An ethnic Albanian refugee weeps beside her grandson after arriving in Kukes. They were part of the convoy of more than 1,000 refugees that was attacked as it fled war-torn Kosovo on Thursday. (Reuters)

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 16, 1999; Page A1

KUKES, Albania, April 15 – Pushed up the piny slope of Mount Blinishta by the Yugoslav forces who seized their village two nights after NATO began its airstrikes, the people of Slatina spent the next three weeks sleeping under tractors and following stray chickens to gather eggs for food.

They bathed their children in mountain streams or spirited them downhill to sneak briefly into their own homes in the occupied town – making the evening bath a truly dangerous undertaking. The 2,500 ethnic Albanians were usually wet, often hungry and almost always terribly afraid.

But they were far from alone.

"There are thousands in the mountains," said Besnik Osmani, a Slatina high school teacher who crossed into Albania Monday morning. Many of the approximately 10,000 who have followed him here from Kosovo this week say the same.

Limping on feet grossly swollen by forced march, many of the new arrivals tell tales of desperation laced with privation. Their haggard appearance underscores the anxiety of NATO commanders who have nevertheless rejected as too risky plans to drop food from cargo planes to the besieged population inside Kosovo.

The accounts from the new refugees also begin to answer a question that grew more acute here during the four days last week when the Belgrade government closed the country's borders: If 580,000 ethnic Albanians have been driven from Kosovo in a brutal campaign of expulsions known as "ethnic cleansing," where are the other 1 million?

Osmani, educated as an economist, can answer for 15 of the 16 villages of Fushe Kosova – literally "plain of Kosovo" – that are visible from Mount Blinishta. Seven appeared to be empty, and five of those had been substantially burned. The other eight were still inhabited last weekend but were surrounded by Serb-led Yugoslav military forces.

"I hope they can have the future of me and the others from my village – to come here to Albania and not be killed," Osmani said.

The risk grows with time. Arsim Maliqi, whose village took refuge on an adjoining slope, said that about two weeks ago his encampment was visited by a messenger. The man explained that he had been sent in search of food for the 20,000 people hiding elsewhere in the Cicavica range. "In all, 20 villages," Maliqi said.

Still, the refugees said they felt safer living on the open mountainside than within range of the government troops. Their accounts of the violence that drove them out of their homes follows a familiar rhythm – shots in the night, orders to assemble, flames.

"They took all our men," said Resmie Fazlliu, 27, of the village of Runik in the Vitak region. "We have lived in the mountains for days."

It could be a brutal refuge. On the mountain above Slatina, Osmani said, people huddled under plastic sheeting during the long, cold rains that frequently kept NATO warplanes on the ground or circling ineffectively. A 74-year-old man died while hiding with Maliqi's group. People ate unleavened bread or what could be foraged from villages in which people remained.

Selvete Maliqi dared approach her home only in darkness, knowing the soldiers had chosen to stay in houses on the other side of town. She gathered food and clothes to carry to her husband.

In the mountains around a village called Izbik, Sevidje Hasnaj eased herself down a slope she had climbed a week earlier; she was nine months pregnant and afraid to deliver in the wild. Her boy was born in the village.

Slatina's residents ventured into their village only during NATO airstrikes, which came with some frequency at the Pristina military airfield nearby. Assuming that government troops had retreated to basements, residents scrambled down on foot, then drove back into the forest on their tractors. "It was odd to steal your own tractor," Osmani said.

It was also a role reversal. Osman Maliqi watched soldiers carry away the family TV set, the refrigerator, his wife's clothes. Pointing to his eyes in the Albanian equivalent of "I swear to God," he reported that a soldier sent someone up the mountain to tell a man to send down the keys to his car so the soldier could steal it.

Refugees said they saw little evidence in the mountains of the Kosovo Liberation Army, an ethnic Albanian separatist guerrilla force. Osman Maliqi said the two or three rebels who visited his group came to see family members, then returned to the higher elevations apparently preferred by the guerrillas.

Yugoslav troops and Serbian police climbed up the Cicavicas to the civilians on Sunday and ordered them onto the road, the refugees said. Before being allowed to leave, Osman Maliqi surrendered the wedding ring he had worn for 18 years; its impression is still on his finger.

Osmani said the journey to the border was almost enough to make him miss living in the open. The convoy of tractors, cars and trucks proceeded slowly down a roadway lined with Serbian civilians who cursed them and threw stones. At Djakovica, masked men pulled men off tractor carts and beat them, apparently to terrorize those looking on.

The masked men – who appeared significantly older than the Yugoslav soldiers, refugees said – also fired into the procession, apparently at random. One bullet shattered the rear window of the Lada sedan Osmani had climbed into after one of the masked men took his Yugo Florida, asking his parents: "Would you like to see your son shot by us?" Osmani said another random bullet killed 13-year-old Edon Osmani, the son of a cousin.

The men shouted sexual insults, and the teacher said he was less than 20 feet away from where a masked man pointed to a young woman. "You stay with us," he said, and pulled her from a tractor cart.

"She was against all this and began to argue," Osmani said. "Then she began to go back. She was climbing into the trailer when the man in the mask shot her."