Kosovo

       GLABOCIC, Yugoslavia–A colleague and I stand on top of a mountain on Kosovo’s southern border with Macedonia, looking over the hills that make up northwestern Macedonia, with troubled Kosovo to our backs and four extremely unfriendly Serbian cops at this remote border outpost demanding our passports.
       The Serbs have reason to be edgy. We have driven four hours over awful mountain roads to witness what’s been billed as NATO’s largest war games maneuver in the Balkans.
       But as we position our mobile phones to pick up Macedonia’s mobile communications signal, all we can hear is birds chirping. The editor at the news desk in New York assures me that 83 NATO war jets have taken off from Italy’s Aviano Air Force Base some four hours ago. So where are the planes? I am not sure what to expect, but surely some loud explosive “booms”–something to discourage the Yugoslav army and the Serb police forces from continuing their bloody clampdown on Albanian separatists here. But to the confusion of all of us–Serb cops looking through binoculars, foreign reporters with antennas poking skyward, Albanian villagers who have gathered on the hill to watch the NATO exercises–we see or hear nothing unusual. We reporters and Albanian villagers–who say they last gathered here two years ago to watch a comet–are disappointed. The Serbs seem suspicious. I think of the movie Wag the Dog. Its premise–that an American president troubled by a sex scandal hires a Hollywood producer to stage a fake war in Albania–is just too appropriate to our situation. Apparently NATO’s intended audience for today’s action is not the people fighting the war on the ground in Kosovo but Yugoslav army radar or the Western public.
       The firepower unleashed in other parts of Kosovo is live. On Sunday, a group of ethnic Albanian men in the town of Glogovac, in Kosovo’s central Drenica region, direct me to 12 houses, belonging to their neighbors, which they say Serb police covered with gasoline and torched. The entire area, which when I visited in March still housed 10,000 people, is abandoned.
       I hear many such horror stories from Albanians in Kosovo and am shown photographs: of 10 people killed by land mines near the western Kosovo-Albanian border town of Popoc; of a man beaten so hard during an interrogation by Serbian police in Room 414 of Djakovica’s police station that his entire back is purple-black. A pregnant woman tells me Serb cops shot and killed her husband at a funeral near the village of Prilep a few weeks ago. Five women and around 20 children tell me of the assault on their village that drove them from their homes. The Serb police tell horror stories, too, of ambushes by the increasingly bold Kosovo Liberation Army that kill a cop or two or three every day. And when I drive between Djakovica and Pristina, I am stopped at a series of checkpoints by Serb police with grenades and extra ammunition strapped to their chests, bunkered down behind sandbags, nervously pulling passengers out of buses, cars, and trucks to check for weapons or just to harass. This is the hilly territory that at night is controlled by the KLA. Western diplomats share a particularly disturbing story. They say there may be a mass grave containing 200 to 300 bodies of ethnic Albanians killed in a Serb police assault near the village of Decani. The town, in western Kosovo, is closed to journalists and humanitarian aid workers by a series of checkpoints. But when Serb officials gave us a tour of the area a week ago, when it was still under heavy assault, we were overwhelmed in the village of Prilep by the smell of decomposing bodies.
       The Serb police commander in the area, Gen. Lukic, says his forces have taken no Albanian prisoners. But Western diplomats say hundreds of people driven from their homes by the attacks are missing.