Serbians Yugoslavia

Like hundreds of thousands of his fellow Kosovo Albanians, Bashkim Millaku was forced at gunpoint to leave his home and his country by Serbian troops last week. On his way, the 36-year-old father of two was caught in a roundup of 400 men, held prisoner for three days and two nights, tormented mentally and physically, robbed and denied food and water. He was used as a human shield. By the time Millaku reached Albania on Saturday night, he was in shock.

For years, Milos Vlaskovic thought he knew what happened in the predominantly Muslim Bosnian town of Srebrenica in the summer of 1995. "I've heard there was a fight between the units of two armies in which Serbian forces were far stronger, and that's why far more Muslim soldiers died," said Vlaskovic, 22, a third-year history student at Belgrade University.

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.

Gunmen fired on a joint American-Russian patrol Sunday as it tried to seal the boundary between Kosovo and part of southern Serbia where ethnic Albanian rebels have been challenging Yugoslav forces, the U.S. Army said. There were no casualties in the attack, the first reported against NATO-led peacekeepers since ethnic Albanian rebels escalated cross-border raids in November.

In cafes and on street corners, anywhere people meet to talk politics in this hardscrabble capital, a consensus is taking shape: Albanians will do anything for their beleaguered "brothers" in the neighboring Yugoslav province of Kosovo--anything, that is, except fight for them. Just over the border, an estimated 250 people have died since February in Kosovo, which is part of Serbia but is 90% ethnic Albanian.

Serbian forces captured three more villages in western Kosovo, pushing ethnic Albanian militants away from Pec, the province's second-largest city, media reported Monday. Yugoslavia's state-run Tanjug news agency said Serbian police "crushed" important strongholds of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army in the villages of Lodja, Grabovac and Rausic, all just outside Pec. The push comes a day after the Serbs gained control of Junik, the rebels' main logistical and weapons distribution center.

When they boarded the Fati Tours bus from Slovenia to Kosovo last July, Baljaj Naim, Zogaj Enver and Hrecaj Haljit were much like the 51 other ethnic Albanian passengers. Like the others, the three men were contract workers going home--their pockets full of hard-earned construction wages--to wives, children and parents they hadn't seen for months.

More than 500 exhausted, emaciated Kosovo men of fighting age staggered across the border into Albania on Sunday, telling harrowing tales of being beaten, starved and forced to fight one another like gladiators before their Serbian captors.

Something strange is going on in this Kosovo Albanian village in what was once a hard-line guerrilla stronghold, where NATO accuses Serbs of committing genocide. An estimated 15,000 displaced ethnic Albanians live in and around Svetlje, in northern Kosovo, and hundreds of young men are everywhere, strolling along the dirt roads or lying on the grass on a spring day.

About 300 members of Southern California's Serbian community gathered in front of the Federal Building in Westwood on Saturday to warn that the rights and lives of Serbian minorities may be jeopardized in the current struggles for independence in Yugoslavia. The demonstrators had often conflicting views about whether the states of Slovenia and Croatia should be permitted to break free from the nation created from disparate peoples after World War I.

The Yugoslav army sent tanks and reinforcements near the NATO-patrolled boundary with Kosovo, a day before Yugoslavia's deadline for the Western alliance to crack down on ethnic Albanian militants whose attacks have inflamed the region. Yugoslav authorities have threatened to launch counterattacks after the deadline passes this afternoon. Many residents in Kosovo, which is a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's main republic, want full independence.

Leaders of Serbia's major opposition parties said Saturday that they would join forces to challenge President Slobodan Milosevic and his ruling party in presidential and parliamentary elections in September. However, new election laws pushed through by Milosevic and a likely boycott of elections by the largest single opposition party, the Serbian Renewal Movement, mean that, even united, the opposition stands little chance against the Yugoslav leader.

Police in Montenegro said Friday that they arrested two men who had shot and wounded a leading opponent of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic the night before in an apparent spread of Serbia's lethal politics to its more peaceful sister republic. The tantalizing announcement on Montenegrin Television's evening news said the police "know who ordered this crime" but did not yet want to tell the public.

A gunman slightly wounded Serbia's most powerful opposition leader, Vuk Draskovic, late Thursday with a burst of automatic weapons fire at a coastal vacation home in the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, police and aides to the politician said today. Members of Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Movement called the 11:30 p.m. shooting an assassination attempt, the second in less than a year on the longtime foe of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Draskovic, 53, was hit by two bullets.

Alarmed about increasing ethnic Albanian attacks, moderate Serbs said Sunday that they will stop participating in Kosovo's U.N.-led interim government until they are satisfied that NATO is acting decisively to quash the violence. The Serbian National Council said it will stop sending representatives to meetings of the United Nations interim government, which helps administer the province, and will send a delegation to New York to raise their concerns directly with the U.N. Security Council.

A slain Kosovo Serb U.N. worker had been accused of war crimes in an ethnic Albanian newspaper shortly before his death. The article brought strong condemnation Wednesday from Kosovo's international administration, which has frequently warned local newspapers that publishing the names of alleged war criminals could encourage people to take the law into their own hands.

Gunmen fired on a joint American-Russian patrol Sunday as it tried to seal the boundary between Kosovo and part of southern Serbia where ethnic Albanian rebels have been challenging Yugoslav forces, the U.S. Army said. There were no casualties in the attack, the first reported against NATO-led peacekeepers since ethnic Albanian rebels escalated cross-border raids in November.

The church was built of stones quarried six centuries ago from the rock of Kosovo, and before last week's blast it had the power to make people believe in miracles. For generations, through endless cycles of war and foreign occupation, people came to the small Serbian Orthodox shrine behind monastery walls and asked the spirits of saints to heal them. Pilgrims reached out to touch caskets said to contain relics of St. Cosma and St.

Stone-throwing Serbs attacked U.S. troops of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led KFOR peacekeeping force in Kosovo, injuring one soldier, KFOR said Thursday. The attacks took place late Wednesday night in Vrbovac, near the southern town of Vitina. "Two Serb crowds numbering between 200 and 300 people attacked KFOR U.S. peacekeepers, throwing stones and hurling insults and threats," KFOR, or Kosovo Force, said in a statement. "One soldier was injured and required stitches."