Evidence Details Systematic Plan of Killings in Kosovo

BELA CRKVA, Yugoslavia — For 2 1/2 months this spring, an average of 128 lives were snuffed out each day in Kosovo. During a single changing of the seasons, at least one out of every 180 Kosovo Albanians died.

That is the harsh, inescapable reckoning now emerging to confront international war crimes prosecutors, NATO peacekeepers and most of all the traumatized survivors of Kosovo as they try to rebuild this vast necropolis of the graves and ashes of 10,000 dead.

As NATO rained bombs on Yugoslavia, evidence now being collected is showing, a great killing machine was at work here, a premeditated Serbian military-and-police juggernaut that swooped down on almost every city and hamlet in the province, leaving in its wake burned homes, charred bones and mass graves for the ethnic Albanian majority to cry over.

While the Serbian onslaught was happening--amid a war between NATO and Yugoslavia, and amid Belgrade’s armed conflict with Kosovo separatists--the overall extent of the massacres could only be speculated on. Now, eight weeks later, the worst fears are being verified.

More graves and decomposed remains are being found daily despite the efforts of the killers to conceal corpses by burning and scattering remains. More family members are admitting to themselves that their missing can only have died. More village leaders are approaching war crimes investigators with the simple plea: Come look at our massacre. Slowly, inexorably, the death count mounts.

By putting together physical information from grave sites and testimony of survivors, as well as through visits by the Los Angeles Times to more than 30 locations where killings occurred, the horror of those 2 1/2 months is revealed. It becomes clear that a great convulsion of organized, geographically pinpointed killing began with simultaneous attacks across Kosovo hours after NATO airstrikes began, and rarely ebbed until June 12, when the first North Atlantic Treaty Organization peacekeepers arrived.

“We have a register [of deaths] for all Kosovo that has more than 10,000 people, and growing,” said Pajazit Nushi, the chairman of Kosovo’s oldest human rights group, the Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms. The council’s storefront offices across the province have become the local information central--the place to come to report a body found or a loved one still missing. As refugees returned to Kosovo in late June and early July, some of these offices had lines spilling out onto the pavement.

The council’s death toll--double the initial U.S. estimate issued in May--does not encompass the 221 reported killings of ethnic Albanians that took place in 1999 before the NATO airstrikes began, nor the up to 2,000 ethnic Albanians believed killed in 1998.

Although it occurred in the context of a war, this extermination of so many thousands of unarmed people stands as a crime of historic dimensions.

Over four weeks, The Times set out to retrace the course of the massacres, visiting killing fields from Bela Crkva and Goden in the south of the province, where it all began, to the ravaged western cities of Djakovica and Pec, to Kosovska Mitrovica in the north, where Serbs and ethnic Albanians now glare at one another across a bridge that symbolizes the gulf of hatred that still must be spanned.

Virtually every small hamlet in between has its horrors: swollen, yellowed bodies floating in wells; human spinal columns and ribs that have been gnawed at by stray dogs; flies hovering over mass graves excavated by relatives looking for loved ones; the misery and plea in the face of a young widow wondering how she will raise a fatherless child.

Based on what they are learning on the ground, investigators and prosecutors say they are more convinced than ever that this slaughter was plotted far in advance at the highest levels.

A Child Killed and Hung From a Gate

The victims were children such as 5-year-old Argjend Demjaha, stabbed to death in Djakovica and then hung with a rope from his family’s gate. Old men like Fathi Emrush Morina, 73--lined up, told to look away and shot dead in a hayfield in Jovic with 33 other men. Or young women such as the unmarried 33-year-old in Bela Crkva (whose name is withheld) who was raped by Serbian police who then dispatched her with a bullet to her genitalia. Many of the victims died in family groups, like the Vejsas, who were among 19 women and children and one man who were shot cowering in their home and then burned while at least some were still alive. Or in poignant settings, like 30-year-old Genc Morina (no relation to Fathi), executed in his garden next to his children’s swings.

“Any one of these individuals would have been a tragedy. But when you put it all together, it’s staggering,” said Paul Mallet, an FBI agent sent to Kosovo to help investigate war crimes for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague. The tribunal has already charged Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic on several counts.

Putting it all together is the job of the tribunal. But with so many suspected mass graves, more than 200 by NATO’s last count, and with so many sites where human remains evidently were incinerated, it will take months for investigators to reach them--and they may never get to every one.

“The reality is that there has been homicide on this territory on a magnitude that the international community has a very difficult time responding to,” said the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour.

