U.S. Peacekeepers’ Tough Stance Mars Image in Kosovo

GJYLEKAR, Yugoslavia —  First came the groan of armored vehicles and the roar of combat helicopters descending from the night sky. Before Xhejlane Shabiu was fully awake, dozens of battle-ready troops had burst into her house, swearing and gesturing with their weapons for her startled family to line up against the wall.

“They just kept screaming at us, and the children began crying,” the 36-year-old Kosovo Albanian recalls of the incident in May, when she was four months pregnant. “We were all so terrified, and then I felt the pain begin.”

A few hours later, amid the rubble of smashed closet doors and ransacked cupboards, she miscarried--an unrecorded casualty of a massive raid by U.S. soldiers trained for high-intensity warfare, not mediating the petty squabbles that are their daily fare as peacekeepers in troubled Kosovo.

The 6,500 U.S. troops assigned to the international force in the separatist province of Serbia are, for the most part, revered by the ethnic Albanians who were rescued from Serbian expulsions and massacres by last year’s NATO bombardment. Serbs, now a frightened minority huddled behind the peacekeepers’ barricades, also see the U.S. forces as their saviors.

But incidents such as the still-unexplained raid on the Shabiu family and a spate of assaults on Albanians in nearby Vitina earlier this year have tarnished the U.S. troops’ heroic image and cast them as Rambo-like cowboys itching to flaunt their awesome power.

“Their behavior was as bad as the Serbs’,” says Sharif Shabiu, another of the extended family nestled in a seven-home hillside enclave that has suffered more than its share in the seemingly irreconcilable conflict in Kosovo between ethnic Albanians and Serbs. Four Shabiu children were killed a year ago by a land mine that the family suspects was planted by Serbian neighbors behind the backs of the U.S. peacekeepers.

The bloody give and get of ethnic violence has persisted despite the intimidating presence of the peacekeepers--42,000 troops from 39 countries. And the bombings, kidnappings and killings committed under cover of darkness are a source of frustration for troops whose mission is to keep a peace only they seem to want.

Some soldiers have been pushed over the edge.

A Pentagon report last week detailed beatings, abductions and even a killing committed by U.S. troops of the 82nd Airborne Division. The most egregious abuses ceased when this small group of soldiers was rotated out by February, but incidents of questionable force persist, including the raid on Shabiu’s house.

The Army’s internal investigation concluded that inadequate training for the specifics of peacekeeping contributed to the breakdowns. But U.S. officers here argue that full-combat readiness for troops sent to join the international force, known as KFOR, is still essential despite the tendency of their ambulatory arsenals to intimidate villagers.

“To train for this kind of deployment, you really have to prepare soldiers for the high end of risks that might be expected,” says Lt. Col. Jefforey A. Smith, commander of the 2nd Battalion of the 327th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which is now patrolling the Vitina region. He also points out that “you can’t lose sight of the fact we have a large and forceful army, the Serbian army, within [nine miles] of us.”

Smith acknowledges that Albanians may regard the demeanor and dress of the troops as aggressive but says: “Our actions speak louder than what we look like. It’s the way we deal with people and interact with them, not what we wear.”

Rank-and-file GIs such as Pvt. David Ni of Los Angeles tend to agree that the need for combat readiness outweighs the negatives of scaring civilians.

“If the worst happens, we’re ready for it,” Ni says. “It’s mostly peaceful here, but there are tendencies for things to get ugly.”

Sgt. John Daugherty of Nashville says the battalion, based at Ft. Bragg, N.C., is well trained but would benefit from better preparation for daily incidents occasioned by everything from bottles hurled over a neighbor’s fence to livestock straying over ethnic borders.

“We’re suited for this mission, but more negotiations training would help out a lot,” he says. “Most people here are big talkers, and it would be more effective to negotiate with them than to be forceful. Our training for war conditions focuses on doing deeds, not talking. Ninety percent of what we train for is combat.”

