Allies Meet Resistance, Violence : 2 Serbs Killed; Russians Bar NATO From Airport

PRIZREN, Yugoslavia — NATO’s entry into Kosovo grew increasingly hazardous Sunday, as German troops moved into the province for the first time since World War II and newly arrived British soldiers struggled to assert control over the capital, Pristina, against Russian and Serbian resistance.

Two Serbs were killed and a German soldier was wounded in the first incidents of armed violence between the NATO-led peacekeepers and Yugoslav forces since the mission began Saturday.

British troops in Pristina shot to death a man believed to be an off-duty police officer who reportedly opened fire at them, and here in the southwestern city of Prizren, one Serb was killed after German troops came under heavy sniper fire. A German soldier was wounded in the arm.

Sniper fire also cut down a pair of German journalists near the southern city of Stimlje. One of the journalists died immediately, the other after being treated by NATO medics.

Elsewhere in the province, the first substantial wave of American troops began pouring into Kosovo without serious incident.

As many as 300 soldiers attached to the 82nd Airborne Division entered the province Sunday afternoon to relieve British troops charged with securing the main road that winds from the border crossing at Blace, Macedonia, to the Kosovo town of Urosevac.

But tensions flared in yet another section of Pristina when Russian troops turned away British and French soldiers from the local airport, which the Russians took control of early Saturday in a surprise move.

A Russian colonel backed by about 200 troops reportedly told members of a French convoy of 10 trucks: “You cannot come in. You must turn around and go back.”

Russian officials said Sunday that the 200 troops who entered Kosovo before NATO forces could get here were deployed to demonstrate that the peacekeeping operation should be under the control of the United Nations, not NATO.

“Instead of a previously agreed operation, NATO carried out a completely different one,” said Vladimir P. Lukin, a deputy in the lower house of parliament and a former Russian ambassador to the U.S. “Instead of a U.N. operation, a NATO operation was conducted. The rapid redeployment of forces was nothing but an attempt to bring the situation in line with the resolution passed by the U.N. Security Council.”

Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott acknowledged in Moscow that Russian peacekeeping forces should have an area of responsibility in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic.

However, Talbott flew back to Washington without concluding an agreement to solve the sticky issues of who will command as many as 10,000 Russian peacekeeping troops expected to be sent to Kosovo and of where in the province they will be deployed.

“Russia should have an area in which its responsibility is manifest and evident for all the world to see,” Talbott told reporters before meeting Sunday morning with Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov. “That is not only a legitimate objective but an objective that the United States supports.”

Russia’s role on the ground in Kosovo may well not be decided until President Clinton and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin meet over the weekend in Cologne, Germany, at a gathering of leaders of the Group of 8, the world’s seven leading industrialized nations plus Russia.

Clinton and Yeltsin talked by phone Sunday for the fourth time in the past week, agreeing to let Russian and U.S. generals decide on the role of Russian troops in Pristina, a White House spokesman said.

In a “constructive conversation” that lasted about an hour Sunday morning, the two presidents discussed broader concerns surrounding Russian participation in the Kosovo peacekeeping force, and they are expected to talk by telephone again today.

Russia would like jurisdiction over a sector of the war-weary province, but the North Atlantic Treaty Organization wants to avoid creating a Russian sphere of influence--as happened in Eastern Europe after World War II--and wants Moscow’s troops under allied command.

Later in the day, NATO supreme commander Gen. Wesley K. Clark described the situation unfolding at the airport as a “bizarre event.”

“I think you have to see the issue of the Russians at the airport as a manifestation of an ongoing political dialogue . . . about the nature of this mission,” Clark told reporters gathered at a hotel in the Macedonian capital, Skopje. “This is essentially a political problem that needs to be resolved on a political level.”

Clark sought to downplay the incident by repeatedly stressing that it has had no effect on the peacekeeping mission, known as KFOR, for Kosovo Force, adding that KFOR officers never intended to use the airport to deploy troops. While in Skopje, Clark met separately with Macedonian Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski and, for an operational update, British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, commander of the peacekeeping forces.

In other developments Sunday:

* British troops reported counting nearly 100 bodies in mass graves in the southern Kosovo town of Kacanik. “When you look at what has happened in the villages, you have to feel sorry for them,” Sgt. Maj. Mick Robson told Britain’s Press Assn. “There are two mass graves in this village with an estimated 98 people in them.”

