Prizren

KUKES, Albania -- The Kosovar city of Prizren has been nearly depopulated, with Serbian military units and tanks digging in throughout the city, refugees who arrived here yesterday said.Prizren would be a key point in a ground invasion of Kosovo; the refugees' accounts suggest that the Serbs are preparing to defend it against a NATO attack.Military bases around the city have come under heavy aerial bombardment. Yesterday, Serbian tanks and other equipment apparently began to take up positions in abandoned houses.

PRIZREN, Yugoslavia -- The lifeblood of this city began flowing again yesterday.Eleven-year-old Isaj Kryeziu sold door locks at the outdoor Qulhan market, to people whose front doors had been smashed in.Hajri Hamza, teetering on a ladder, scraped the Serbian lettering off the front of his dress shop, so that only the Albanian remained.And Shenol Tabak, on his first day back in business as a barber in three months, snipped away at Afrim Gashi's straggly curls."This morning," he said, "I've seen too many bad haircuts that people tried to give themselves during the war."

KUKES, Albania -- Life for the ethnic Albanians of Prizren, Kosovo, took a terrifying turn for the worse at the end of last week, when Serbian forces began driving them out in earnest and sent them fleeing by the thousands into Albania.Arriving in Albania, the refugees spoke of half the people of Prizren, Kosovo's second-largest city, having fled, many with little more than the clothes on their backs.Refugees who have arrived here over the past few days from Prizren described a city where for the past month the food shops sold only to ethnic Serbs, fear of police had kept all but elderly Kosovar Albanians indoors, and "ethnic cleansing" had reduced the population by half.

KUKES, Albania -- The Kosovar city of Prizren has been nearly depopulated, with Serbian military units and tanks digging in throughout the city, refugees who arrived here yesterday said.Prizren would be a key point in a ground invasion of Kosovo; the refugees' accounts suggest that the Serbs are preparing to defend it against a NATO attack.Military bases around the city have come under heavy aerial bombardment. Yesterday, Serbian tanks and other equipment apparently began to take up positions in abandoned houses.

PRIZREN, Yugoslavia -- The lifeblood of this city began flowing again yesterday.Eleven-year-old Isaj Kryeziu sold door locks at the outdoor Qulhan market, to people whose front doors had been smashed in.Hajri Hamza, teetering on a ladder, scraped the Serbian lettering off the front of his dress shop, so that only the Albanian remained.And Shenol Tabak, on his first day back in business as a barber in three months, snipped away at Afrim Gashi's straggly curls."This morning," he said, "I've seen too many bad haircuts that people tried to give themselves during the war."

WASHINGTON -- In an effort to increase the attacks on Serbian ground troops in Kosovo, the Pentagon added 82 U.S. aircraft to the NATO air armada attacking Yugoslavia yesterday, saying that dozens of other alliance planes were expected in the coming days.In the package are 34 combat aircraft, including two dozen U.S. Air Force F-16CJ Flying Falcons, equipped with anti-radiation missiles designed to take out air defenses, and four A-10 Thunderbolt II "Warthogs," which target tanks and other armor.

PRIZREN, Yugoslavia -- Grooming the next battlefield for Yugoslavia's roving civil war, Serb police arrested ethnic Albanian activists, seized ballot boxes and harassed U.S. election monitors yesterday in a vain attempt to disrupt an independence vote in Serbia's restive southwestern province of Kosovo, adjacent to Albania and Macedonia.Despite intimidation by heavily armed Serbian police and Yugoslav federal troops patrolling in armored vehicles, Albanians flooded to secret polling places to vote for a president and Parliament committed to independence from the Serbian republic.

KUKES, Albania -- Several thousand refugees trudged across the border from Kosovo here yesterday after a lull of nine days, some telling stories of nightmarish weeks during which they moved from village to village, living in basements and burned-out homes, before the Serbs finally expelled them.Refugees told of men being killed along the roadside, and of their families being forced to shout, "Long live Serbia, long live Slobodan Milosevic."Traslije Sokolaj, from the town of Meja, said Serbian soldiers came to her home Tuesday and told everyone to leave.

PRIZREN, Yugoslavia -- Zela Ahmetaj lost her leg to a NATO bomb. So did Ljuljeta Rexhaj. Sevdije Kukaj lost 11 members of her extended family, all in the same attack. They don't blame the NATO pilot who launched the bomb, because they believe that Serbian police deliberately put them in harm's way.They were among several hundred refugees from the village of Korisa who were locked inside a building supply depot in the early morning hours of May 14, when a single terrifying explosion destroyed the depot and killed 87 people.

THE PROBLEMS facing the peacekeeping troops in Kosovo were not long coming. Foremost are the hordes of Albanian Kosovars going back to destroyed villages and homes, and others still wandering in the hills seeking water and food.Although the Serbian army is withdrawing as agreed, more problems quickly became apparent, with the complaint of Bishop Artemije Radosavljevic that monasteries and churches were under siege in Prizren from Kosovo Liberation Army members patrolling the streets. Serbian Orthodox institutions survived in Kosovo during centuries of Turkish rule.

KUKES, Albania -- Life for the ethnic Albanians of Prizren, Kosovo, took a terrifying turn for the worse at the end of last week, when Serbian forces began driving them out in earnest and sent them fleeing by the thousands into Albania.Arriving in Albania, the refugees spoke of half the people of Prizren, Kosovo's second-largest city, having fled, many with little more than the clothes on their backs.Refugees who have arrived here over the past few days from Prizren described a city where for the past month the food shops sold only to ethnic Serbs, fear of police had kept all but elderly Kosovar Albanians indoors, and "ethnic cleansing" had reduced the population by half.

WASHINGTON -- In an effort to increase the attacks on Serbian ground troops in Kosovo, the Pentagon added 82 U.S. aircraft to the NATO air armada attacking Yugoslavia yesterday, saying that dozens of other alliance planes were expected in the coming days.In the package are 34 combat aircraft, including two dozen U.S. Air Force F-16CJ Flying Falcons, equipped with anti-radiation missiles designed to take out air defenses, and four A-10 Thunderbolt II "Warthogs," which target tanks and other armor.

KUKES, Albania -- They had no choice but to spend the night outside a warehouse off the highway in Korisa, Haxhere Palushi said yesterday. There were 700 Albanian refugees like her, and Serb soldiers herded them all inside the building's iron outer gates, promising they would be allowed to leave Kosovo the next day. Then, she said, one soldier clicked the gate shut with a padlock. "One young guy said, `Why did they lock us in? Something is happening,' " she said. A few hours later, just before midnight on May 13, NATO planes again bombed the village, in southern Kosovo, killing what Serb officials and survivors say were more than 80 Albanian refugees.

PEC, Yugoslavia -- Zhivko Martinovic had a dank, cramped, concrete woodshed next to his home. It was the best he could offer -- 5 by 7 feet, cluttered with chopped wood, paint cans, old soda bottles, hammers, shovels.For nearly three months, the Serbian man's shed served as sanctuary for his two ethnic Albanian neighbors, a refuge from the terrors of Serbian paramilitary attacks and NATO bombing."He opened his door and helped us," said 75-year-old Zymber Buqaj at the doorway to the shed, "because he knew they were doing massacres."