The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 15

"When they saw us on the street they chased us to our homes and attacked." Ethnic Albanian woman, referring to Serbs in Komro SECTION MacDonald, Watson B3 FOREIGN EDITOR: RAYMOND BEAUCHEMIN (514) 987-2457 MONDAY, MARCH 29, 1999 Medieval battle Clean smg Kosovo Weekend of fighting forces 50,000 Albanians to flee Serbs, Kosovo Albanians each have legit beefs. Is there a way out of their overlapping claims? i teft i. -of I fijliWi i tMtuflMktilm week or so before Serbian leader Slobodan Milosovic called NATO's 40th or 50th and made clear his de termination to depopulate Kosovo, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou made an unsuccessful pilgrimage to Belgrade to urge him to backdown. Russia and Greece? An odd duo, surely, to be making joint entreaties in the Serb capital? The crisis in Kosovo has plenty to do with that staple of humanMstory, the dark conclaves of tribalism: at root, a large scale version of my daddy is better than your daddy, my wool purer than yours. Yugoslavia was a miniature multi-ethnic empire.

The dream that communism would dissolve its patchwork quilt of overlapping chauvinisms proved as elusive there as elsewhere. In last week's New York Review of Books, Michael Ignatieff presciently quoted the late Milovan Djilas, revolutionary true-believer turned dissident: "When revolutions occur, ethnic identities do get hammered down, only to bounce back with elemental force unless precisely defined relationships have developed in a society: democratic institutions, a free economy, a middle class. In this regard, communism left behind it a desert." The fault lines run deeper than the Soviet bloc's demise, than World War II and its legacy of puppet facisms, older even than World War I's trigger of anti-imperial nationalisms. In his history-soaked travelogue Balkan Ghosts (10 years old, the book gets a bit more pertinent every day), Robert Kaplan visits the same locale. Bel-, grade he reminds us, sits on what was for centuries the border between East and West, where the Hapsburg empire ended and the Turk ish empire began.

If the relevance of the Ottoman empire to contemporary Kosovo seems a stretch, it is wise to follow Kaplan into Serbia sort of Kosovo JOHN NADLER SouthamNews GENERAL JANKOVIC BORDER CROSSING, Macedonia Stepped-up attacks by NATO warplanes against Yugoslav ground forces in Kosovo over the weekend has not halted an aggressive effort by Serb security forces to terrorize and drive Albanian civilians from this embattled province in an apparent last-ditch ethnic-cleansing campaign. Under a gray and drizzling sky, a long stream of traumatized ethnic Albanian refugees, many from the Kosovo capital, Pristina, and the southern city of Urosevac, trickled across the Macedonia-Kosovo border here yesterday afternoon. Carrying few possessions and often speechless and weeping, many of the refugees mumbled that hunger and threats by Serb civilians and military forces had prompted their flight across the Macedonia frontier. THREATS BY SERBS, GYPSIES These refugees reported that Pristina, Serb and Gypsy civilians menaced and threatened Albanians who had left their homes during daylight hours in search of food. "When they saw us on the street they chased us to our homes and attacked our houses, breaking windows, throwing stones," recounted one distraught woman who crossed the frontier at General Jankovic yesterday Similar stories of harassment came from the mouths of exhausted refugees from Urosevac, which has reportedly been under siege by Yugoslav security forces now focusing their military offensive on urban centres after a brutal and lightning conquest of large rural areas of this Albanian enclave last week, specifically in Kosovo's central Drenica region due west of Pristina.

Refugees report that many have to pay Serb soldiers 30 deutsche marks or surrender possessions to cross the border. At General Jankovic a massive force of the Yugoslav Army and Serb Police Militia were dug into mountain positions that were hidden yesterday by low-lying clouds that also complicated NATO's weekend air campaign against Serb ground forces. General Jankovic, a stop along the Skopje-Pristina road, is considered the most direct route between Kosovo and Macedonia for escaping refugees or an invading army Escaping Kosovo along this route is dangerous, but for many Kosovars, remaining holds greater risks. A source still in embattled Pristina told Southam News in a message that Yugoslav forces were employing "Middle Ages' brutality against Albanian civilians. We are hoping the worst is over but I believe it is still coming," he reported.

Sources for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) have received reports of bloody retribution by Serb forces against Albanians employed by the Kosovo Verification Mission, the OSCE-sponsored monitoring force that left Kosovo a week ago. One OSCE representativesaid at least three Albanian former employees of the mission, individuals employed as translators, drivers or security guards, have been executed by Serb police. Sources also reported that Serb forces torched a Pristina building that housed OSCE officials and an apartment owned by Kosovar Albanian political leader Ibrihim Rugova. Unconfirmed reports also state that, oddly enough, Yugoslav vengeance also included the destruction of the Tiffany's restaurant in Pristina which often served OSCE members. Please see CLEANSE, PageB7 Serb players take stand.

