NATO Protects Serb Police, Civilians Leaving Kosovo

PRIZREN, Yugoslavia — German NATO troops gained control of this war-whipped city in southwestern Kosovo on Monday and escorted 5,000 Serbian police and civilians out of town through a gantlet of taunting ethnic Albanians.

Released from chronic fear and intoxicated with freedom after more than two months hiding in their homes, ethnic Albanians poured into the streets for celebrations that verged on hysteria. They honked horns, beat drums, broke windows, shrieked, shot off guns, whistled and danced around German tanks, all under a blistering sun.

While thousands joined the frenzy on NATO’s second day in town, armed Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, rebels quietly moved into a deserted neighborhood in the foothills of Prizren for emotional reunions with family members.

“I have never felt happier in my life,” Husamedin Alemdar said after hugging his 16-year-old son, who was wearing KLA camouflage fatigues. “We hadn’t heard from him in six months.”

Nearby, less fortunate ethnic Albanians crept nervously back to their burned-out houses to confront the ghosts of murdered relatives.

Fazije Avdylmegjiti, 53, made her way home to a charred two-story house in the Tusus neighborhood where she said her husband, two sons and five other family members were killed by Serbian police May 26, two days after the start of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.

“I am still afraid,” Avdylmegjiti whispered.

Several residents of Tusus said uniformed and unmasked Serbian police swept through their neighborhood on that late-May morning, demanding money from the few residents who had not already fled and randomly burning dozens of houses.

Avdylmegjiti recalled how they jumped over the back wall of her family’s compound, rounded up the men and forced the women to leave. She heard the gunfire on her way out, saw the smoke rising from her house and found the burned bodies of her menfolk at the morgue four days later.

“Look, there are the bullet holes,” she said, pointing to the front wall of her house. The charcoal beneath it still smelled of burned flesh.

“It’s very hard to come back without having a family,” her daughter, Yahona, 19, said in tears.

Earlier in the day, it was the Serbs who shed tears as they waited in long convoys of suitcase-laden cars for safe passage through town.

“In each car, we have three generations, a hundred years of work, and now we have to move,” said Gusisa Todorovic, 39, a Serbian factory worker.

The Serbs said they were leaving because they feared the KLA and hoped to return once the rebels were disarmed by NATO. They described themselves as having been friends to the ethnic Albanians who lived in the same streets and apartment blocks, and many even left their house keys behind with ethnic Albanian neighbors.

But the two groups presented such different versions of the last 2 1/2 months of war, it is hard to imagine that they ever lived in the same place at the same time.

The departing Serbs said bitterly that the nearly 1 million ethnic Albanians who fled the country after the NATO bombing began had been taken to the border by bus in a safe and orderly fashion, free of fear--a view belied by the terror many refugees experienced.

“No one did anything wrong to them. The Yugoslav army did nothing to them,” a Serbian woman said as she waited to leave. “The Albanians say they were threatened to get attention. They always do that.”

Ethnic Albanians watching Serbian civilians pull out of town Monday had no more understanding of their neighbors’ reality than the Serbs had of theirs.

“They don’t have to leave. They aren’t under pressure from us,” said Besnik Murkola, a 36-year-old musician. “This is a show, an organized show to say to the world, ‘Look what NATO did to us: NATO ethnically cleansed Prizren.’ They are playing games.”

Nonetheless, Murkola bid goodbye to his Serbian neighbor and accepted the house key for safekeeping.

“He said to me, ‘If I come back, I hope we live better days.’ It was very sad. He started to cry, and I started to cry,” Murkola said as the convoy passed before him.

But all around him, ethnic Albanians jeered, swore and made crude hand gestures at the departing Serbs. Many held up Albanian flags and KLA posters. After nightfall, drunken Albanians surrounded a group of the few remaining Serbs that took refuge in an Orthodox church. The Albanian crowd was pulled back by German troops and KLA rebels.

About 2,000 soldiers from a German battle group were in Prizren by late Monday, patrolling the streets in tanks and armored personnel carriers and looking through binoculars for Serbian snipers in the high ground around the city.

Early in the day, snipers took up positions in the ruins of an Ottoman fortress with a view of most of Prizren. They appeared to be gone by late afternoon, however, when ethnic Albanians were partying frenetically in the streets and chanting “UCK,” the Albanian initials for the KLA.

Under the peace deal, Serbian soldiers have until tonight to completely withdraw from the zone that includes Prizren. Most Serbian forces appeared to be gone from the city and surrounding areas by late Monday, although German Lt. Col. Dietmar Jeserich said a group near the Morine border crossing with Albania still lacked transportation north.

Jeserich said NATO was working with a Serbian colonel, who was based in the NATO headquarters in Prizren, and was also talking to KLA commanders about keeping their forces from seeking revenge.

In the Tusus neighborhood, KLA soldiers seemed happy to be home if not entirely happy with the NATO peace deal that gives autonomy but not full independence to Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic.

“It is not our victory,” said a bearded KLA commander who asked not to be named. “But they are happy,” he said, pointing to rebels reunited with their families. “So I am happy.”