Because so many bodies were removed or destroyed before NATO got to Kosovo, “we may never know the cost in lives of the atrocities that occurred in that short period of time,” said tribunal spokesman Paul Risley, who said he fears that the true toll is greater than the worst estimates so far.

Tribunal insiders say there could be additional charges brought against Milosevic and his top commanders, possibly including the ultimate war crimes allegation of genocide.

Indictments are also possible against mid- and lower-ranking officers in order to prove an unbroken chain of command responsible for the atrocities, and to single out individuals who committed the most flagrant acts.

NATO Critics Contend Serbs Reacted to War

Some supporters of Yugoslavia and critics of NATO continue to argue that the Serbian onslaught was a spontaneous reaction to the NATO bombing campaign. That’s not likely, according to Western officials and analysts.

Instead, they see it as a bold stroke by Milosevic and his henchmen to finally control Kosovo--a southern province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic--and to realize the slogan that has been daubed by Serbian troops on countless buildings across Kosovo: “This is Serbia.”

They point to Belgrade’s pre-positioning of troops, special police units and weapons in the months leading up to the killings and expulsions and the fact that intensified attacks on the Kosovars began several days before NATO’s assault.

Also damning is that almost immediately after the first NATO bombs fell, paramilitary and police simultaneously began killing and burning in towns and villages across Kosovo, and soldiers had set up corridors through which the ethnic Albanians were ordered to flee.

Indeed, the German government believes that it has in hand the written blueprint for the whole campaign, put together late last year under the code name “Operation Horseshoe.”

It turned over a copy--which it says was obtained from an unidentified country neighboring Yugoslavia--to Arbour in April.

This plan, the Germans believe, was drafted by generals in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, with the final green light coming directly from Milosevic even before the failed last-minute peace negotiations in February at Rambouillet, France.

Michael Steiner, the chief foreign policy advisor to German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, noted a stunning conformity of the expulsions and killings inflicted by Serbs amid the NATO bombardment with the detailed orders in the plan.

“This document proved that these ‘ethnic cleansing’ measures had been planned during 1998,” he asserted.

The CIA declines to discuss the Operation Horseshoe plan, but a senior White House official said that the U.S. government became aware as early as February that Belgrade was getting ready for a major crackdown.

“It became clear to us at Rambouillet that the Serbs were preparing for some form of large-scale offensive,” the official said.

“The indications were that the VJ [Yugoslav army] and MUP [Interior Ministry police] were working close together on this,” the official said. “We saw forces being moved into the area, and there were growing indicators they were preparing for some kind of action. I mean, they were going beyond the planning phases. They were mobilizing resources.”

Adding to those ominous signs, Milosevic never seemed to take the Rambouillet talks seriously. He sent only low-ranking delegates, with no apparent instructions, who acted like they were on a holiday.

“One of their first requests was for manicures,” the White House official said. And the delegation consumed well over 100 bottles of wine during the first two weeks of talks, according to a French news agency report.

Yugoslav General Deploys More Troops

In charge of forces in Kosovo was Yugoslav 3rd Army chief Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic. (Pavkovic, with no apparent irony, recently berated NATO for failing to maintain law and order in Kosovo.)

In the weeks leading up to the Serbian campaign, Pavkovic moved 40,000 additional troops into Kosovo or along its borders with Serbia proper, and was working more closely with both federal and Serbian MUP units. Indeed, prosecutors have charged, the police units were subordinated to the military.

He, in turn, took his orders from Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic, the Yugoslav army commander, one of the four Milosevic associates indicted with the Yugoslav president on war crimes charges in May.

Western officials, in retrospect, believe that Ojdanic’s appointment in November 1998 was key in leading to the killing operation. Unlike his predecessor, Gen. Momcilo Perisic, Ojdanic showed no inhibition about having the army help MUP units carrying out brutal acts.

“In some cases, MUP units operated under VJ control, and we didn’t see that last year,” the senior Clinton administration official said.

In Kosovo in January, international verifiers who had arrived to help implement a previous peace accord were in mounting danger from Serbian police and soldiers. Several staff members had been pulled from their cars and beaten. Yugoslav forces reacted with hostility to the sight of the monitors. The massacre of more than 45 Kosovo Albanians on Jan. 15 in the village of Racak seemed to be a sample of what the Yugoslav forces were planning.