PageF9 SRDMNSUKI. AP Local villagers dance on the wing of crashed F-117 Stealth fighter in Budjevica, Yugoslavia. Serbs parade 'invisible' trophy made any other outcome impossible by stripping of autonomy. DAVID MANICOM PRESENT HISTORICAL elest of empires, enduring an astonishing 600 years, until 1922. At its height it crushed local cultures and put nationalisms to the sword from Algeria to Iran to Austria and southern Ukraine.

In the 15th century, the Ottomans toppled Constantinople, swept aside the etiolated glories of the Byzantines and converted Hagia Sophia to a mosque. The Turks would come to control what is now Kosovo for centuries. Much of Kosovo looks Turkish, and the Turks have as good a claim to the mud and mountains as any other conquistador. It is no coincidence that the largest anti-NATO marches last week were in Athens. The Albanians have lived in the southern Balkans for a very long time.

They appear to be descended from the ancient Illyrians. Their lands were rarely independent, falling successively under Byzantine, Bulgarian and Serbian rule between the fall of Rome and the rise of the Ottomans. Serbia had good luck against the fading Byzantines, pushing south as far as Macedonia before the Turks began to push back. Kosovo was a buffer zone (in Milosovician thinking, it still is), the worst kind of zone to be. Serbia was out-empired in a crushing defeat at the Battle of Kosovo on June 15, 1389, little more than six centuries ago and still fresh in the dusted off folklore of em Serbian hypernationalism.

The defeat came after turning down an offer to pay tribute. Serbia rejected limited "autonomy" in favour of death and destruction. Today, 90 per cent of Kosovars are Al banian Muslims. They live there. So surely Kosovo really belongs to them? To make that point, their sporadically terroristic independence front, the KLA, has taken to abusing "collaborators" (according to Amnesty International), though on nothing like the scale of Serbian human-rights abuses.

The situation of 1999 has not only been created by medieval battles. The French and English, for example, have by and large patched up their differing takes on Agincourt. More recent history lends a hand. Yet the Serbian national trauma on Kosovo's soil, and the presence of then- great religious sites, played a role in Kosovo being made part of the Serbian republic (though with substantial autonomy) when Yugoslavia was created. Robert Kaplan's description of Kosovo as Serbia's Judea and Samaria (i.e., their West Bank) is apt: an ancient and cherished "Serbian" landscape that just happens to have hardly any Serbs.

Those who in recent thinkpieces characterize Belgrade as "simply putting down a secessionist movement" conveniently forget that Serbia made any other sort of outcome impossible when it reneged on the 1974 constitution, stripping Kosovo of its autonomy In 1989 it was rendered a mere administrative district. Ethnic Albanians were fired from responsible posts en masse. The use of Albanian was effectively banned in the school system. Human-rights abuses by the Serb-dominated government and police forces, while accelerating in the late '90s, have been habitual for a decade. Please see CLAIMS, PageB7 tit i Asked whether the pilot would have been made welcome, Lepotic retorted: "I would have ripped his throat out." Army sources said they believed the pilot had ejected and drifted west toward the Bosnian border on the prevailing wind.

The official line seemed to conceal anger and frustration that NATO helicopters had been allowed unmolested into Serbia to rescue him. The "wingman" flying alongside the crashed Stealth bomber was being debriefed by U.S. officials yesterday to establish whether the plane was shot down or suffered mechanical failure. The aircraft always fly in pairs and it is hoped that the wingman will be able to add vital evidence to that of the pilot, who ejected safely, on whether the plane was hit by anti-aircraft defences. Senior U.S.

officers are reserving judgment on how the plane crashed until the debriefing was complete. THE LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH CONTRIBUTED TO THIS REPORT what Belgrade likes to call Old Serbia, the northern stretches of Kosovo. Just as Russia's brutal obstinacy concerning Chechnya (heating up again) seems to revisit a deep psychosis about its southern flank's old exposure to the Ottomans, Kosovo is, for Serbia, the "near a lost, displaced homeland where its own zenith crashed and burned against the superior might of the Turk. As nation-states began to cohere in the high Middle Ages, Serbia (and Kosovo) belonged to the Byzantine empire. The first independent Serb state was created by Stefan Nemanja in the late 12th century.