Pentagon strategists have been considering a separate peacekeeping service within the Army, to train soldiers for the more mundane tasks of dissuading neighbor from harassing neighbor and to prevent the “difficulties in tempering their combat mentality” that led the renegade unit in Vitina to attack and mistreat civilians. One KFOR soldier, Army Staff Sgt. Frank J. Ronghi, from a different battalion also based at Ft. Bragg, is serving a life term at Ft. Leavenworth for the murder of an 11-year-old ethnic Albanian girl from Vitina, and official reprimands have been recommended for eight other soldiers.

Vitina, the seat of the volatile region that includes Gjylekar, looks more like a town at war than one recovering from a conflict that ended more than a year ago. Armored personnel carriers and their helmeted and flak-jacketed troops are posted at every key intersection and stand 24-hour watch over Serbian enclaves that make up less than a third of the population. It’s easy to tell the dwellings that once housed Serbs in the Albanian sectors: They’re blasted to ruins.

Frustration over what were then nightly acts of revenge against the Serbian minority led some GIs to turn on the Albanian civilians.

The Army report on abuses released last week accused troops of violating the rights of local citizens by beating men, groping women during security checks and showing favoritism toward the Serbs they saw as victims.

Lulzim Ukshimi was drinking coffee with friends at Sam’s Pizzeria one night in December when KFOR troops burst in and demanded identification papers and information on the bombing of a Serbian bar a few minutes earlier. When they got to Ukshimi, they asked if he had been behind the explosion.

“I said, ‘How could I have bombed a house while I’m sitting here drinking coffee?’ ” Ukshimi recalls. “And this soldier just grabbed me by the neck and started beating me.”

The cafe was cleared of other patrons, and then a U.S. officer turned out the lights and told another soldier to “rough him up,” both Ukshimi and the army records say. He was punched and bashed in the head with the butt of a rifle, and threatened with a knife.

“It’s very hard for me to speak against American soldiers, but what this group did to us was wrong,” says Ilir Maliqi, a former fighter with the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army who now runs Sam’s Pizzeria, a smoky cafe frequented by others from the disbanded force. “It’s better now that this group is gone, but there are still problems. KFOR is still protecting the criminals they fought against last year.”

Like many Albanians, Maliqi interprets KFOR’s guarding of Serbian enclaves and escorting of civilians through Albanian settlements as reflecting a bias toward the Albanians’ erstwhile oppressors.

To them, it’s a particularly cruel rebuke: In the decade preceding last year’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign, after Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic stripped Kosovo of its autonomy and deployed his henchmen to take over security and political functions here, Albanians who refused to knuckle under were often beaten, jailed and drafted for the Yugoslav army’s aggressions elsewhere.

“Serbs broke two of my ribs just a year ago,” the cafe owner relates, patting both sides of his chest to show where he was beaten when Vitina was overrun by Milosevic’s forces. “Does anyone think I can forget about this so soon?”

Other ethnic Albanians lament the KFOR-imposed curfew that begins as early as 8 p.m. in some towns, impinging on business as well as relaxation.

The physical assaults have left social as well as physical scars.

“Ever since the killing [of the 11-year-old girl], I’ve forbidden my daughters to even say hello to the American soldiers,” says Ajsha Dekteshi, a history teacher with three girls younger than 12.

Still, the grievances are overshadowed by the now-taken-for-granted security maintained by KFOR and the boost that stability has given the local economy.

Confident about their future for the first time in years, Albanians are busy restoring bombed houses and rebuilding roads with funds from the European Union.

And they’re benefiting from the ubiquitous babble of English. Much as a generation of Germans absorbed American culture among the GIs who occupied the Nazi ruins after World War II, so do Kosovo kids hang around the U.S. troops guarding their neighborhoods, as keen on conversation or a soldier’s autograph as for a chewing-gum handout.

Speaking of the Army report detailing criminal abuses, Lt. Col. Seth Braverman, a spokesman for Camp Bondsteel, the headquarters for U.S. troops in Kosovo, says he regrets that “it really does take the focus off the tremendous amount of good being done here.”

But KFOR officers concede that the agonizingly slow progress in bringing Serbs and Albanians together is one of the mission’s biggest frustrations and presents dangers they are now more alert for in the wake of their predecessors’ excesses.