VRANIC, Yugoslavia -- Barefoot but resolved, Ruzhdi Muqa tosses one boulder after another into what used to be the basement of his house.

The floors are caved in and a few walls stand, stark reminders of a three-story terraced home where weddings were held, babies were born and an extended family of 20 scratched out a life in remote mountains on rocky land.

"It's gone," Muqa says wearily as he cleans away the rubble that was his home -- destroyed by Serbian guns.

Now, Muqa is among the nearly 300,000 people devastated by the Kosovo crisis, driven from his home by a Serbian security offensive designed to root out a rebel army.

The 38-year-old ethnic Albanian is a refugee in his own land, bunking with neighbors, waiting for winter, fearful about the future.

While diplomats talk of fashioning agreements and Western politicians deliver daily threats of using NATO warplanes to end the Serbian onslaught, people like Muqa are concerned about how they'll stay warm, what they'll eat.

"I have no money," he says. "How will I rebuild?"

Muqa's question haunts this place. So much has been destroyed in the fighting in the Yugoslav province -- the historic heartland of Serbian nationalism, but where Albanians outnumber Serbs nine to one.

Going after the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, Serbian security forces killed hundreds and ravaged more than 400 villages, creating a trail of misery for civilians, "internally displaced persons" in diplomatic parlance.

With winter approaching, aid workers are saying that Kosovo faces a potential humanitarian disaster.

The nightmare scenario is that a quarter of the refugee population who are too afraid to return to their villages will remain in the woods, where they will die of exposure and starvation.

That scenario helps to drive the frantic negotiating process, as U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke engages in last-ditch talks with his old Balkan adversary, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

If the West fails to reduce suffering here, in Europe, at the end of the century, where can it possibly succeed in the next?

Not ready for winter

"People haven't got anything prepared for the winter," says James Weatherill, who helps lead the aid team in Kosovo for Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services, one of more than 30 international agencies trying to care for the needy.

But in the past week, most of the agencies have pulled out of Kosovo, as the war of words heats up to possible NATO bombardment.

Weatherill says that refugees who endured a summer outdoors face far worse in the winter. Latrines overflow or become unusable. The risk of disease rises.

And there is the ever-present search for food and the onset of what could be a harsh winter of cold and snow. It's not just men out in the countryside. There are women. There are tens of thousands of children, most under 15.

"A high percentage of fields haven't been harvested," Weatherill says. "Food stocks are low. Monetary resources have been spent to take care of these people.

"And these people can't buy milk, flour, sugar and oil, which are all in short supply or are available for a high price on the black market."

"All of these things together have created a very bad situation," he adds. "Even with the best scenario -- that forces withdraw, that people return to their villages or homes -- it's still going to be a very, very difficult situation."

The people have survived so much already.

Unexpected fighting

Muqa never thought the fighting would come to his village. He has lived here for 30 years in a home that his father built. While the Serbian security forces cut a path of destruction through rural Kosovo, Muqa and his neighbors had avoided it.

But on the morning of Sept. 27, he and his family awoke to the rolling thunder of artillery. They packed what meager possessions they could carry and fled into the mountains.

"We didn't know where the shelling was coming from," he says. "We just ran."

They were among the lucky ones. Serbian shells were launched at one convoy of refugees containing 250 vehicles and tractors.

Some were killed in what outside observers claimed was one of three massacres as Serbian forces engaged in a mop-up operation against remnants of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Survivors said others were robbed.

Muqa and his family returned to Vranic three days later to find their house destroyed, their tractor torched. Hundreds of others had returned with them to the area that once housed 15,000.

They said the men were rounded up by Serbian police who were still around the village. They were taken to Prizren, where they said they were harshly questioned and beaten by police. The women stayed behind in a school.

The men are angry. They speak of the sort of medieval atrocities that have come to characterize wars in the Balkans.

"They cut off their noses," one man says. "Their eyes were out."

According to Human Rights Watch, four men were killed and hundreds of men were detained and abused.

One man takes a group of visiting journalists aside and holds a plastic bag that contains the remains of a man's genitals.

Along a rutted dirt road that winds into the mountains, most of the houses are destroyed or burned. A car lies flattened, apparently crushed by a tank.

The men say the Serbian police have warned them to turn in any weapons. But they claim they have none. And they fear reprisals.

"We want some help," Muqa says. "We want some protection."

The village holds out hope that NATO will strike and bring the crisis to an end.

"I'm not a politician," Muqa says. "They said they wouldn't allow another Bosnia. But they are allowing it. What can I say? They see what is happening."

More immediate concerns

But Muqa has more immediate problems. He wants to survive the winter. He is living on the food provided by aid convoys and friends. He is sharing space with other families. He is trying to figure out how he can rebuild his home and his life.

"We have nowhere to go," he says. "The country is full of refugees."

Yet Muqa and his neighbors are only the latest arrivals to this condition. Tens of thousands of others have not returned home.

The camp that has become the symbol of Kosovo's refugee problem is at a place called Kisna Reka. Above waves of burned-out homes and shattered farms, across a stream and up a two-mile, one-lane rutted dirt road, is a valley where 2,000 people cling to the hillside in makeshift tents covered with giant plastic sheets.

For some six months, the refugees have been pouring into this area. They now have stoves, a well and water pumps. Babies have been born here. The cries of hungry children fill the air.

Dozens of children play in the mud, some wearing rags, others dressed in worn shirts, muddy jeans and old shoes.

And along a ridge, there is a sign that few here expect to leave anytime soon.

There, men have cobbled together tree branches and erected the skeleton of a schoolhouse. All that is needed are a plastic roof, books, chairs, pens and paper.

A place to teach

"The children haven't been to school in months," says Hasan Nichori, a former high school teacher with soft hands and receding hair, who has fled the military onslaught, living in three towns before arriving here six weeks ago. He misses his books.

"Kids are scared," he says. "They're scared of what they have seen and what they have heard."

So Nichori wants to create this school, with his friend and fellow teacher, Florim Gara. For now, though, the men and their families are trying to live in this new community of the brutally dispossessed.

Nichori shares a tent with his mother, his three sons and his wife, who is expecting their fourth child early next year. The mats they sit on by day are the ones they sleep on at night.

"This is the worst that can happen," says Nichori's wife, Fatima, who wears her hair in a bun, offers visitors coffee and fastidiously cleans the tent, making sure the mud and grime are not tracked indoors.

The family has lost everything but the clothing on their backs. They cook their meals on a donated stove, eat donated food, and hope they will receive donated clothing to get through the winter.

They are settled into their new home.

"We're trying to get used to this way of living," Nichori says. "Now, it is raining. Next month it will begin to snow. What will we do?"

Pub Date: 10/11/98