Kosovo’s Capital Isn’t Spared Dangers of War

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia —  Mahije Mala is running out of places to hide, and after seeing a Serbian policeman’s knife at her teenage daughter’s throat, she knows what may happen if the wrong people find her.

Mala, 39, is the wife of a founder of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army. With her village captured in an offensive by Serbian forces and her house burned down, Mala joined an estimated 20,000 refugees streaming to Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, during the past several days.

But to flee, Mala and her children first had to get past Serbian police who wanted information about her husband, one of the first to take up a gun with late KLA commander Adem Jashari.

Mala said a police officer put his knife to the throat of 17-year-old Iliriana and said: “Tell me, who is your father?”

He let her and the rest of the family go but set their house on fire, Mala said. She headed southeast 15 miles to Pristina thinking it was the safest place for her five children.

Just a few days earlier, she would have been right. But as NATO prepares to bomb military and special police targets in and around Kosovo, its capital can’t escape war’s vortex any longer.

Shops close about 4 p.m. People hurry home to get off the streets before dark. Even behind their own locked doors they are afraid because no one can tell when NATO’s bombs might fall, and who might come looking for revenge.

Serbian special police units, armed with assault rifles and patrolling in armored vehicles, have come down hard in Pristina after gunmen killed four officers at a checkpoint Sunday evening.

One of the slain police officers, 25-year-old Aleksandar Milojkovic, was buried beside his mother Tuesday with a 12-Kalashnikov salute.

His grave, in the ethnically mixed village of Devet Jugovica outside Pristina, is near the monument to the battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389, when Ottoman Turks handed the Serbs a humiliating defeat that Serbian nationalists pledge will never be repeated.

For three nights now, Mala and her children have tried to get some sleep in a small classroom. They lie on wooden benches because the concrete floor is too cold.

Most of the night, Mala lies awake in the dark, listening for the next gunshot or a knock at the door. She is terrified that if North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces attack, Serbs looking for revenge will find her and her children.

Mala agreed to be interviewed on condition that her husband not be identified by name. In any case, she said she hadn’t seen him for days before she left Prekaz and doesn’t know whether he is alive.

“I’m afraid, very much afraid,” Mala said Tuesday, gently rocking her 5-year-old son in her lap as she began to cry. “Last night, there was shooting everywhere around us. I don’t know what was happening. Some boy was killed.”

Mala was speaking of Kushtrim Gashi, an 18-year-old student, who was shot in the back about 5:30 p.m. Monday while trying to get out of Pristina’s Sunny Hill district during a police sweep.

The police report of Gashi’s death only cited initial evidence that he was killed by automatic weapons and that an investigation was underway.

As Gashi’s sister Violeta, 21, wept at his graveside Tuesday afternoon, other relatives described how a police officer shot him from behind with a single bullet, from about 30 yards away.

“There were five or six policemen standing near a primary school. Kushtrim was with his brother and his aunt, and they just shot him,” said his cousin, 44-year-old Mustafa Gashi. “He was killed because he is Albanian.”

The family had run from Sunny Hill along with most of their neighbors because police were going door to door searching for KLA members.

At the funeral of Milojkovic, the young Serbian police officer, dozens of distant blasts of Yugoslav heavy artillery echoed through the valleys. Some mourners whispered about revenge.

If all the village’s Serbs would arm themselves, they could clear out three ethnic Albanian villages by themselves, one man said.

“If NATO strikes, we should be sleeping with Kalashnikovs next to our beds, with 100 bullets under each pillow, and shoot whoever comes through the door,” another added.

The funeral’s official remarks came from police Lt. Zoran Janjic, who called the killing of the four police officers “an unprecedented crime by Albanian gangs.”

“We’ll endure in our battle against terrorism to the end, without mercy,” Janjic said.