“It was evident . . . [that] this military campaign to go in and cleanse villages, push people out, burn the village, under the pretense of chasing terrorists, was a well-orchestrated campaign that was going to go on,” recalled William Walker, the American who headed the verification mission for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and inspected the mutilated corpses from Racak.

“They weren’t listening to us anymore,” Walker said. “We were unable to perform the tasks we were sent in there to do.”

On March 20, in a lightning exit, Walker ordered all his monitors out of Kosovo. As they left, Yugoslav tanks blocked the roads behind them. The operation to clean out Kosovo had begun in earnest.

Weighed Down by Bodies in a River

When the killing started, it was with unexpected ferocity.

On the morning of March 25, barely half a day since the beginning of NATO airstrikes, Zenel Popaj found himself submerged in the Billai River, weighed down by the bodies of his relatives and neighbors, and struggling now and then to push his nose above the surface long enough for a quick breath.

Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore. Better to die quickly from a bullet, he thought, than to drown in this freezing stream. So he pushed aside the corpses that were covering him and looked around.

The Serbian police were gone. There was only a young boy staring at him in disbelief.

Popaj had survived one of the first massacres, 45 men gunned down in Bela Crkva.

In Celina, about three miles away, 21 residents of the village had seen the soldiers coming in their tanks and ran with their belongings to escape through a small wooded hollow. They may have believed they were safely covered by thick brush on either side of a sandy creek bed. But at the other end of the hollow, two Yugoslav soldiers waited on the high ground. In a few short bursts of automatic weapons, all 21 were dead.

In Goden, 15 miles from Celina, the male villagers had gathered to offer the customary condolences to a recently bereaved family of a neighbor when Yugoslav border troops who were a fixture in their village began ordering everyone to leave for Albania. All except the mourners; they were lined against a building and shot.

In Djakovica, the Albanian-inhabited old section of town was put to the torch on that same Thursday morning, including the city’s most famous mosque, and gangs of executioners raced to the homes of their first intended victims--intellectuals, political activists and ethnic Albanians who had money to be stolen.

The massacres had their own logic. The first significant waves of killings and expulsions happened in the south and southwest of Kosovo, emptying out towns and villages on the border with Albania and astride the road between Djakovica and Prizren, clearing a channel through which most of the ethnic Albanian population would flood on its way to Albania.

Thus, in those first three days, Celina, Bela Crkva, Velika Krusa, Mala Krusa and other small farming communities within sight of the two-lane asphalt became killing zones. Today, the villagers still move about as if in a state of shock.

Nuradin Rejipi, a 32-year-old resident of Celina, remembers a Yugoslav tank coming through the thicket behind the village and opening fire, destroying houses. Soon the school was ablaze, and the country lanes were swarming with hundreds of police, soldiers and members of special units. They were ordering people to leave for Albania and killing apparently at random.

On March 26, seven police officers realized that about 200 people, Rejipi among them, had taken haven on the ground floor of one of the houses. Calling from the gate, they ordered the people to come out. Rejipi’s uncle took Rejipi by the elbow reassuringly and said, “Come, nothing will happen.”

But Rejipi didn’t believe him, a split-second judgment that saved his life. He hung back, and when the Serbs’ backs were turned, he darted behind the house and hid in a sewer drain.

“There were 14 males in that group, and I am the only one to survive,” Rejipi said. After they were shot in the next yard, the men’s bodies were doused with gasoline, piled with wooden beams and set ablaze. When Rejipi came out of hiding five hours later, he saw his uncle’s white cap but not much else recognizable.

And so it went through that whole area--army soldiers surrounding the villages and controlling the roads, and police, paramilitary and other special units going in to do the dirty work.

Serbian forces massacred about 3,000 people in that southern region alone, many of the killings occurring in the first week, according to NATO and the human rights council.

It was a lottery as to who would get killed and who would be allowed to walk to Albania. According to survivors, some were shot because they were running away; some old people were shot because they tried to stay; some were killed simply because they were ethnic Albanian men, or were of fighting age, or because they had no money with which to buy their lives.

Djakovica, half an hour’s drive away, was another focus that first week--the most Albanian and most Muslim of Kosovo’s cities. It boasted fine stone Turkish-style mosques and maintained a tradition of Sufi Muslim sheiks and dervishes gathering in the quiet intimacy of centuries-old wood-paneled prayer centers.

On the first night of the NATO bombing, Serbian police and paramilitary units rampaged through the 500-year-old bazaar area of Hamudi Street. Using gasoline and some kind of explosive incendiary chemicals, they gutted 250 shops and the Hamudi Mosque itself.

