Albanias

A few minutes after the faintest sound of jets was heard, Yugoslav artillery fell silent along the Albanian border. Then the airstrikes began. The NATO bombings usually don't last more than an hour, though. And as the roar from fighter-bombers trailed off beyond the mountains, the Yugoslav artillery opened up again with a heavy whumpf.

Relief workers keep coming by the wooden wagon that Emine Ulluri shares with 18 relatives, pulling back the plastic tarp slung over the top and surveying the twisted mass of bodies inside. Alarmed by what they see, the authorities encourage the young woman to move her family out of this crowded border city near the Yugoslav province of Kosovo and on to safer, more spacious places farther south.

Despite four weeks of bombardment, Yugoslavia's air-defense system in Kosovo is still largely intact, hampering NATO operations and limiting the usefulness of the Apache helicopters that began arriving in Albania on Wednesday to escalate attacks on Serbian ground forces.

David B. McCall and Joan "Penny" Mills McCall, international philanthropists and social workers, died Sunday in an automobile accident while doing volunteer work for a refugee program in Albania. David McCall, a Madison Avenue advertising executive, was 71. His wife was 57. The couple, who lived in New York, died near Kukes, Albania, when their car missed a turn on a winding mountain road in heavy rain.

It easily could have been another frightful image from a conflict that already has produced so much despair: 32 ethnic Albanian children marching through a muddy field with their hands up, as if they were surrendering. But then the man leading the children Monday started walking duck-footed. A few steps later, he was pigeon-toed. He flapped his arms. He spun around madly. And everything he did, the children--roaring with laughter--did behind him.

Since the beginning of Operation Allied Force, the focus has concentrated on two unfolding dramas: The progress of the air campaign against Yugoslavia and the plight of hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanian refugees who are the victims of Slobodan Milosevic's campaign of murder and mass deportation. This focus is understandable.

The Clinton administration and its NATO allies prepared Tuesday for a major escalation of the 3-week-old air war in Yugoslavia, including a possible call-up of U.S. air reserve units in California and elsewhere, as an American effort to enlist Russian support to resolve the Kosovo crisis failed to achieve a breakthrough.

In a significant escalation of tensions between the two Balkan neighbors, Albania on Tuesday charged that Yugoslav troops had violated its territory, shelling and burning homes in a remote border village before withdrawing. Yugoslav officials denied the report, but international peace monitors in the border area said Yugoslav troops had entered the village of Kamenica and set part of it on fire before withdrawing after 1 1/2 hours.

Some crimes alleged to be taking place in Serbia's Kosovo province are horrific: mutilations, parents killed before their children's eyes, a 2-year-old girl burned alive. Then there are the more common, if numbing, acts: nearly half a million people forced from their homes and driven for days in an atmosphere of terror; whole towns and villages set ablaze; possessions looted and cars stolen at gunpoint, wedding rings stripped from women's fingers.

They continued to come on foot and in slow-moving farm carts Friday, an uninterrupted tide of refugees that seemed to grow stronger from hour to hour. And, as though days on the road without food or water was not bad enough for these ethnic Albanians, some were arriving with fresh wounds from shellings, or saying they had been raped, beaten or robbed by their Serbian tormentors along the way.