Our mission was to get out the Serbs and now they are gone. The men, mostly young fighters who smoked and talked easily with the few journalists there, said they had just come down from a mountain posting near the Albanian border and were anxious to get home to find out how their own families fared. The guerrillas who fought for Kosovo's independence had become a potential barrier to peace in this Yugoslav province, taking over villages, setting up road checkpoints and swaggering around cities heavily armed. They also engaged in several kidnappings and are accused of vengeance killings of Kosovar Serbs. At Patriarchate of Pec monastery, where 300 Serbs have taken refuge, there was no sense the KLA agreement gave comfort.
Today is the same as yesterday.
Ethnic Albanian refugees, meanwhile, continued filtering back into towns where Serb forces had rampaged. The U.N. refugee agency said Monday that 137,000 of the 860,000 who fled were now back. The Associated Press and New York Times contributed to this report. Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on June 22, 1999. All rights reserved.