As Kosovo Burns

By Massimo Calabresi/On The Macedonia-Kosovo Border

Kosovo is not a place preparing for peace. Every day the province is filled with awful violence. NATO warplanes are slamming Serbian troops with tons of munitions, guided by tiny drones that hum overhead. Deep in the Kosovo hills, the Kosovo Liberation Army is fighting defensive battles, trying to conserve its resources. And in the middle of all this, NATO now says that up to 700,000 refugees are wandering homeless, brutalized by Serbian forces and desperately seeking a way out. Slobodan Milosevic has tried to put a lid on the province--limiting media access and stemming the outflow of refugees--but tales of horror continue to escape. And with K.L.A. troops busily rearming and Serbian forces mining, entrenching and leveling the province, much more violence probably lies ahead before Kosovo has its first hint of peace.

The roots of Kosovo's continuing chaos are, of course, strategic. They arise from Milosevic's aims and the long, bitter history of the Balkans. But in a practical sense, they also have to do with the very specific problem of fighting a day-to-day guerrilla war in a hilly country, where camouflage is easy and offensive operation hard. Kosovo's mountains stretch up nearly 9,000 ft., and the snow-clogged highlands are almost completely underdeveloped, with few four-wheel-drive tracks and no roads. The only modes of transport are donkeys and feet--a kind of primitiveness that serves as a leveller between the ammo-starved K.L.A. and the powerfully armed Serbs.

The rebel army is already preparing for its next offensive, tapping support from a widely dispersed Albanian diaspora that reaches as far as New Jersey, where last week K.L.A. representatives held an event. And in the regions around Kosovo, the K.L.A. is sharpening its rudimentary training and logistics network. The key element of that web is a recruiting operation that may have pulled in thousands of battle-age men. In Albania, near the town of Durres, unarmed ethnic Albanian volunteers from Western Europe (countries like Switzerland and Germany are a particular source) head toward the border with supplies for the war. There, K.L.A. and refugees say, they join other young men for two weeks of training.

Not everyone in the training camps is a volunteer, however. The K.L.A. is stopping some vehicles heading south from the Kosovo border and demanding recruits from among the refugees or, alternatively, as much as $300--a kind of weapons tax or service exemption.

Inside Kosovo, the K.L.A. is surviving better than expected. The CIA initially feared that thousands of Kosovar men had been massacred, but it now believes many have actually slipped off to join the K.L.A. in the hills, in some cases helping guide NATO warplanes in for attacks. The K.L.A. is husbanding what few resources it has and is avoiding offensive operations "so it can fight another day," says a senior U.S. intelligence official. "Reports of their demise are premature," he explains, "They have been badly hampered but not wiped out."

Near the rugged border with Montenegro and Albania, French journalists managed to reach a unit in the Rugova valley west of the cleansed town of Pec. They said the rebels were organized and disciplined and appeared to be holding their own against the Serbs in sporadic fighting. In a bold move last Tuesday, rebels from this group phoned NATO and requested that planes take out a specific bridge. Twenty-four hours later, the K.L.A. commander claimed, it was gone. NATO has so far stopped short of shipping arms to the K.L.A. Administration sources say they fear such a move would encourage the Russians to retaliate by rearming Milosevic's forces with a variety of weapons.

Some of the estimated 40,000 Serbian soldiers and irregulars on the ground in Kosovo are now digging in deeper. In a clear message to the West, troops last week began laying mines along Kosovo's borders within sight of Western television cameras. The mining operation is probably also designed to help stop such incidents as the spasm of fighting that broke out late last week between Serbian forces and Albanian-based K.L.A. forces. The Yugoslav military issued a furious statement decrying the "aggression"--and reportedly lobbed some artillery shells into Albania for good measure. The image of a well-trained and well-financed K.L.A. using bases in Macedonia and Albania to fight the Serbs clearly haunts Belgrade.

In addition to the military struggle, the Serbs are evidently continuing their campaign of generalized terror. In particular, there are reports of rape inside Kosovo, something that the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees' Chris Janowski calls credible. But allegations of an orchestrated rape campaign by Serbs, he says, have not yet been confirmed. U.S. satellites do seem to have picked up solid visual evidence--pictures of abandoned towns and farms--of the ethnic cleansing, which has now flushed Albanians from almost all of western Kosovo. One stark image shows Serb armor apparently "herding" a group of civilians out of their village. The brutality of the moves has so traumatized many refugees that officials now plan to augment shipments of food and medical supplies with teams of specially trained psychological counselors.

The latest accusations from the West include the charge that Kosovars are being used as human shields. "We certainly hear that [Serb forces] have surrounded military vehicles with civilians," says Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon. Such stories are particularly difficult to confirm, but there is special concern after the disappearance of tens of thousands of refugees who had been seen just inside Kosovo trying to get out. Last Tuesday night, at least 70,000 refugees had gathered on the Kosovo side of border crossings into Montenegro, Albania and Macedonia. At dawn on Wednesday, the crossings were empty.

While there is no evidence the missing are being used as human shields, there is little doubt they are in danger. "I don't think anyone took the measure of Milosevic's capacity for brutality," says J. Brian Atwood, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, who is coordinating the U.S. refugee response. Now "the problem we fear is the humanitarian crisis that isn't being managed inside Kosovo." And as fighting between the K.L.A. and Serbian forces begins to pick up, that problem will only grow worse.

--With reporting by Altin Rraxhimi/Kukes, Jan Stojaspal/Tirana, and Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by Altin Rraxhimi/Kukes, Jan Stojaspal/Tirana, and Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington