By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 5, 1998; Page A14

BANJA, Yugoslavia, Oct. 4 — The decision to return home today caused considerable anguish for Arben Samadraxha and his family. After widespread shelling, looting and burning by Serbian troops here in the past month, the main structures in their family compound are gutted stone skeletons. Gunfire still crackles intermittently nearby, and Serbian armored vehicles still roar past on a highway several blocks away.

But after spending four weeks in a field and two weeks in a vacant house without windows, doors or a roof -- a period in which the area was drenched by heavy rains -- Arben and his 27 relatives were cold and in declining health. He and his sister Besa said they do not feel safe here, but with winter looming they felt they had no choice but to come home.

With temperatures dropping and violence here abating under the threat of imminent NATO airstrikes against government targets, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians displaced by six months of fighting in Kosovo also face a hard choice about whether to try to return to their villages.

Military offensives by government forces have rendered tens of thousands of civilian dwellings uninhabitable without direct provocation, a factor that will create enormous problems in any massive resettlement, Western officials say.

But even if their houses are reparable or intact, ethnic Albanians say almost universally that they feel uncomfortable about the prospect of returning to sleep near continued deployments of Serbian security forces that they hold responsible for atrocities against ethnic Albanians and for looting and torching their houses.

One reason is that although the U.N. Security Council has called for a withdrawal of Serbian security forces from Kosovo and an immediate end to civilian repression, the Belgrade government has adopted a narrow interpretation of its obligations, Western diplomats here said. It has ordered more than two-thirds of the estimated 15,000 army troops confined to their barracks or withdrawn from the province, but it has not substantially reduced an estimated 12,000 additional Interior Ministry troops commonly referred to here as police.

On a four-hour drive today through central Kosovo, for example, reporters saw more than a dozen of the ministry's armored personnel carriers at highway checkpoints or troop headquarters. Serbian officers also remained perched in the windows of charred and looted private homes on key roads and at one site were busily chopping wood for the winter.

"We were thinking of going back, but we don't dare," said Xhylie Buzhala, 41, a mother of seven who lived in Banja until fighting broke out here several months ago between government troops and members of an ethnic Albanian guerrilla group known as the Kosovo Liberation Army. The guerrillas are fighting for Kosovo's independence from Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia, because they have chafed at longstanding Serbian control of the levers of power in Kosovo.

Buzhala and her family now live in the back of a large truck trailer parked in a small field in the village of Pagarusha, in central Kosovo, where they sleep on a pile of carpets along with several dozen other ethnic Albanians uprooted from their houses in Banja.

"I am afraid," she said, explaining that as long as police continue to patrol nearby highways "we can't go back." She has heard that shelling occurred near Banja in the past few days and says she will reconsider her decision to stay away only if "someone . . . guarantees our safety and security." After enduring months of punishing Serbian attacks, the guerrillas are not capable of providing that guarantee, she and Zejnie, a 40-year-old relative, agree. "We have to wait for the help from outside," Zejnie said.

Arben Samadraxha, 19, says he knows that Western nations have been threatening airstrikes to end Serbian attacks on ethnic Albanian civilians but finds little reassurance in such rhetoric. Asked to explain, he said that a month ago, after the town had been shot up in an initial Serbian offensive, he said he had a chance meeting in the parking lot of the town pool with Christopher Hill, the top U.S. envoy for Kosovo, and heard him convey a pledge by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic that no further harm would come to Banja.

Later that day, however, the vacant house of a Serbian family in Banja was torched, Samadraxha and his relatives said. They claim the act was performed by Serbian provocateurs rather than ethnic Albanians, but in any event, the government reacted furiously and initiated a second major offensive four days later in which their house was torched and 3,000 books on Kosovo's history collected by Samadraxha's father -- a local history teacher -- were destroyed.

Tensions in the area remain high. Although one Serbian officer said he had been told in recent orders not to fire on ethnic Albanians except in self-defense, a half-dozen ethnic Albanians said that a Serbian armored personnel carrier had fired on their houses Saturday evening. The action might have been in retaliation for the death of a Serbian officer earlier in the day in an explosion of a land mine evidently planted by the Kosovo Liberation Army.

"They are saying, one more week, one more week," Samadraxha said dismissively of NATO's recent threats. "These events did not have any impact on my decision to return." His sister Besa charged that the NATO allies "are creating the illusions to us."

In the city of Orahovac, southwest of Banja, as much as one-half of the 1997 population of 50,000 people has returned in the wake of five days of fierce fighting between Serbian troops and ethnic Albanians in July. But residents interviewed there today and last month said that many of those who returned did so under blunt government threats of punishment if they did not.

Meanwhile, in an effort to head off possible NATO airstrikes, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev met today in Belgrade with Milosevic. No details of their discussions were released.