>From Int'l Herald Tribune Paris, Wednesday, March 24, 1999 Amid Gunfire, Pristina Waits in Fear Serbian Police Units Surround Violence-Wracked Capital of Kosovo ------------------------------------------------------------------------ By Peter Finn Washington Post Service ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PRISTINA, Yugoslavia - For most of the last year, this gray city situated in a valley with smoke-fouled air and the cluttered character of a bazaar, has largely escaped the violence that scarred the surrounding province of Kosovo. But this week, with NATO air strikes threatening, a grim foreboding is strangling Pristina. The provincial capital of 200,000 - seen by ethnic Albanian separatists as a future seat of government and by the Belgrade government as a nest of sedition - was ringed Monday night by police checkpoints manned by hostile Serbian police units from the Ministry of Interior. Gunfire rang out in residential neighborhoods and artillery thundered in the distance. Late in the day, a bomb hurled through the doorway exploded in a caf� popular among ethnic Albanians, wounding two people. Another restaurant was reportedly sprayed with gunfire. As most bars and restaurants closed, residents began stockpiling food and water, anticipating shortages they are certain will accompany any attack by planes or troops of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A withering offensive since the weekend by government security forces against villages identified with the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army has spread to Pristina in other ways. About 10,000 refugees have arrived since last week, adding to the 29,000 already known to be here, according to humanitarian organizations. Many new arrivals are finding a setting only marginally less violent than the burned-out villages they are fleeing. Yugoslav troops and Serbian special police units patrol the capital in armored vehicles, a rare sight just weeks ago. On Sunday night, four Serbian policemen were gunned down in an ambush, the deadliest attack yet on Serbian forces in the city. With the offices of international peace monitors boarded up since their departure from Kosovo last Saturday - and many foreign aid workers and journalists leaving the province - Belgrade officials are moving against other voices of opposition. On Monday, the publisher of the major Albanian-language newspaper in Kosovo, Koha Ditore, said that he expected the paper to be closed within 24 hours after a Pristina court ordered it to pay a fine for allegedly inciting ethnic hatred. For many refugees, Pristina has become the destination of a tortured odyssey. Last week, Sevdie Krasniqi, 35, left her village of Zhilovda, 25 kilometers (15 miles) north of here, when the village came under shelling from Yugoslav forces clearing a large area in the foothills of the Cicovac Mountains. For two days, she found shelter for herself, her husband, and their eight children at a mosque in nearby Resnik, but then that village came under heavy shelling. She then crossed the mountains on an open trailer pulled by a tractor and reached her mother-in-law's house in the village of Shtutica, in the Drenica area west of Pristina. But that village, too, came under attack and she fled again, this time with her mother-in-law, her sister-in-law and her three children. Her husband, fearing he would be arrested, fled to the snow-covered mountains with other local men. Two days ago, the women and children made it to Glogovac, a small town on the edge of the fighting, where 20,000 refugees have arrived in recent days. >From there the family took a bus to Pristina. All 14 now live in two cramped rooms, where they dare not peek out the window because they do not have a permit to live in the city. ''I'm still afraid,'' said Mrs. Krasniqi. ''I'm terrified.'' The government offensive in the countryside continued Tuesday, although it appeared to have lost some intensity as security forces have few populated villages left to target. The village of Gornja Klina, five miles north of the deserted city of Srbica, in the Drenica region west of Pristina, was burning Tuesday. The fighting has paralyzed some refugees who were surrounded by government forces and did not know where to go, witnesses said. On Sunday in Srbica, a town of 20,000 that troops have cleared of most of its population, a woman with her daughter and grandchild huddled behind a kiosk on an empty street. When reporters approached them, they began to cry and shudder - terrorized by the strange faces. ''Please, we don't know anything,'' said the younger woman, looking around anxiously. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. -Thomas Huxley + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
