Peace In The Balkans: Villages burn as parting shots fired

Kosovo

THE AGREEMENT for a Serb withdrawal from Kosovo did not silence the guns. Far from it. Serb forces continued to fire artillery at Kosovo Liberation Army fighters yesterday, while others appeared to be shooting in wild celebration of what they hailed as a victory over Nato.

Alliance jets, meanwhile, flew over southern Kosovo, but apparently dropped no bombs.

Shelling continued through Wednesday night and into yesterday after the pull-out agreement was signed. Serb artillery pounded KLA forward positions around the village of Batushe, north-west of this Kosovo-Albanian frontier post, and hit the KLA-held border villages of Pogaj, Vlahan and Cahan, just across a lake from here.

A KLA spokesman near Batushe, contacted via satellite phone, said the Serbs were not pulling back yesterday, despite the agreement.

"Quite the opposite," he said. "They're firing artillery into the surrounding villages. They're spreading the conflict. They're burning the town of Junik, down below us. Nato has to do something to stop this.

"They know they've lost, but they're not going to go without using up all their ammunition. The KLA will respect the ceasefire, but we'll fire back in self-defence."

There was no sign of the Serbs pulling back from their positions across the border from here, particularly in the village of Vermica and the town of Zur. Albanian army observers on hilltops said Serb forces were still dug in with tanks and field guns. The Serbs on the Kosovo side of this border post spent yesterday afternoon entertaining us with orchestrated bursts of machine-gun fire, apparently in the air and occasionally into Lake Fierze.

One particular artist managed to perform the da-da-dadada-dadadada-dada rhythm that football fans often honk on their car horns when their team wins. We reckoned that he must have used two AK-47 assault rifles - one in each hand. We took it all as meaning they were planning to go home soon; that they would hardly waste their ammunition if they were thinking of fighting on.

A Nato spokesman in the Albanian town of Kukes said he expected the KLA to respect the peace agreement, disarm, co-operate with Nato forces and "basically, do what we tell them to do". But not everyone around here was so sure - pointing to factional splits within the KLA.

Many Kosovars expressed surprise that Nato appeared to have no plans to secure the border crossing here or the road from here to Prizren, and that aid workers had no immediate plans to move into Kosovo through here. They said this area could become a dangerous vacuum, that KLA fighters were bound to swarm down from the hills around here into the heart of Kosovo, and that they were unlikely to do so unarmed in case they ran into Serb resistance.

If the Nato mission does goes ahead as planned, aid workers will face the massive task of housing and feeding the estimated 650,000 internally displaced Kosovars - many now hiding in the woods and mountains - as well as catering for the returning refugees among the 780,000 who fled to countries bordering Kosovo.

A handful of refugees sat in Albanian border villages yesterday, waiting to go back, but all said they did not trust President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia, and did not expect to return for two months or more. They predicted that all the 200,000 Serbs who lived in Kosovo before the crisis would flee for fear of reprisals.

"The Serbs had the chance to live with us, but they threw it away," said Zamir, 35, a refugee from Prizren, waiting near the border and engaged in a heated discussion with a small group of fellow refugees over who should lead Kosovo once liberated.

As I left him, Zamir shouted in Albanian: "The balls of Tony Blair are very big."

One of his friends, as though caressing a giant globe, added: "The balls of Bill Clinton are even bigger."