Word: kosovo
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...nearly his entire life, Dervis Audaja, 54, lived on the same block in the Kosovo city of Pec, developing close friendships with his neighbors, a mix of ethnic Albanians and Serbs. Now all that is gone forever. Early last week Serb paramilitary units drove into his neighborhood, went to the door of every Albanian home and gave the residents 10 minutes to pack their belongings and go to the Korza, the city's main square. From there most of the crowd of 15,000 were herded into the local sports stadium, where they spent the night in silent fear, half...
...commanded to yell "Serbia! Serbia!" and give the three-finger Serb victory salute. "Go to Albania. That's your country," Serb troops told a group of ethnic Albanians hiding in Mamusa, a village 22 miles from the Albanian border. "And say hello to Bill Clinton. You will never see Kosovo again." Serb paramilitary forces were said to have committed grisly atrocities. There were reports of summary executions in at least 20 towns and villages. According to the State Department, Albanian men in Djakovica were systematically separated from women and children. Thirty-three bodies were later found in a nearby river...
Throughout Kosovo, the "cleansing" of the province's 1.8 million Albanians was swift and brutal. Arife Bajrami, 30, who fled to Kukes, Albania, from Izbice, in central Kosovo, said Serbs told residents to assemble at the local schoolyard. The Serbs demanded money from the women in exchange for their lives. "They made us walk for two hours to another village, then they marched us back again, just making fun of us," Bajrami said. "We had no food. I saw one old lady die on the road." As she trudged along the muddy road to Albania, local Serbs shouted, "Your land...
...Pristina, the Kosovo capital, black-masked Serb police dragged Albanians out of their homes, force-marched them to a railroad station and packed thousands into locked trains bound for Macedonia. Says a senior State Department official: "The numbers are staggering. We have a huge humanitarian disaster on our hands." The roads leading out of Kosovo were trails of suffering. At least 500 elderly Albanians, too sick and weary to go on, were abandoned by the roadside on the way to Rozaje. On Friday NATO spokesman Shea reported that a six-mile line of some 25,000 refugees had formed...
...specially trained for such missions. Navy F-18s from the carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt are expected to see action. And the U.S. Army may get a chance to unleash its AH-64 gunships against Serbian targets. The choppers could also help take out Serbian special-forces units operating inside Kosovo--units the Pentagon is starting to believe engineered the "snatch" of the three Army scouts last week...