Albanians Serbia

In better times, Nazmi Hoxha was a university student working toward a degree in German. But of late, his life has turned macabre. Every day for the past week, he has risen early, mounted his bicycle and pedaled 10 miles to the city cemetery, to spend hours looking into graves. He is searching for someone in particular: his brother Shuki, the baby of the family, who he has reason to believe is buried in one of about 200 unmarked mounds here. Amid the horrors of Kosovo, Hoxha is not alone.

Serbian forces burned a paralyzed ethnic Albanian woman alive in her home, killed a toddler and blew up a mosque during their 1999 crackdown in Kosovo, a witness said Monday at the war crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Halil Morina, a retired ethnic Albanian farmer in Kosovo, said three-quarters of his village, Landovica, was torched in March 1999, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization began bombing Yugoslavia in response to the crackdown in Kosovo.

Her body savaged, her family wronged and her future ruined, 13-year-old Pranvera Lokaj has taken off for the mountains of Kosovo to seek the only solace her hidebound clan accords a rape victim: to kill or be killed in pursuit of vengeance. "I have given her to the KLA so she can do to the Serbs what they have done to us," Haxhi Lokaj said of his daughter, who has been sent to fight with the rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

A memorial is being constructed here to honor the memory of Adem Jashari and his family, who ignited all-out war for Kosovo's independence by sacrificing their lives four years ago. From the perspective of ethnic Albanians who backed the armed struggle against Serbian rule, the ruined home where 20 Jasharis--including women and children--died is drenched not only in blood but also in honor. Glossy brochures for visitors tell the story of events here in that spirit.

When Capt. Ken Dwelle heard that the pilot of a U.S. F-117A from this base had been rescued in Yugoslavia on Saturday night, the relieved Stealth fighter pilot instructor turned off the TV, satisfied. But Sunday, after seeing pictures of the downed craft, Dwelle sprang back into action. Clearly printed on the plane's surface was Dwelle's name, and he began calling family members to assure them he was safe at home.

Carrying the allied air war to the innermost sanctuaries of the Yugoslav leadership, NATO warplanes have begun bombing a labyrinthine network of underground command bunkers with munitions designed to destroy the most well-protected targets. Almost two weeks after blasting one of President Slobodan Milosevic's Belgrade residences, NATO warplanes used a 5,000-pound "bunker-buster" bomb this week to strike another of his regular retreats: the national command center at Mt.

Instead of bombing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic back to the bargaining table, NATO's airstrikes have provoked new massacres and terrorist attacks in Kosovo, according to ethnic Albanian sources. Serbs have executed as many as 50 ethnic Albanians in three incidents in this separatist Serbian 9province since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization launched its air attacks against Yugoslavia on Wednesday night, according to the news agency of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian guerrillas.

For 2 1/2 months this spring, an average of 128 lives were snuffed out each day in Kosovo. During a single changing of the seasons, at least one out of every 180 Kosovo Albanians died. That is the harsh, inescapable reckoning now emerging to confront international war crimes prosecutors, NATO peacekeepers and most of all the traumatized survivors of Kosovo as they try to rebuild this vast necropolis of the graves and ashes of 10,000 dead.

A new U.S. effort to further punish Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for his brutal crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Serbia's Kosovo province hit a potentially serious snag Tuesday as key American allies expressed a deep reluctance to tighten the Balkan sanctions any further.

President Slobodan Milosevic freed three captured U.S. Army soldiers today and sent them homeward with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had lobbied for their release as a step toward ending 39 days of NATO bombing. The soldiers were brought to the Yugoslav army press center in downtown Belgrade on the 33rd day of their captivity and turned over to Jackson's delegation of American religious leaders.

Valbona Halili, an ethnic Albanian from this rural town in western Kosovo, hid from Yugoslav forces in the nearby mountains for three months during fighting in 1999. Now, with the first free and democratic Kosovo-wide elections scheduled today, the young woman says she will vote for the former guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army. "They are the only ones who deserve to represent me," she said, "because they were the only ones who fought for the freedom we're living in today."

NATO-led peacekeepers in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo said Saturday that they had fought and apprehended five suspected ethnic Albanian guerrillas and detained 48 others crossing the border from Macedonia. Officials from the Kosovo Force, or KFOR, said one man was wounded in the gun battle Friday before he and his four comrades were captured. Arms and ammunition were seized from the group, they said.

NATO-led peacekeepers Friday relaxed their control of a buffer zone that separates Kosovo from the rest of the country, allowing the Yugoslav army to deploy on the province's boundary, officials said. The agreement is part of a NATO-brokered deal allowing the Belgrade government to gradually reclaim the volatile zone separating the Serbian province of Kosovo, a predominantly ethnic Albanian area, with the rest of Yugoslavia's main republic. Lt. Gen.

Serbian Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic said police believe that about 800 victims of the Kosovo war were buried in mass graves in the Yugoslav republic. He vowed that no one guilty of war crimes would escape justice. Mihajlovic, a leading member of the reformist alliance that last year ousted Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, said police would find out who had ordered the "monstrous operation" to transport bodies to mass graves across Serbia.

Several thousand Yugoslav soldiers and police began moving back into the last--and most important--section of a buffer zone around Kosovo on Thursday, reclaiming territory their government abandoned two years ago under pressure from NATO forces. The alliance-approved deployment into the zone at the edge of southern Serbia's Presevo Valley marks a milestone in rapidly warming relations between Yugoslavia and the West.

Saying their fight was over, ethnic Albanian rebels in southern Serbia began laying aside their weapons Tuesday for collection by NATO. The rebels, who number fewer than 1,000 and face a vastly more powerful army, occupy a narrow strip of land separating Kosovo province from the rest of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic. Their last strongholds are to be taken over Thursday by Yugoslav army troops, moving with NATO backing in a deal to end the insurrection.

Few ships pack as much punch per pound as this 567-foot U.S. guided-missile cruiser. Plying the Ionian Sea hundreds of miles south of the Serbian province of Kosovo, it bristles with missiles, torpedoes, helicopters, cannons and guns. "It's a Death Star," Capt. Joe Klingseis boasted Tuesday as he leaned into a 35-knot wind gust on the starboard catwalk--his favorite spot on the Aegis cruiser under his command--and admired the Anzio from bow to stern through gold-rimmed aviator glasses.

This hamlet wedged high in the mountains is nothing more than a hundred stone huts at the end of a dirt road. Its people are sheepherders or farmers who work patches of land with horse and plow as close as 50 feet to the border with Kosovo. Nonetheless, it is an extraordinary place. Beginning around 2 a.m. Saturday and continuing through Sunday, more than 3,500 Kosovo Albanian refugees inundated the 400 or so Albanian Macedonians who live here.

Ethnic Albanian rebels used machine guns and other infantry weapons to attack Serbian police near the volatile boundary with Kosovo, a U.N.-administered province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic. The clashes, the most violent in weeks, came a day before the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is to decide whether to allow Yugoslav troops back into the remaining part of the three-mile-wide buffer zone in Serbia proper along the Kosovo border. It was not known if there were any casualties.

NATO troops Thursday smashed through three roadblocks set up by Serbs in Kosovo to protest tax collection checkpoints established by the U.N., but Serbs said they erected new blockades nearby. Serbian media in Belgrade reported that a 62-year-old woman died en route to a hospital after inhaling tear gas thrown by NATO troops and that a man lost a hand when he picked up a stun grenade and tried to throw it back at peacekeepers.