Assault On The Serbs: More killing in villages as iron curtain draws shut

On the Kosovo Border

AS SERBIA pulled its iron curtain over Kosovo, closing the eyes of the world to what is going on, reports of fresh massacres have filtered out. Here a group of civilians shot, there a village, or even an entire town burnt down by Serb security forces.

Almost equally veiled are the results of the Nato strikes. But yesterday "Western military sources" said the Yugoslav special-forces base at Hajvalia, Kosovo, had been destroyed with "substantial human casualties". It is not difficult to imagine the fury that such a strike would unleash among Serb troops and police in Kosovo, and the way in which their wrath would be vented.

In the absence of journalists, forced out of the conflict zone by the Serbs, it has been refugees who have carried the news of the brutalities visited on the local population.

Some 174 Albanians from the adjoining villages of Goden and Dobrune, close to the Yugoslav border, crossed into Albania with only their barest possessions and said they saw the massacre of 20 "schoolteachers" and a principal in the school building that the two villages share.

Albanian officials looking after the refugees, who include 96 children, said the villagers told them the Serbs attacked their homes, 185 miles north-east of the Albanian capital, Tirana, on Thursday, and torched all 21 houses and the school building.

A refugee from Goden, Selim Ferraj, 37, said the Serbs had rounded up his brother with 23 other men from the village of 250. He was one of only 10 men among the 174 who reached the refugee centre at Kruma, where they are being looked after by Western aid workers.

In the Kosovo capital, Pristina, the few local Albanians who could be reached by telephone said they were witnessing the "methodical destruction" of their city by Serb security forces.

None dared to go on to the streets but from behind peepholes and through windows people in the city of almost 300,000 saw the police engaging in an orgy of destruction, smashing down the doors and windows of shops and cafes owned by Albanians. They said they saw Serbs, possibly civilians, driving round in cars and hurling petrol bombs into Albanian businesses.

All the remaining Serbs in Kosovo are reported to have been armed by the authorities. Nato said yesterday that even 300 hardline Serbian prisoners had been released from jail and co-opted into the ranks of the paramilitaries carrying out the reign of terror.

"We can't see very much but we can hear gunfire," said one Pristina resident.

The great fear gripping the city, said another resident, speaking against a background of shooting, was reports that police were rounding up prominent Albanians and taking them to the police station.

The fears appear to be well-founded. Last night Albanian sources said in unconfirmed reports that a prominent Kosovo Albanian lawyer and his two sons were shot dead by Serb police and dumped in the street in Pristina. Bajram Kelmendi and his sons, aged 16 and 26, were taken by police from their home on the first night of the Nato strikes, the sources said, and the women of the family were told they would never see the men again.

To anyone familiar with the wars that have accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia, the enforced news black-out in Kosovo carries sinister echoes of events in Bosnia in the spring of 1992. Then as now, journalists were forced out of the conflict zone by Slobodan Milosevic's forces and back to Belgrade, where muffled and confused reports of terror and mass murder over the River Drina in Bosnia were dismissed - much too easily, it turned out - as exaggeration or "propaganda".

In London yesterday the Secretary of State for Defence, George Robertson, confirmed that on Wednesday the Serbs razed several villages around Podujevo, in the north of Kosovo, and around Srbica, farther east. "Yesterday the Yugoslav forces persisted in their brutality," Mr Robertson said.

"Yugoslav forces attacked a village in Kosovo, surrounding and blockading it before shelling the population who were trapped inside it."

Nato was watching to see whether Yugoslav forces had been "ceasing their butchery," he said, "but our intelligence indicates that they are not."

Serb police and paramilitaries were reported to have swept through the western Kosovo town of Djakovica last night, killing at least two people and setting homes and shops on fire. They were also raiding homes in Obranco, near Podujevo.

The United Nations refugee agency [UNHCR] said it had the gravest fears for the safety of the civilian population of Kosovo now that the eyes of the outside world had been closed by the enforced expulsion of almost all foreign observers. "With only a handful of independent observers left on the ground, we are extremely worried," the UNHCR chief, Sadako Ogata, said in Geneva. "All international observers are gone and journalists have been pushed out. We are extremely concerned that very ugly things may happen and the world would not know."

Perhaps the most worrying of those "ugly things" would be the reported arrival in Kosovo of Serb paramilitary forces.

Mr Robertson said he was "aware that the notorious paramilitary leader Arkan, whose men have been linked to some of the nastiest episodes of the Bosnian war, has been touting his wares in Belgrade." If Arkan, real name Zeljko Raznjatovic, has been sent by his masters to Kosovo, it would only conform with earlier practice in the wars in former Yugoslavia.

In the fighting in Croatia 1991-92 and in the much worse conflict in Bosnia 1992-95, regular-army units were followed by a ragbag of paramilitary groups such as Arkan's "Tigers" and the "White Eagles" of the ultra-nationalist Vojislav Seselj, now a Serbian deputy prime minister.

Their job was to follow the army into occupied territory and terrorise and kill the population, often gruesomely. The exploits of Arkan's team were captured on camera in Time magazine after they stormed the town of Bijeljina in north-east Bosnia in April 1992.

Arkan's "Tigers" are musclebound precision killers in modern combat uniform. Some of the others were gap-toothed, shaggy-haired killers in old- fashioned fur hats, less fit, untrained, and guided merely by bloodlust. Theoretically independent, they are all thought to operate under the aegis of the Interior Ministry [MUP].

Similarly, reports of round-ups of intellectuals in Pristina and of the killing of "teachers" in Kosovo yesterday has a ring of verisimilitude. In Bosnia in 1992 the Serbs drew up detailed lists of targets for murder in each town they overran in the east of the country, and "teachers", often a loose term for anyone thought to belong to the intelligentsia, were at the top, with politicians and the clergy. The Serbs felt men of letters posed the biggest threat.

Charles Heyman, editor of Jane's World Armies, described the army's standard tactics in Kosovo today. "The regular army will surround each village, pound it with mortars and leave a single escape route for the inhabitants. But it is the MUP who will then go in and clear it all out. They carry out Milosevic's policy."

Yesterday General Wesley Clark, Nato Supreme Commander, said air raids alone were unlikely to stop more villages going the way of Goden and Dobrune. He told NBC: "It was understood from the outset there was no way we were going to stop these paramilitary forces ... murdering civilians."

Goden: 20 ethnic Albanian men separated from women and feared slaughtered; buildings destroyed

Hajvalia: Key special forces base destroyed in Nato strikes; `substantial' casualties

Slatina: Radar installations hit

Grmija hill: Major ammunition dump destroyed

Golash mountain: Two large radar domes and communications masts attacked repeatedly

Podujevo: Sixty per cent of town destroyed by fire, according to Albanian sources

Djakovica: Masked paramilitaries sweep through town, killing at least two people and burning buildings

Pec: At least one man killed in overnight attacks

Orahovac: Shootouts between KLA fighters and Yugoslav army and police

Obranca: Paramilitaries destroy buildings