By Christine Spolar
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 30, 1998; Page A13

BAJRAM CURRI, Albania, May 29—Serbian forces have escalated their attacks on ethnic Albanian villages near Kosovo's mountainous border with Albania, burning and shelling homes and sending refugees fleeing, international observers and refugees crossing the frontier said today.

From vantage points here on the Albanian side of the remote, rugged border, at least three villages in Kosovo's strategic Morina Valley -- a suspected transit point for weapons being smuggled from Albania to separatist rebels in Kosovo -- were under assault.

Two of the villages -- Smotica and Morina -- have been obscured by smoke since Thursday while the third, Ponosevac, came under fire today. Explosions could be heard at regular intervals this afternoon as artillery fire rattled across the valley. The whistle of falling mortar shells had leathery-faced local shepherds, unnerved by the noise, looking up to the sky.

A delegation of Kosovo Albanians who met with President Clinton at the White House today said the attacks on villages near the border were part of an effort by the Serbs to carve out a strategic zone arching from the Drenica Valley in western Kosovo southward along the Albanian border.

"It is a scorched-earth policy," Veton Suroi, an adviser to Kosovo's ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova, told Washington Post editors and reporters. "Our warning to the president was, 'This is the first stage of war.' "

At least 200 people have died in Kosovo since late February, when Serbian army and special police forces launched a crackdown against ethnic Albanian guerrillas. Albanians outnumber Serbs 9-to-1 in Kosovo, an independence-minded province of Serbia, the larger of the two republics in what remains of Yugoslavia.

Officials from international organizations based in this Albanian town 12 miles from the border said the attacks on the Morina Valley began Saturday. They reported witnessing hours of shelling and artillery fire from tanks and armored vehicles that rolled over main, paved roads in Kosovo.

Black and white smoke billowed from the area today as the assault continued. It was uncertain whether the Serbs met any resistance.

Hasan Mahiri, 20, said he fled his village of Sara Breg in Kosovo on Thursday. He reached the Albanian town of Tropoje this morning, sunburned, caked in mud to his knees and hungry. He said he had been walking for 22 hours, crossing streams and hillsides to find the first town on the Albanian side of the border.

"My first cousin, my uncle and his two sons were killed three days ago," he said, biting hungrily into a jam-filled bun. "No one was killed in the group of people I was with -- we all came through the mountain okay."

Mahiri, whose account could not be confirmed, estimated that 300 people fled his village. It appeared, however, that only a handful of men had turned up in Tropoje. Mahiri said he believed that the others had found safety in the hills. His mother and sister escaped earlier to another town in Kosovo, he said.

Four other men -- 20 or 21 years old, hungry and covered in mud -- appeared in the town about the same time as Mahiri. One of them, Agron Ukhaxhaj, said he left Sara Breg when "cannon fire" showered the village. "My house caught on fire -- that's when I headed out," he said. His father and mother ran at the same time, he said, but he did not know where they were.

"In the panic, we split," Ukhaxhaj said. He said he believed only a few men stayed behind to guard homes in the village.

None of the men said he planned to stay long in Albania. "We'll only be here for a while," said one who would not identify himself. "Then we'll go back."

Andrew Harper, an official for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said he found 15 ethnic Albanians -- all women and children -- hiding in a house today in the remote Padresh region of Albania. The people had been hiding in Kosovo for more than two months and fled Thursday to Albania as the Serbs intensified their attacks, he said.

The refugees said many people were killed and their houses were destroyed, Harper said. One woman clutched a piece of mortar shell that she said fell near her home. Another woman fretted over a baby who appeared to be in a coma, Harper said. International aid officials were attempting to get the child medical help.

One woman said, "There's a real war going on there, and we don't know what to do. What is Europe doing?" Harper recounted.

Here in Bajram Curri, the Albanian town closest to the fighting, military officials from Albania and Western Europe have been arriving daily to assess the conflict across the border. The officials say they are concerned about stemming the flow of weapons from Albania to the Kosovo Liberation Army -- the province's guerrilla group -- through the rocky, tangled, muddy passes that crisscross the mountains along the border.

Brig. Gen. Wilhelm Figl, a defense attache for Austria, spent two days here, combing the mountainsides in a four-wheel drive vehicle. Figl, who has been responsible for Albania for six years, said the Albanian "military is too weak" to monitor borders or control traffic between the two countries. "They have no materiel, less resources," Figl said. "The situation here can become a real European problem.

"All the signs are that the Serbs are going on with ethnic cleansing in the Kosovo area," Figl said. "It's the way [the Serbs] solve their problems -- in Croatia, in Bosnia and now in Kosovo."

Albanian officials deny the possibility that smugglers ferrying arms or other contraband are passing into Kosovo through the main paths near Morina, a Kosovo border town near here. But at least one shepherd, a 19-year-old man who lives on a hillside near the village of Padresh, said men from Kosovo travel back and forth through a more remote pass. "They come in the night," he said.

Indeed, a small group of men leaving Tropoje early this morning were startled to see a four-wheel-drive vehicle, carrying foreign visitors, come their way. The three men were leading two donkeys and a horse up a barely discernible path. The horse had two automatic rifles strapped to its side. One donkey had what appeared to be two machine guns tied to its belly; another carried ammunition.

There are few border guards on the Albanian side of the frontier. Few residents of this deeply impoverished area have radios, cars or even the proper boots for the job.

"There is no evidence that people from this side are going over to the other side. But we have to accept that we aren't capable of controlling the border and knowing who is coming from that side to here, and back again," said Sabit Brokaj, an Albanian military adviser. "But it exists in very small groups, more or less like a guerrilla activity."