the KLA and a PR success for the Serbs - a moment of grand hubris for the KLA after its irregulars failed in their attempt to take and hold Orahovac - it has been a limited disaster.
"Two weeks ago the KLA controlled 40 per cent of the country including some major towns and roads," says one observer. "Now they control 40 per cent of the country but without the roads. All the Serbs have achieved is to open up the roads for police patrols. It doesn't make it safer for them to drive those roads." And as if to prove the point, travellers returning from areas around the fiercest of the fighting have reported KLA positions pouring fire from the hills onto Serb patrols.
And, by and large, the KLA has used its policy of anonymity to slip the net of the pursuing JNA. Faced with the disaster at Orahovac it has walked away from confrontations with the superior force abandoning positions to the Serbs. "There was one guy I saw manning a checkpoint five days ago in KLA uniform," said one source. "Yesterday I saw him in civilian clothes walking with some refugees. You know when the time is right he will find another uniform."
And while Serbian forces have advanced sending thousands of refugees into the countryside, the international community, which had threatened air stikes to protect Albanian civilians, has looked on. The Nato jets raids promised by Tony Blair as he relinquished the European Presidency have not materialised. Serbia has laid its fires.
Instead the international community appears to be backing the most dangerous strategy of all - turning a blind eye to the latest Serb advance in the hope it will draw the teeth of the KLA with its dreams of an independent Albanian Kosovo, and by brokering a rapprochement between the rival factions in Kosovo's Albanian factions to forge a united front who can negotiate with Milosevic for a limited self rule.
In that last part it has been encouraging a rapprochement between the increasing unpopular moderate ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova - who has called for talks with President Milosevic in Belgrade - and the fighters of the KLA and their anonymous leaders.
Other factors are already at work designed to unravel the international community's grand plans. Not least among these is an escalating crisis over the arming of Serb civilians by the Serb forces who have opened up their police stations to hand out weapons.
Emyr Jones Parry, Foreign Office political director and one of a troika of European Union diplomats who was last week escorted through the abandoned fields and villages and gutted houses on the Pristina-Malisevo road. "We're trying to bring these folks together," he told reorters. "Whether it is possible after all this, I don't know."
`'The Serbs have had a good two weeks," said another western source. "But the position of the KLA is such that they cannot be defeated. They also cannot win."
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Kosova Information Centre - London

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