By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 4, 1998; Page A29

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Oct. 3—With Western pressures growing for a coercive NATO military strike, the Yugoslav government has ordered scores of tanks and other heavy armor in the embattled province of Kosovo to return to their garrisons. It also placed thousands of security troops on leave for at least two weeks, according to government officials and Western diplomatic observers here.

Although smoking or burning houses were visible today in two areas west and southwest of Pristina, the provincial capital, the government's three large military offensives of the past two weeks were said by all sides to have ended. Some of the Interior Ministry troops involved in those actions are now enjoying a holiday in the capital or in Kosovo's second- and third-largest cities, Pec and Prizren, Western officials said.

Diplomats reported they have seen no evidence that any of the troops are being withdrawn from Kosovo to other areas in Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia, despite government claims that a withdrawal has been underway for three days. They also said that a relatively small number of government tanks and artillery remain deployed in the field, near the site of recent heavy fighting, and that some small arms fire is still being exchanged.

"In the last three days, we have not observed any aggressive Serb acts," said one diplomatic official here, who added that the Belgrade government appears to be "bending over backwards not to provide a pretext for NATO intervention."

But diplomats disagreed about the government's effort to rein in its forces, with some describing it as a likely prelude to full compliance with the U.N. Security Council's demand to end the offensive and others noting that the moves could be reversed easily.

"No one thinks [the government forces] are pulling out of Kosovo," said an official with access to daily reports on activities in the province. The official cautioned that a large group of special security forces had gathered without explanation between the towns of Glogovac and Srbica to the west of the capital.

In a Sept. 23 resolution and a statement on Thursday, the Security Council demanded not only an immediate cessation of hostilities between the Serbian-led government forces and members of an ethnic Albanian insurgent group, but also the start of a credible political dialogue between Serbians and ethnic Albanians, an end to attacks on ethnic Albanian civilians, and the withdrawal of special Serbian military units "used for civilian repression."

Although the language of the resolutions did not define "withdrawal," White House spokesman Michael McCurry said on Thursday that if Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic wanted to avoid a NATO airstrike, he had to "act very quickly to remove the security forces that had been deployed in Kosovo, who could very likely be responsible for some of the atrocities that have been committed there."

Several diplomats here said they believed the Sept. 23 U.N. resolution likely had the opposite effect of what was intended, however, because in subsequent days the government intensified its efforts to eradicate remaining strongholds of the ethnic Albanian guerrillas, who belong to the Kosovo Liberation Army and have demanded Kosovo's independence from Serbia.

Ethnic Albanians make up 90 percent of the province's population, and they have been chafing under Serbian political control. The government's effort to squelch their rebellion has caused more than 700 deaths and displaced more than 250,000 people in the past six months.

The government responded to the U.N. warning by launching major offensives in three areas: in the Drenica region, in the Cicavica Mountains northwest of Pristina and between the cities of Urosevac and Suva Reka in the southeast. Fighting was particularly fierce in the mountains, where a government spokesman said more than 100 Serbian troops were killed and 300 ethnic Albanian fighters were detained.

Near the town of Likovac in Drenica, five members of a Serbian special forces unit and an ethnic Albanian physician were killed by Chinese-made antitank mines apparently smuggled into Kosovo from Albania.

Under pressure to finish the campaigns quickly because of NATO pressure, the imminent release of thousands of draftees and the prospect of winter, the Serbians brought in several paramilitary units notorious for their brutality.

These units "increased the size and amount of artillery" in Kosovo, moving from a 60mm to 155mm cannon that created immense craters, said a diplomat with military training.

Diplomats were largely excluded from combat areas, but burning houses could be seen from Pristina through binoculars. "They had their eye on the clock . . . [and allowed] more wayward, casual killing," a Western official said, leading to the discovery last week of two large-scale executions in the towns of Gornje Obrinje and Golubovac. More than a dozen women, children and elderly people were killed as well as possible members of the Kosovo Liberation Army in these two attacks; in another attack, at least four men were killed in a convoy of fleeing villagers near Vranic.

When the Security Council responded with a threatening new statement, the Serbian forces broke off their attack near Suva Reka before it was finished, said government spokesman Radovan Urosevac. He denied that government forces had committed the atrocities but confirmed that troops had widely ignored an Interior Ministry order not to torch the homes of ethnic Albanians. He said the fires were set in anger after the rebels killed some soldiers.

Since Thursday, the day of the U.N. statement, a large number of Serbian forces -- one official claimed it was as many as two-thirds of the 15,000 Yugoslav Army troops in Kosovo -- have left the field and returned their equipment to large depots at the edge of Pristina, near the southern city of Djakovica, and at a special forces base outside the western village of Istok, according to several diplomatic officials.

At a largely deserted special forces base at Ajvalija, near Pristina, the few soldiers seen milling around this afternoon said most of their colleagues had been granted at least two weeks of leave beginning on Thursday. "These are basically very tired people," said a sergeant, 36, who said his nickname was "Blackie." He added: "They have conducted what they were asked to do, and now they are finished."

A helicopter flight engineer named Srboljub said that "whenever there is a need, we will regroup immediately. Now, there is no need. . . . [But] we don't think that their fight is over."

A diplomat confirmed that several geographic "pockets" in Kosovo are still loosely controlled by hard-core Kosovo Liberation Army fighters, "who still have a lot of cards to play. We will see more ideologically and military extreme" groups attacking the Serbs in the future.