Civilians Killed in Airstrikes on Refugee Convoys

MEJA, Yugoslavia —  In one of the deadliest and most confusing days yet of Operation Allied Force, NATO and the Yugoslav government of Slobodan Milosevic accused each other Wednesday of launching air attacks that killed scores of fleeing Kosovo Albanians in at least two different places.

Yugoslav authorities maintained that their forces came under attack while escorting Albanian refugees out of the country and that NATO attacks have killed soldiers and civilians without discrimination. In one incident Wednesday, survivors reported that 20 people had died; a foreign reporter on the scene saw eight victims dead or dying. In another attack, Serbian media reported that 44 refugees had been killed.

The Pentagon said Wednesday that NATO warplanes had begun to attack a convoy on the road between Prizren and the Albanian border city of Kukes when pilots recognized civilian trucks and tractors mixed in with military vehicles. The pilots broke off the attack, Pentagon officials said, but it was not clear whether civilians were harmed before they did so.

NATO and Pentagon officials, citing refugee reports emerging from Albania on Wednesday, charged that the Serbs now are using their aircraft to help carry out their campaign of “ethnic cleansing” throughout Kosovo, a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic.

At the Pentagon, officials at first said that Yugoslav military escorts had turned their rage on refugees when they came under NATO air attack. A few hours later, the officials recanted the charges, admitting that they had no evidence for them.

Appearing to corroborate allegations that Serbs were to blame, however, ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo arriving at the Albanian border post of Morine on Wednesday night said they believed that their convoy had been bombed by Yugoslav forces and not by NATO airplanes, as officials in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, charged. The attack cited by these refugees appeared to be different from the one referred to by the Pentagon and from the one whose aftermath was witnessed by a foreign reporter.

The refugees who reached Albania also disputed statements from Belgrade that they were on their way back to their homes when the attack occurred. The refugees said the opposite was true, that they were in the process of being driven out of Kosovo by force and were en route to the border.

By day’s end in Washington, Clinton administration officials and the Pentagon’s top brass were uncertain how to untangle the day’s carnage and determine who had caused it. The fog of war had engulfed the operation, they acknowledged.

At Site of Attack, Confusion Was Deadly

In villages like Meja, where a column of fleeing Kosovo Albanians was struck by bombs Wednesday, the confusion was deadly. Meja, a small Kosovo Albanian farming village, is about three miles west of the town of Djakovica; farther east is Prizren. In the confusion, it was not clear if the Meja attack was the same as the one the Pentagon had referred to.

In Meja, the victims had been riding near the front of a convoy of 11 wagons, six of which were drawn by horses that more than an hour later were still stopped in their tracks.

They were in a column of refugees who fled the town of Junik and the nearby village of Pacaj when the area came under intense NATO bombardment Wednesday morning, several survivors said.

It is in the vicinity of Meja that the paths of refugees, soldiers, guerrillas and NATO warplanes have converged as Yugoslav forces fight what they claim are rebel incursions from Albania and as refugees flee in several directions.

During the height of the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army’s gains in Kosovo last summer, Junik was a key guerrilla headquarters. But Yugoslav forces seized it, and Junik is now a target of NATO’s air war.

Even as dazed refugees who had survived the Meja attack came out of hiding in the woods Wednesday, NATO warplanes bombed targets on the other side of a low mountain ridge. Explosions shook the ground every few minutes.

Scattered among the corpses of Kosovo Albanian refugees lying on a dirt road near Meja, there were reminders of how NATO countries had tried to help them before the bombs fell.

A bulging sack landed just above the head of a young woman’s body, both thrown by blasts from what several survivors said was an airstrike that killed at least 20 ethnic Albanian refugees, including a young boy.

The label “U.S.A. Flour” was printed across the front of the sack in large, bold letters. As a gift of relief aid, it also carried the warning “Not For Resale.”

A few feet away lay the corpse of a young Kosovo Albanian woman who looked to be in her late teens or early 20s. It was hard to tell. A large piece of shrapnel had pierced her soft cheek, leaving a gaping wound.

Next to her was a small white carton with blue lettering that identified a different aid donor: the relief agency Doctors of the World. It is based in France, another NATO member.

The body of a boy lay nearby. He looked about 7 years old and, like the rest of the dead around him, had been hurled from a wagon hitched to a farmer’s tractor.

In all, eight bodies could be seen lying dead or dying. One corpse was that of a middle-aged woman thrown so hard by the blast that her body was wrapped around a tree on the other side of a barbed-wire fence.

A blond doll hung over the side of the ruined wagon, and a child’s purple boot stood upright in the road below. It was only about five yards from the small crater left by the bomb in the roadside.

In death, the refugees were surrounded by the things they had brought to keep them going in whatever sanctuary they might reach.