The killing started before dawn that morning and intensified as the week went on. One of the worst cases was the April 2 massacre of the occupants of a house in the Qerim district where 19 women and children and one adult male were hiding. The women thought they would be safe after their men had run away. Instead, they were shot and burned.

Faton Polloshka, the public works director who was responsible for overseeing the cemetery and the city’s eight gravediggers, says at least 75 people died that day alone in Djakovica.

Curiously, he said, before his gravediggers were allowed to cart bodies away, a Serbian forensics team often came and photographed the corpses where they lay, putting down plastic numbers to identify each one. This bureaucratic procedure--supervised, according to Polloshka, by a lawyer in his 60s named Marinkovic--continued despite the mass killings, with the investigators acting as if they didn’t know that their own people were responsible for the slayings.

Similar forensic photographs were obtained by The Times from a man who said he had taken them from the abandoned Yugoslav army barracks in Prizren. The photos illustrate the methodical nature of the Serbian operation. They show the fatal wounds of slain Kosovo Albanians up close, sometimes with a tape measure held near the bullet holes. In some, soldiers in regular army uniforms are walking around prone bodies that are wearing civilian clothes.

KLA Stronghold a Focus of Aggression

Massacres spread to other parts of Kosovo as well. Suva Reka, a city north of Prizren, had been a stronghold of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, and the Serbian operation there was particularly aggressive.

On March 25, special police units emptied the quarter inhabited by one of the wealthiest ethnic Albanian families, the Berisha clan, and summarily executed eight men. The next morning, 70 people were herded into a pizzeria; some were shot, and some were burned alive. Much of the city was shelled, and residents took flight into farm villages nearby, some of them shot in the back as they ran.

In Pec, the province’s second-largest city, north of Djakovica, the picturesque old street of Carshia e Gjate was set on fire March 26, marking the beginning of “ethnic cleansing” there.

“Those who remained say the smoke and the fire never stopped until the Serbs left” in June, said human rights activist Tahir Demaj. Seven hundred people were killed in and around Pec, Demaj added--at first in the city itself and then in hunt-and-destroy operations in villages such as Ljubenic and in the nearby, aptly named Accursed Mountains.

There were massacres in which the people simply vanished, like 96 men from Klina, a town of 10,000 people in central Kosovo.

As Serbian neighbors jeered, the ethnic Albanian population of the town was forced out March 30 and sent walking toward Albania. On the way, however, they detoured to avoid fighting between Serbian troops and the KLA, until about 400 of the men found themselves taken prisoner April 1 and held in the mountain village of Kraljan. After two days and two nights of ill treatment, the Serbs decided to let all but 97 younger men go.

Of them, 96 have never been heard from again.

The only known survivor, 21-year-old Hysen Krasniqi, stares vacantly as he tells the story to The Times: As the other men were taken away, he was picked out with 14 others and led into a garage. There Serbs in yellow uniforms stood a few yards away and opened fire. Although bleeding in the arm, shoulder and back, Krasniqi managed to drag himself away.

“I saw only dead bodies,” Krasniqi said. As for the other 82 prisoners, he has no idea. The only evidence in Kraljan now is seven circles on the ground where something has been burned.

Operations soon moved northward and eastward.

Police and paramilitary fighters began a purge of ethnic Albanian neighborhoods in the provincial capital, Pristina, breaking into Albanian-owned stores and apartments and ordering people to leave. As some residents tried to flee, they found themselves subjected to sniper shootings.

Those who made it through this gantlet to the center of the city were directed to sleep outside the train station, and then were packed onto rail cars for Macedonia in scenes reminiscent of World War II.

Then the action shifted to the rolling farmland northeast and southeast of Pristina, with killings in the Gnjilane area April 6 and along the road to Leskovac, a city of Serbia proper, on April 19. Those who tried to remain, even the elderly, were often shot and burned in their homes.

Reprisal Killings in KLA Stronghold

Another center of killing through this period was the Drenica region, a KLA stronghold in north-central Kosovo where guerrillas were engaged in gun battles with the Serbs, who responded by carrying out reprisal killings in captured villages. The fighting in Drenica exploded March 20, and massacres took place every week from then until May. By June, an estimated 2,000 people had died there.

At Izbica on March 28, 150 mostly elderly men were lined up and shot as they crouched with their hands behind their heads. After the killers pulled back, villagers managed to videotape the scene and bury the bodies. NATO later showed aerial photos of the victims’ graves, but when Times reporter Paul Watson became the first Western journalist to reach the scene June 15, the bodies had evidently been dug up and taken away.

