Refugees Yugoslavia

Hana Zabeli, an 85-year-old invalid, died alone here last week. So did her village. Life ended for this ethnic Albanian settlement and its oldest inhabitant on the day Serbian paramilitary police struck with gratuitous brutality, burning dozens of homes and shooting Zabeli in her bed.

President Slobodan Milosevic offered Friday to allow diplomatic observer patrols to escort home tens of thousands of people uprooted by his military assault on armed Albanian separatists in Kosovo province. The escort patrols could ease some of the suffering caused by the 5-month-old conflict in the southern province while Western officials try to coax the separatists into resuming peace talks.

Serbian gunners shelled villages in Kosovo with heavy artillery Saturday, and fighting flared along the province's southern border with Macedonia. Four people were killed in the clashes, ethnic Albanian and Serbian sources said. The artillery attack targeted three villages in the Decani area, 45 miles west of Pristina, the provincial capital, said the Kosovo Information Center, which is close to Albanian leaders in the province.

In two dingy rooms furnished with no more than a rug, a couple of sofas and a single-burner hot plate, Nebi G., his wife and their seven children are trying to start a new life in Albania. A pot of macaroni, their only food for the day, was bubbling on the hot plate Saturday as Nebi described his family's sudden recent flight from their home in Kosovo province, just across the border in Serbia.

The top political leader of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians appealed Friday for direct NATO intervention in the province, fearing that Serbian forces are readying new attacks on his people. "NATO should undertake all possible measures to prevent further massacres and protect the people of Kosovo," Ibrahim Rugova told a news conference in Pristina, the capital of the southern Serbian province. Ethnic Albanians outnumber Serbs in Kosovo, 9 to 1.

The crew of a raft carrying illegal immigrants from Kosovo and Albania threw refugee children into the Adriatic to try to avoid capture, Italian authorities said Saturday. Police dived into the sea to rescue all nine, including babies. The drama was part of a chaotic exodus that brought more than 300 refugees to southern Italy in three days.

A week after a peace deal was supposed to relieve Kosovo's refugee crisis, fresh Yugoslav troops armed with tanks and artillery dug in Monday to confront rebel forces 30 miles from the capital of the Serbian province. The new troop deployment further complicates efforts to coax about 50,000 refugees out of mountain and forest camps where they risk freezing to death.

Thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees were driven from a squalid camp in western Kosovo on Saturday after Serbian police in armored vehicles told them to leave the area immediately. The refugees, who had numbered as many as 40,000 near Istinic until Friday, piled on tractors to attempt to return to their villages--many of which have been razed--or to find other refugee pockets nearby.

The Yugoslav republic of Montenegro deported thousands of Kosovo refugees to Albania, saying it could not provide for them even though they are citizens of Yugoslavia. The 3,200 refugees, who are of Albanian descent but Yugoslav citizens, had been uprooted by fighting in Serbia's province of Kosovo and were camped in Montenegro. The refugees were part of a group of 40,000 that Serbian police recently dispersed from a makeshift camp in Kosovo.

Parking their tractors bumper-to-bumper, about 25,000 Kosovo refugees camped out in fields Thursday, terrified that Serbian police soon would be arresting their men for alleged membership in the rebel army. Food, water and hope appeared nowhere in sight. Serbian forces seemed to have halted their advance, which drove the ethnic Albanians from their homes and farms into a huge encampment around this village 45 miles southwest of the provincial capital, Pristina.