Kosovo Albanian women and children use a farm cart to flee fighting near the town of Srbica on Monday. (AP Photo)

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, March 23, 1999; Page A1

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, March 22 – For most of the last year, this gray valley city with smokestack-fouled air and the cluttered character of a bazaar has largely escaped the violence that has scarred the Serbian province of Kosovo.

But on the eve of possible NATO airstrikes, 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 Yugoslav government as a nest of sedition – was ringed tonight by heavy police checkpoints manned by hostile Interior Ministry troops. Gunfire rang out in residential neighborhoods. Shelling thundered in the distance.

Late in the day, a bomb hurled through the doorway exploded in a cafe popular among ethnic Albanians, injuring two people. Another restaurant was reportedly sprayed with gunfire. As most other bars and restaurants closed, residents began stockpiling food and water, anticipating shortages they are sure will accompany an attack by NATO.

A withering offensive since the weekend by the Yugoslav army against villages identified with the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army has spread to the city in other ways. About 10,000 refugees have arrived in the capital since last week, adding to the 29,000 already 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 Army and Interior Ministry troops 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 Serb forces in the city.

With the offices of international peace monitors boarded up here since their departure from Kosovo on Saturday – and many foreign aid workers and journalists leaving the province – Serbian officials are moving against other voices of opposition. Today, 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 15 miles north of here when it came under heavy shelling from Yugoslav government forces clearing a large area in the foothills of the Cicovac Mountains. For two days, Krasniqi found shelter for herself, her husband, and their eight children in a mosque in nearby Resnik, but then that village came under heavy shelling. She said she 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 fire 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 fled in recent days.

And from there the family took a bus to Pristina. All 14 of them live in two cramped rooms in the city, where they dare not peek out the window because they don't have a permit to live in the city.

"I'm still afraid," said Krasniqi. "I'm terrified."

The Serb offensive in the countryside also continued today, although it appeared to have lost some intensity as government 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 today. The fighting has paralyzed some refugees who were surrounded by Yugoslav government forces and didn't know where to go, witnesses said.

On Sunday in Srbica, a city of 20,000 that has been cleared of most of its population, a woman with her daughter and grandchild huddled behind a kiosk on an empty street in the city. When reporters approached them they began to cry and shudder-terrorized by any strange faces. "Please, we don't know anything," said the younger woman, anxiously looking around in case she was seen talking to journalists.

Srbica has become a moonscape of desolation and despair. Today Serbian authorities said that seven armed guerrillas were killed in a firefight in the city Saturday morning, disputing the allegations of local witnesses that unarmed male civilians had been summarily executed after being marched into a wooded area.

North of Pristina, along the main road to the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, government forces continued to target strongholds of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has fought a year-long guerrilla insurgency seeking independence from Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia. The population of Kosovo is 90 percent ethnic Albanian.

The KLA has been hammered in the last week by the military action in its former heartland west of this city. Weeks ago, the KLA acted as the authority in the countryside, manning roadblocks, deploying military police to settle local disputes, and checking the identities of reporters seeking to enter areas they controlled.

But on Sunday, on the road from Klina to Srbica, they clustered in forlorn looking groups, although they still struck defiant notes. They could hear the shelling and they knew that the strongholds where they once flew their flag – a black eagle against a blood-red background – -were being reduced to smoldering ruins.