Kraljan and Izbica rank as two of the largest massacres, but the greatest catastrophe appears to have occurred several weeks later in Meja, amid a group of mainly Catholic ethnic Albanian villages just outside Djakovica.

According to witnesses, Serbian forces wanted revenge after suffering battle casualties in the area. “Whoever was out on the 27th of April, they stopped and killed him,” said Engjel Markaj, who lives nearby.

Today, the main massacre site looks innocuous--a grassy slope that rises gently from a narrow farm lane, next to a ravine filled with underbrush. But the grass is strangely beaten down, and there are bits of debris--socks, broken dentures, rusted cigarette cases--strewn about.

According to testimony received by human rights groups and the war crimes detectives, up to 300 men were taken out of a vast refugee convoy going to the nearby border crossing with Albania. They were kept in the field in view of the road as their wives and children were forced at gunpoint to move on. Groups of refugees arriving later said that, instead of prisoners, they saw only what looked like hundreds of bodies.

Like so many survivors across Kosovo, Trashe Sokoli, 73, who hasn’t seen her four grown sons and one teenage grandson since the day the Serbs carried out that massacre near her home, is tormented by the question of what happened to the bodies.

There are tracks from heavy machinery near the field in Meja, and some residents believe that human remains will be found beneath two mounds that look like compost heaps. Corpses may have been burned in farmhouses nearby, or buried in several suspected mass graves in Korenica, about a mile away. The driveway to a cemetery had been dug up and packed down again. What appears to be a woman’s scalp can be seen sticking out from the mottled earth--black hair with gray roots.

None of these sites has yet been exhumed. The villagers fear that they may be booby-trapped, and they want to leave the evidence undisturbed for the war crimes investigators.

What is clear to everyone is that the killers went to extraordinary, sometimes macabre lengths to hide the evidence, as the removal of bodies from Izbica, Kraljan and Meja suggests. Polloshka, who oversaw the cemetery in Djakovica, said an excavator came one night in late May and that the remains of at least 70 victims were taken away.

Farmer Izidor Ransi in Korisa, near the Prizren city garbage dump, saw a truck and a digger come to bury bodies March 28 and then return a week later to exhume them. They were apparently in a hurry, because they left behind a woman’s head, a man’s arm and a man’s leg.

War crimes investigators have been looking into whether bodies were cremated or otherwise destroyed at industrial centers such as the Balkan Belt factory in Suva Reka, where automotive belts are made; the Obilic coal mine and electricity plant near Pristina; or the Trepca mining complex north of Kosovska Mitrovica.

In Suva Reka, people who remained in the city recall a horrific smell emanating from the plant at the end of March, even though the factory was not working. “The fire was going for three days, and we couldn’t open the windows,” said resident Bahrije Kokollari.

If corpses weren’t burned, they were often mutilated by beheading or by gun blasts to the face so they couldn’t be identified. In Jovic, the bodies of the 34 men killed there were scattered throughout the hayfield. Halil Krasniqi, a farmer who eventually buried them, thinks that was done so the bodies would look as if the men had fallen in combat.

The pattern of killing people in one place, burying them someplace else and then exhuming and reburying in yet another location is known to the war crimes investigators from their work in Bosnia, where Serbs are also accused of “ethnic cleansing,” said tribunal spokesman Risley.

The perpetrators may have tried to hide evidence of their deeds, but ultimately it will not do them any good, predicted Graham Blewitt, the deputy prosecutor for the tribunal in The Hague.

“It will be demonstrated in Kosovo that the hiding of evidence or attempting to destroy it is never possible--you will still find traces, and you don’t need much,” he said.

Indeed, such attempts may boomerang and “compound their guilt” by depriving the actions of any “innocent explanations,” he said.

Ten thousand people killed in 78 days.

That reality goes far to explain why NATO is having such difficulty bringing Serb and Albanian together now.

Since NATO troops entered Kosovo, the tables have been turned. These days, it is ethnic Albanians who are quietly killing Serbs--more than 100 cases so far, NATO says. The Serbian Orthodox Church estimates the number at more than 200.

After what has happened, the West is naive if it believes that reconciliation is possible in the foreseeable future, Albanian after Albanian said in interviews conducted over the past few months.

Dr. Fehmi Spahiu, a dentist whose brother and two nephews--and three other men--were executed on his balcony April 1, and whose own life was only saved at the last minute by a policeman who recognized him, is among those who believe that separation is the only answer now.