* In Belgrade, former Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Vuk Draskovic, who was fired during the NATO bombing for expressing views different from those of the government, called for an immediate end to the official “state of war” that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has used to impose draconian restrictions on freedom of speech and press. “By maintaining the ‘state of war,’ they are trying to prolong rule by fear and commands, as well as the old politics of internal conflicts and conflicts with the whole world,” said Draskovic, who also heads the Serbian Renewal Movement. “We have to confront that energetically with all the power of democratic Serbia.”

Meanwhile, at the Morine border crossing from Albania into Kosovo on Sunday, a German light infantry battalion had expected to meet a few Serbian troops to precede them into Prizren, the second-largest city in Kosovo.

Instead, they encountered truckloads of Serbian troops making a slow, angry retreat through a landscape of burned and empty villages and of craters caused by 78 days of NATO bombing that the Western allies began in response to the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo Albanians by the forces of Milosevic.

The Germans fought to hold Prizren back from the edge of anarchy.

Jubilant ethnic Albanians, many of them pale from 2 1/2 months hiding in their basements, embraced the German troops as saviors, showering them with orange lilies and kisses as they arrived and even tossing some of the bewildered soldiers into the air.

The ethnic Albanians danced in the streets and sang folk songs.

“I feel like a survivor on the Titanic,” Mentor Cobani, 24, shouted over earsplitting cheers. “I didn’t come out of my house for 78 days. The whole time I was hoping to see this.”

But terror was as much a part of the day as celebration, with exchanges of gunfire, stone-throwing and window-bashing.

As the ethnic Albanians emerged from their basements, many Serbian residents beat a hasty retreat, speeding out of town in moving vans under a hail of rocks and broken glass.

At one point, 20 Serbian troops burst into town firing their automatic rifles into the air and yelling threats at the ethnic Albanians before facing off with a contingent of German soldiers.

“The hell with you! We’re going to kill you all!” the Serbs shouted at the crowd.

About 200 ethnic Albanians ran for cover, screaming in panic.

“They are monsters,” said Violet Gashi, shaking uncontrollably.

German Maj. Harald List forced the Serbs to pull back several hundred yards to the edge of town while his forces awaited reinforcements--which seemed a long time coming.

German troops parked their armored personnel carriers between the two groups and struggled to keep peace. The Serbs would have to cross the town to make their retreat north to Serbia proper, but the Germans did not have enough troops to hold back the thousands of ethnic Albanians.

Off on a side street, dozens of Serbian residents of Prizren stood by their packed automobiles, afraid to stay in town and afraid to leave.

“If we stay here, they’ll kill us in 24 hours,” said Olga Nikolic, a 57-year-old native of the city, before breaking into tears.

But the Serbs said they feared they would run into the Kosovo Liberation Army, the ethnic Albanian rebels, if they left town.

“The situation in the middle of town is very dangerous for the Serbs,” said Maj. Volker Schaefer. The Serbian forces who entered, he said, “lost their nerve. They went crazy.”

By nightfall, German reinforcements had come and the ethnic Albanians returned to their houses out of habitual fear. In the middle of the night, NATO troops began leading the Serbs through town.

Under the peace agreement that Milosevic’s government signed with NATO, the Serbs do not have to be out of the western sector of Kosovo for several days.

Prizren residents said Serbian paramilitaries were burning and looting houses in one part of the city before withdrawing, but German soldiers were unable to get into the area to check out the reports.

Still, it seemed the Germans could do no wrong in the eyes of the ethnic Albanians, many of whom not only welcomed them as a part of the NATO force but remembered them fondly from World War II. While Hitler razed much of Europe and slaughtered Jews, he allowed Kosovo to unite with Albania, briefly creating the Greater Albania that many of them continue to dream of.

The American troops who arrived in Kosovo on Sunday, like the Germans, encountered a deafening blend of cheers, screams and whistles from hundreds of ethnic Albanian refugees who rushed to greet them before they even reached the border. The soldiers responded by snapping pictures of the refugees, grabbing their hands and flashing the thumbs-up signal.

One GI tried to capture the event with a camcorder as he maneuvered a huge truck through the crowd.

“This is incredibly positive and upbeat,” said Capt. Michael Taylor of the 82nd Airborne Division. “We didn’t know what to expect when we set out this morning.”

An extensive convoy of Bradley fighting vehicles, M1A1 tanks and Humvees transported the American soldiers by land as 10 Chinook helicopters advanced by air.

A convoy of more than 1,000 Marines began entering Kosovo from Macedonia at first light today. The U.S. portion of the approximately 48,000-strong force is expected to number 7,000.

*

Miller reported from Prizren, Tamaki from Skopje and Paddock from Moscow. Times staff writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington and David Holley in Podgorica, Yugoslavia, contributed to this report.