Thousands of Yugoslav troops and police pulled out of the central Pristina area of Kosovo on Tuesday to meet a midnight NATO deadline for withdrawal, as ethnic Albanians reported at least a half-dozen mass killings carried out by Serbs during the allied air war against them.
The convoys of Yugoslav forces, the losers in a 78-day air war with NATO, clogged highways north to the Serbian border for much of the day. Scores of Soviet-built tanks clanked along ahead of armored cars, artillery pieces, buses and trucks and other vehicles stolen from ethnic Albanians.
Thousands of frightened Serb civilians joined the exodus, cars and tractors piled high with personal belongings, although a NATO spokesman tried to reassure remaining Serbs they would come under NATO protection. He said he hoped many Serbs who are leaving would later decide to return.
NATO forces on the ground and in the air monitored the military and police withdrawal closely and said there might be a few stragglers Wednesday whose vehicles had broken down. But generally, they said, the pullout was going smoothly.
With more than half the 40,000 Yugoslav forces now out of Kosovo, those in two more NATO-designated zones are to depart later this week. One group has been given until midnight Friday to leave, and all those remaining should, under the plan, be gone by midnight Sunday.
While the Yugoslavs were pouring out of Kosovo, several thousand ethnic Albanian refugees from Macedonia and Albania were pouring in. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said it had spread the word through refugee camps that it was still not safe for people to return, but some had ignored that in their eagerness to go home.
Officials said some refugees were walking back to Kosovo, and two men were killed Tuesday when they stepped on a land mine.
The Yugoslav forces, flashing a traditional three-fingered victory salute, did not all leave Kosovo gallantly. In areas where NATO forces have not yet deployed, they stopped to burn more ethnic Albanian houses in a final act of vengeance that appeared to symbolize the unforgiving nature of the war they started and lost.
In the southern town of Gnjilane, Yugoslav forces threw a grenade at ethnic Albanians celebrating the departure of the government troops, wounding eight children and two adults.
Large Yugoslav flags fluttered from tanks in the convoys, and many of the tanks were plastered with pinups of scantily clad women taken from magazines. Some vehicles also were covered with flowers, evidently thrown at them by Serb civilians who stayed behind.
In the center of Pristina, troops hauled desks and other equipment out of the army command headquarters, while nearby a Yugoslav soldier exchanged farewell kisses with a tearful young Serb woman. In Polje, a suburb of Pristina, departing Serbs torched dozens of their own homes, fearing returning ethnic Albanians would claim them.
While the exodus was under way, Kosovo Liberation Army fighters in Pristina went into a Serb home, killed one person and wounded another and then exchanged fire with British paratroopers. The troops captured and disarmed the five KLA men.
Across Kosovo, hundreds of KLA rebels emerged from months of hiding and came out into the open as the Serbs departed. In Prizren, the province’s second-largest city, ethnic Albanian guerrillas moved into a vacant Yugoslav army headquarters, held victory parades and directed traffic in the streets.
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“From today, the city is in KLA hands 100 percent,” Rexha Ekrem, the area’s senior KLA commander, whose nom de guerre is Drini, declared at one news briefing.
German Brig. Gen. Fritz von Korff said his forces had no orders to disarm the KLA but said NATO nonetheless was in control of the city. “Wherever the Yugoslav army has left, the KLA has moved in,” Korff said. “It’s not worth trying to deny that.”
In Pristina, the commander of British forces in the provincial capital urgently appealed to ethnic Albanians to allow Serbian forces to withdraw unhindered as rebels surrounded a building where Yugoslav soldiers were holed up. British forces rushed to the building to defuse the situation and disperse the KLA rebels surrounding the Serbs.
Just outside the city, there was no resolution to the standoff with Russia that has embarrassed NATO. A Russian military convoy carrying food and fuel arrived in Pristina from Bosnia-Herzegovina to resupply some 200 Russian soldiers who took control of the airport Saturday and since then have kept out British and French troops.
In Moscow, Russian officials predicted the impasse and the larger question of a role for Russian peacekeeping forces would be resolved by the end of the week, after Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Defense Secretary William Cohen meet with their Russian counterparts in Helsinki, Finland.
As angry Serbian troops and civilians headed north toward the Serb heartland, the influential Serbian Orthodox Church demanded Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his government resign.
“Every sensible person has to realize that numerous internal problems and . . . the isolation of our country on the international scene cannot be solved or overcome with this kind of leadership,” said the announcement from the church’s highest body, the Holy Synod.
In Kosovo, NATO troops and international human-rights investigators began the work of piecing together evidence of war crimes in the province.
Just outside Vucitrn, 20 miles northwest of Pristina, a group of frightened ethnic Albanians told a Tribune correspondent of one of the largest massacres reported so far. They said 140 people were slaughtered by Serbian paramilitary forces May 2 in the nearby village of Studime, and that 17 others were killed by police in their neighborhood a mile from the Vucitrn town center.
Dutch troops in the southwest Kosovo village of Velika Krusa found the butchered and burned bodies of 22 young men in a house there. Villagers told them the massacre was carried out by paramilitary forces under the command of indicted war crimes suspect Zelko Raznjatovic, better known as Arkan, and said as many as 400 people in the village may have been killed.
Arkan told Britain’s Sky TV in an interview from Belgrade that neither he nor any member of his Tigers militia had been in Kosovo during the war. But Western intelligence sources reported that the Tigers were active in spreading death across Kosovo.
Arkan said that whoever perpetrated the crime in Velika Krusa should be brought before a Yugoslav tribunal and shot immediately.
In Ribari Vogal near Lipljan, 25 fresh graves outside the village mosque hold the victims of an April 18 massacre, allegedly by Yugoslav army troops. Survivors and witnesses said the men and women were gunned down as they fled their homes, some after being unable to give the soldiers money, some after being told to run and then being shot in the back.
At least two other mass graves were found in western Kosovo just off the road leading through Koronica, 6 miles west of Djakovica. The graves hold scores, and perhaps hundreds, of bodies, residents said. Shule Morturi, a refugee from Koronica who returned to the village Tuesday as Italian peacekeeping forces expanded their control of the western sector of Kosovo, said Serbian forces stormed the village April 27, taking away all males over age 16.
Nearby, in Djakovica, a small building housing a pool hall contained the burned bodies of nearly 20 members of a single family who relatives said were killed by Serbian paramilitaries and then dumped in the basement and set on fire to cover up the crime.
These rapidly emerging reports of massacres followed one on Monday at the southern village of Kacanik, where as many as 100 ethnic Albanians were reported to have been killed April 9.
In Pristina, Irish Guards in the NATO force said they carried to a hospital on Tuesday an ethnic Albanian woman in her 30s who jumped from a fourth-floor window Sunday after being raped by Yugoslav troops.
The Irish said neighbors took her in but had been afraid to call Yugoslav police. The woman was suffering from internal bleeding, broken ribs and facial cuts, they said.