“Bill Clinton says, ‘Don’t take any revenge on Serbs.’ But if I could, I would ask Bill Clinton, what would he do if he had his daughter in the grave like I have my brother? Could he continue life with the Serbs, as he is asking us?”

Spahiu, his voice choking, had his answer:

“If someone tried by force to make me live with Serbs again, I think I would have to kill myself.”

*

Daniszewski reported from Kosovo and The Hague. Times staff writers Tyler Marshall in Washington, Valerie Reitman and Julie Tamaki in Pristina, Carol J. Williams in Berlin and Marjorie Miller in London and researchers Agron Shkodra and Arianit Shehu in Kosovo contributed to this report.

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A CHRONOLOGY OF HORROR IN KOSOVO

For 2 1/2 months, a killing machine swept through Kosovo, leaving 10,000 ethnic Albanians dead in its wake. The map above shows the general geographic progression of the Yugoslav campaign: the securing of major road corridors in and out of the province, followed by “ethnic cleansing” that was focused in the south and west but spread within a few days northward and eastward.

* March 24

NATO bombs fall on Yugoslavia at 8 p.m. By 11 p.m., special police units and paramilitary troops are on a rampage in Mitrovica Kosovska, in northern Kosovo. During the next 11 weeks, about 650 people will be killed there.

* March 25

A long column of tanks and trucks is seen shortly after midnight on the main highway between Prizren and Djakovica. By dawn, police units and paramilitary troops surround the villages of Celina, Bela Crkva and Velika Krusa and begin a killing rampage that lasts for the next three days.

Also on March 25, in the early morning hours, killings begin in the old section of Djakovica. During the morning, other killings begin in Pec and Suva Reka. At dawn, soldiers saying they have orders to kill everyone carry out a massacre at Goden, a remote mountain village along the Albania-Kosovo border near Djakovica.

* March 27-April 2

Pec, Kosovo’s second-largest city, is emptied of its ethnic Albanian population.

* March 28

An estimated 150 ethnic Albanians are executed in Izbica. The corpses are videotaped and buried by residents, and NATO records the graves on aerial photographs. However, when a Times reporter reaches the site in June, the bodies have been exhumed and disposed of at an unknown location.

* March 31

Eighty thousand residents of the Podrime region of south-central Kosovo are herded into Belanica, shelled and robbed. An estimated 60 people are killed before the massive column is allowed to leave for Albania.

* March 31

More than 100 men are killed in Pusto Selo, a village near Orahovac. More than 30 others are killed in Jovic, another nearby village.

* April 1

“Ethnic cleansing” of Pristina begins. Rail cars are jammed with refugees sent to Macedonia in scenes reminiscent of World War II.

* April 1-11

Operations near Pec are believed to have killed up to 350 people from a series of villages, including Ljubenic. Yugoslav troops hunt down refugees in the mountains and summarily execute them.

* April 2

Systematic burning of the Qerim section of Djakovica. In one household, 19 women and children and one man are gunned down and then burned as the house is set on fire.

* April 3

Presumed massacre at Kraljan, a mountain village. Ninety-six men from the town of Klina vanish without a trace after their retreating families hear gunfire.

* April 6

Residents in villages around Gnjilane, eastern Kosovo, are forced to flee. Men are taken from a convoy and shot along the road.

* April 5-May 5

Massacres are taking place on an ongoing basis in Drenica.

* April 19-May 1

“Ethnic cleansing” in northeast Kosovo, along the road to Leskovac, leaves more than 100 dead. * April 27

Mass killings in Meja and Korenica: Up to 300 are dead in what may be the largest single massacre.

* May 7-10

The Chabrat neighborhood of Djakovica is purged -- hundreds of men are arrested; most are still missing.

* June 9-12

Yugoslavia agrees to pull out. An unknown number of ethnic Albanian prisoners are transported from Kosovo to Serbia proper.

* June 12

NATO troops arrive. Documents found by German forces in Prizren indicate that the historic southern city was scheduled to be burned next but that Yugoslav forces ran out of time.

* June 12-Present

About 100,000 Serbs and Gypsies flee Kosovo amid reprisal killings by ethnic Albanians against members of both groups; some Gypsies are accused of collaborating in war crimes. According to NATO, there have been about 200 killings, involving victims from all ethnic groups. The worst incident was the July 23 massacre by unknown gunmen of 14 Serbian farmers harvesting grain.