Terrain Of Terror

By Romesh Ratnesar

For nearly his entire life, Dervis Audaja, 54, lived on the same block in the Kosovo city of Pec, developing close friendships with his neighbors, a mix of ethnic Albanians and Serbs. Now all that is gone forever. Early last week Serb paramilitary units drove into his neighborhood, went to the door of every Albanian home and gave the residents 10 minutes to pack their belongings and go to the Korza, the city's main square. From there most of the crowd of 15,000 were herded into the local sports stadium, where they spent the night in silent fear, half expecting to be mowed down in a mass execution or placed in the way of NATO bombs.

The next morning, the Serb police told the Albanians they could go home safely. But by then most of their houses were in flames. Audaja's home was already ashes; still, he was determined to stay in Pec. He moved in with relatives next door and asked his Serb neighbors for protection. "I asked them, 'What have I ever done in 50 years that would make you burn my house?' They told me it was outsiders." But by Tuesday, more Albanian homes were burning, and Serb soldiers lined the hills surrounding the neighborhood. Audaja, his trust shattered and his possessions gone, put his paralyzed daughter into a wheelchair and began walking away from Pec. He pushed his daughter for 13 hours before a truck stopped to offer them a ride. "In a place where your neighbors burn your houses, there can be no survival," he said last week, fighting back tears as he sat in the corner of a factory in Rozaje, Montenegro, where some 50,000 displaced Kosovars passed through last week. His daughter was propped nearby, in clothes covered in dirt and soot, with no food and little hope.

For the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians like Audaja who desperately fled their homes last week--traversing miles of winding mountain roads afoot or on tractors or atop mules--the world seemed to have come apart. By week's end, according to the U.N., more than 300,000 refugees had crossed into neighboring Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro since the bombing campaign began on March 24. On Saturday, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said at least 200,000 to 300,000 more Kosovars were heading for the border. At the Montenegro boundary, one column of refugees awaiting entry extended in an unbroken line of misery for 20 miles. Late last week, fearing internal instability, Macedonia closed its borders, with thousands of Kosovars still waiting to get in.

What the refugees left behind was a Serb spasm of looting, terror and executions; what they encountered on the other side of the frontier was a teeming mess of poverty, hunger and disease. In Rozaje refugees drifted through the streets, hungry and shell-shocked; some would come across small obstacles and simply stop and weep. Doctors scrambled to prevent the crowding and dismal sanitation from causing a tuberculosis epidemic, but their efforts seemed of little use. "People don't even have spoons, so everyone eats from one bowl. Women are giving birth next to men with TB. It is an epidemiological bomb," said a local doctor. Added another: "This is hell."

If so, the refugees had already come face to face with the devils. In many villages early last week, Serb paramilitaries surrounded Albanian homes, broke down doors and ordered villagers to pack up and go. Some refugees said they were lined up and commanded to yell "Serbia! Serbia!" and give the three-finger Serb victory salute. "Go to Albania. That's your country," Serb troops told a group of ethnic Albanians hiding in Mamusa, a village 22 miles from the Albanian border. "And say hello to Bill Clinton. You will never see Kosovo again." Serb paramilitary forces were said to have committed grisly atrocities. There were reports of summary executions in at least 20 towns and villages. According to the State Department, Albanian men in Djakovica were systematically separated from women and children. Thirty-three bodies were later found in a nearby river. Refugees said Serb forces rounded up and executed 150 Kosovar men in the police station in Kacanik. Kosovars who made it to the border had their identities erased by Serb border authorities, who confiscated citizenship papers, financial records and car license plates.

Throughout Kosovo, the "cleansing" of the province's 1.8 million Albanians was swift and brutal. Arife Bajrami, 30, who fled to Kukes, Albania, from Izbice, in central Kosovo, said Serbs told residents to assemble at the local schoolyard. The Serbs demanded money from the women in exchange for their lives. "They made us walk for two hours to another village, then they marched us back again, just making fun of us," Bajrami said. "We had no food. I saw one old lady die on the road." As she trudged along the muddy road to Albania, local Serbs shouted, "Your land will be ours now! Where are your husbands? We will kill you all."