His son, Saint Sava, founded the Serbian Orthodox Church, whose ancient monasteries of Grachanitsa and Kossovo Polje happen to lie in modern Kosovo. By the 14th century under King Stefan Dushan the Serbs were a regional power controlling most of what would one day become Yugoslavia, Macedonia, northern Greece and Bulgaria. Clearly then, having seeded it with their holy sites and controlling it for several centuries, Serbs are the true owners of Kosovo? And to seal the sanctity in, Kosovo was where the expanding Serb realms met the Ottomans. The only thing more holy than victory is crushing national defeat. The Ottomans controlled the second great Turkic empire.

Before them, the Seljuk domain sprawled from Tashkent and Bukhara to Jerusalem. The Mongols overran most of this empire in the 13th century. As the Mongols faded the Turks expanded again under Uthman (Ottoman). Theirs was one of the greatest and cru- TBI i I ,1 it i ff i mmu I Hi 1 I'm II IWHiH: 'lit V. t.

IP fj, fijii Iff London Times BELGRADE The Yugoslav Army escorted journalists to the crash site of a U.S. Stealth F-117 Nighthawk bomber yesterday, as the Belgrade propaganda machine strove to maximize the psychological impact of its first confirmed success against NATO's superior technology. The fact that the Stealth pilot was not captured was quietly forgotten in the hullabaloo. Two coachloads of mostly local reporters disgorged themselves in a maize field 50 kilometres west of Belgrade; several forgot their pens and cameras in a mad scramble to be first around a broken section of wing, which they picked at with penknives and screwdrivers like a giant chicken bone. State television, which showed the mangled F-117 over and again, described how Yugoslav MiG pilots had engaged the Stealth in a dogfight, chasing it low over the Sava flatlands and riddling it with bullets before finally downing it with a heat-seeking missile.

Pictures showed groups of Yugoslav soldiers around the fuselage, and Russian-speaking voices could be heard in the background. Farmer and horse-breeder Zivko Lep-otic said the people of Budjevica had certainly never seen anything like this fall from the sky before. "There was a whoosh and then it dipped down to the right and hit the fields in this big ball of flame," he said, as a mixed group of villagers and peasants danced up and down on the wing, helped by a 4-year-old brandishing a water pistol. "The fact that they use a veto means that they have emasculated the Security Council in its role and you almost have to find a functional equivalent." Axworthy said the international community did its best to find a diplomatic solution to the year of fighting in Kosovo. But faced with the implacability of President Slobodan Milosevic, it had to act to stop the ethnic violence in the Serbian province, which has left thousands dead and hundreds of thousands more homeless.

"Can you stand by and let it happen because the Security Council by the obsolescent technique of the veto -finds itself being paralyzed?" Axworthy defended the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with its 19 members countries, as the appropriate world body to address the Kosovo crisis. "It's not as if this is some kind of freelance operation. It's been undertak- Axworthy comes down hard on council 'A. MORE WORLD NEWS Paraguayan head quits The day before his impeachment trial was to continue, Paraguayan President Raul Cubas abruptly resigns from his job. PageB4 Vigilantes losing favour.

Page B5 West Bank reversal. Page B8 Jesus's path re-enacted. Page D13 Russian abortions down. Page D14 en by the security organization that has been around for close to 50 years, to protect the security of Europe." Yesterday in Toronto, at least 3,000 people gathered in the fifth-consecutive day of protests against NATO air strikes on Yugoslavia. It was the largest showing yet by the city's Serb community, with no signs it will be the last.

The protesters say NATO has no right to intervene in the affairs of a sovereign state. One child who has relatives in Yugoslavia carried a sign that read: "Please don't bomb my Grandma." In Edmonton, about 200 angry and upset Serb-Canadians chanted anti-Clinton and anti-NATO slogans in Old Strathcona. The march was led by a huge banner that said: "North American Terrorist Organization. NATO Pilots Have a Safe Return In Coffins." CP CONTRIBUTED TO THIS REPORT 1 SouthamNews OTTAWA Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy yesterday called the United Nations Security Council an "emasculated" and "obsolescent" body incapable of addressing the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Kosovo. Axworthy lashed back at critics who say NATO countries, including Canada, should not have commenced air strikes against Yugoslavia without a supporting resolution from the Security Council.

In an interview on the CBC radio program Crosscountry Check-Up, Axworthy singled out the council veto, which members such as China and Russia can use to block resolutions. "We're still faced with the age-old problem that the veto, which was a tool developed 50 years ago, gets in the way," Axworthy said. SANTIAGO LYON. AP Group of ethnic Albanian refugees cry as they wait at border crossing of Morini, Albania, yesterday on a tractor-pulled trailer..