There were a small bucket of macaroni, tins of cooking oil, fresh white socks and bathroom towels still in their cellophane wrappers, folding cots and mattresses now charred black.

Two hours after the attack, when a foreign reporter arrived on the scene independently of Yugoslav authorities, local ethnic Albanian volunteers were still helping Serbian police remove the dead, along with two women who were barely breathing.

One of them, her jaw moving so faintly that no one had noticed she was still alive, was laid out on a blanket and loaded into a hearse that carried victims to a hospital, one at a time.

As the hearse drove off, the shellshocked survivors walked out of the woods, screaming and crying in cold terror. One said she had counted five or six explosions.

“I saw the bombs,” shouted Antigona Hasanaj. “What did we do to deserve this?”

She identified two of the dead as her uncles.

Milenko Momcilovic, an investigating judge at the scene, read the casualty figures from his clipboard. Dead: 20. Wounded: 4.

About 100 yards up the road toward Djakovica, in the direction the column of refugees was heading, another bomb had blown a truck in half.

The blast had tossed one section of the vehicle through the wall surrounding a farmer’s house.

It was impossible to tell from the wreckage whether the truck, which had been parked in front of the farmhouse, was a military vehicle.

But another bomb hit a larger, two-story farmhouse right next to where the Kosovo Albanian refugees were killed.

More than an hour after the airstrike, an elderly man and woman were still moaning for help in the rubble of the destroyed wall and small barn where they had tried to hide.

Muharem Alija, 14, walked out of the ruins trembling and covered in dust, with a trickle of tears and dried blood on his cheek.

Asked what had happened, he spoke just one word.

“Airplanes,” he said through an interpreter.

Across the Albanian border, Ahmet Hasani, 55, a refugee from Kladranica, said: “For sure, [Serbs] are doing it in order to tell the world, ‘Look what NATO is doing.’ ”

Hasani said that since the NATO bombings began last month, no one had seen any planes because they fly so high. “But this time we did,” he said. For Hasani, that was proof that NATO was not involved.

Hasani said he believes that statements from refugees in Kosovo implicating NATO may have been coerced. He had seen a badly wounded man speaking to Yugoslav television and “maybe because they threatened him, he said NATO bombed us.”

Metal Blades Found Near Carnage

But in Meja, the only clues to the weapon that caused the deaths and destruction were two pieces of heavy metal, a dull silvery gray, that were each about 2 feet long and shaped like single blades from a small propeller or motor.

Similar metal blades were also found in shallow craters beside the wreckage of a bombed civilian car in which three police officers were killed on a main road in Kosovo’s provincial capital, Pristina, on Monday and at the city’s demolished bus terminal the following day.

One blade lay in the shallow roadside crater next to the destroyed tractor. Another fell about 12 yards behind it in an open field, not far from the corpse of an elderly man killed in the explosion.

Several Serbian police in blue camouflage uniforms helped with the wounded, carrying the elderly woman and man from the destroyed farmhouse in a wheelbarrow.

One of the police wore a blue baseball cap with two letters in the top left corner, a team emblem that said “L.A.”

Watson reported from Meja and Healy from Washington. Times staff writer John Daniszewski in Kukes contributed to this report.

All of Paul Watson’s dispatches from Kosovo are available on The Times’ Web site at http://ukobiw.net/dispatch.

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Yugoslav and Serbian Forces in the Field

The failure by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw Yugoslav soldiers and Serbian paramilitary police from the field in Kosovo helped trigger the current NATO campaign. Last fall, a U.N. Security Council resolution called for the soldiers and police to be kept at bases where they are normally garrisoned. But the Yugoslav and Serbian forces failed to comply. Noncompliance and atrocities increased, triggering the NATO airstrikes that began March 24. The latest map, reflecting ground deployments Tuesday, shows Yugoslav and Serbian forces still out in the field.

GROUND DISPOSITIONS DEC. 23, 1998

Estimated Yugoslav army strength in Kosovo: 12,000

Estimated Serbian Interior Ministry police strength in Kosovo: 11,500

GROUND DISPOSITIONS MARCH 24, 1999

Estimated Yugoslav army strength in Kosovo: 15,000

Estimated Serbian Interior Ministry police strength in Kosovo: 14,000

GROUND DISPOSITIONS APRIL 13, 1999

Estimated Yugoslav army strength in Kosovo: 16,000 +

Estimated Serbian Interior Ministry police strength in Kosovo: 15,000

Source: NATO

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A Puzzling Attack

NATO officials were trying to determine whether alliance jets accidentally struck a caravan of refugees in Kosovo, or whether the attack was by Serbian aircraft. This was one of at least two attacks reported Wednesday on refugees.

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