In Pristina, the Kosovo capital, black-masked Serb police dragged Albanians out of their homes, force-marched them to a railroad station and packed thousands into locked trains bound for Macedonia. Says a senior State Department official: "The numbers are staggering. We have a huge humanitarian disaster on our hands." The roads leading out of Kosovo were trails of suffering. At least 500 elderly Albanians, too sick and weary to go on, were abandoned by the roadside on the way to Rozaje. On Friday NATO spokesman Shea reported that a six-mile line of some 25,000 refugees had formed on the border with Macedonia. "We're seeing ladies in slippers, children with no shoes and socks," he said. In Albania the refugees' dismal plight was further prolonged by the authorities' cumbersome registration procedures. Even as refugees flowed over the borders at the rate of 20,000 a day, officials warned of many more ethnic Albanians still displaced from their homes in Kosovo, trapped in the killing fields and unable to make their way out. Last week Serb units reportedly shelled internal refugees forced into hiding in the Pagarusa Valley.

Living conditions for the refugees in Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro are wretched. In Rozaje three large factories have been turned into human warehouses, and refugees have packed into the town's 10 mosques. Soiled blankets are the only source of warmth. "I can't do anything," says Delija Kurpejovic, the lone aid worker in the overwhelmed town. "There is no more room in the town. There is nothing to eat. It is a cataclysm." In Macedonia malnourished refugees jostled for the few loaves of bread, water bottles and protein biscuits tossed to them by relief workers. Sick arrivals lay untreated. The region in which the refugees have sought haven is the poorest in Europe, and while relief workers have responded admirably to the human influx, their provisions will be depleted within days. The White House has rushed $50 million in aid to Albania and Macedonia. The European Union will provide $11 million for aid to refugees, along with $17 million in economic aid to the surrounding countries. Germany has committed $15 million.

But getting help to those who most need it is another matter. Relief organizations, for example, say they have enough food in the Balkans to feed 400,000 people for six months. And yet in Kukes, tens of thousands of refugees living in open fields have already gone without food for several days. The crisis is compounded by the departure of international relief officials from Yugoslavia shortly before the NATO bombing began. Most aid agencies' stockpiles of food, shelter and medical supplies remain locked down in Belgrade.

The humanitarian crisis could grow even more dire if Milosevic moves against the pro-Western leadership in Montenegro, the junior republic in the Yugoslav federation. The massive refugee surge also poses dangers for Macedonia, where the economy has sputtered and tensions run high between the country's Serbs and Albanians. Ethnic Albanians make up one-quarter of Macedonia's population. Some Albanian agitators aspire to break away from Macedonia to form a greater Albania. The arrival of 100,000 new Albanian refugees may lend the movement strength. Last week many refugees in Macedonia found shelter in the homes of ethnic Albanians. "We will scrunch 40 refugees into every room if we have to," said the mayor of Studenitan, a suburb of Skopje. "But we will not abandon our ethnic brothers." However magnanimous, that kind of talk may only serve to incite the increasingly belligerent Macedonian Serbs.

For all the pain they have already endured, all the tears shed and horrors witnessed, the Kosovars displaced last week could face an even bleaker future. Europe has found it hard to absorb the large number of refugees flung out by the Balkan wars, and Germany, France and Italy have expressed reservations about the Kosovars' western migration. And no one believes the Kosovars will be able to go back to their villages anytime soon despite the suggestion last week that NATO was considering the establishment of a protected Albanian enclave within Kosovo once the Serb offensive is halted. But if NATO's campaign against Milosevic ends in a stalemate, "the refugees won't go home," says John Fredricksson, associate director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees. "The only way refugees will go home is to an independent Kosovo."

There are some Kosovars, hardened by last week's sorrows, who seem determined to wait it out. For them, things can't get much worse. Qamil Jupaj, 28, huddled with thousands of other refugees in Kukes, told of Serb soldiers burning his house and whipping him with their guns. "They asked me for money. My mother stepped forward and said, 'Why do you ask him for money? He doesn't have any.' They hit her in the face with the gun." He paused. "If I didn't die yesterday, I'll never die."

--Reported by Edward Barnes/Rozaje, Altin Rraxhimi/Kukes, Anthee Carassava/Gorno Blace, James L. Graff/ Brussels and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by Edward Barnes/Rozaje, Altin Rraxhimi/Kukes, Anthee Carassava/Gorno Blace, James L. Graff/Brussels and Douglas Waller/Washington