KUKES, Albania -- A fierce roar split the sky and awakened her from an uneasy sleep.

Before Ymer Qela knew what was happening, she heard an explosion and tried desperately to protect herself, covering her head with her hands and folding herself into the cab of the crowded tractor on which she had been riding since Serbian troops emptied her village six hours before.

Suddenly the tiny 54-year-old woman was swallowed by black smoke. Her hands and head felt like they had been licked by fire.

She looked for her husband, Faze, but he was already dead.

Her 18-year-old daughter, Valentina, had been hit in the head and back by jagged pieces of shrapnel. Her son, Nezdet, 15, was bleeding from angry cuts on his head and face.

"We were just trying to escape Kosovo, and save our lives," Ymer Qela said, still numb and heavily bandaged a day after the bombing of a column of refugees on tractors along the road from Dakovica to Prizren in southwestern Kosovo.

The farmer's wife and two dozen other refugees who were forced from their homes at gunpoint by Serbian officials were interviewed in four different groups yesterday.

The refugees spoke of being bombed Wednesday as they formed a miles-long convoy fleeing Kosovo toward Albania.

But, with a welter of conflicting accounts from NATO, Washington, Serbia and the refugees, it was not clear by whom, Serbs or NATO.

On Wednesday morning, all of them were still living in their homes throughout Kosovo. One group that came across the border Wednesday night described the terror of being rounded up by Serbian authorities and forced to leave their homes in a half-hour early that day, only to come under attack again as they fled on the main road toward Albania.

Weary and empty-eyed refugees in two other groups composed mostly of women who came across the border early yesterday afternoon described being forced off their tractors and used as human shields to protect Serbian police who feared they might be bombed.

Another group from a northern city who were herded on buses and forced to leave Kosovo said, as they entered Albania late in the afternoon, that Serbian police forced them to stand beside the burning remains of the tractors while they were taunted with: "You wanted NATO, and this is what you got."

Puzzling inconsistencies

Although a number of details offered by the refugees confirm the accounts given by NATO officials who have accepted responsibility for bombing, calling it an accident, there are puzzling inconsistencies.

Some refugees said they saw two jets, not one. Some saw only one and said it was dark colored.

Some said the attack occurred near a bridge on the highway somewhere near the town of Krushne e Medje, roughly halfway between Dakovica and Prizren. Others said they were heading toward Dakovica when the bombs fell.

And some said the jet circled over the column at least twice, swooped down low, dropped two bombs and then circled again, dropping two more, the last hitting the lead tractor.

This is not the normal pattern a NATO attack jet would follow in a daylight raid.

But there were also points on which every one of the refugees agreed.

The attack occurred about 1 o'clock in the afternoon. The first bombs dropped did not hit anything. And they all said that while armored vehicles occasionally passed the convoy, no tanks were close enough to the column to have led to confusing the tractors with military vehicles.

The border crossing near Kukes has been the scene of almost unimaginable misery since Yugoslav paramilitary units began driving Albanians out of Kosovo. But few refugees have been so hollowed out by the experience as those, like Qela, who saw their diaspora turn into yet another nightmare, perhaps caused by the same people who were to have been their saviors.

'It was the Serbs'

"NATO tried to save us, so NATO can't bomb us," she said. "It was the Serbs who did it."

People all through the dangerously overcrowded refugee camps around this city were saying the same thing.

Those who were still streaming over the border crossing from Kosovo into Albania yesterday afternoon said over and over that NATO allies could not have dropped bombs on civilians riding on tractors, killing and wounding an as yet undetermined number of refugees.

Even after NATO commanders acknowledged that an American F-16 pilot had mistakenly sent a missile thundering into what he believed was a military truck, there was disbelief.

"We don't believe NATO could bomb us," said Ajmon Ademja, 62, as the tractor-pulled cart she was sitting in started to roll across the border into Albania yesterday. Her face had been ripped by shrapnel fragments and her ears were covered in blood.

"We could see it very big in the sky. NATO planes fly very high. This one was not high at all."

NATO commanders confirmed that the F-16 was flying at 15,000 feet and would not have been visible from the ground, as many refugees said yesterday.

"The stories are all consistent in that people say the column was hit by some kind of bomb or shell," said Kris Torgeson, a press officer with Doctors Without Borders who interviewed refugees as they arrived at a Kukes camp.

The dead included Ymer Qela's husband, a 52-year-old farmer from the village of Batusha, near Dakovica. She did not know exactly what happened to him because shortly after the bombing Serbian authorities ordered the refugees to continue down the road.

She also had to leave her daughter Valentina behind, not knowing whether she was being taken care of.

Three other people on the same crowded tractor and cart died, including the driver, Ferat Bajrami, 35. His cousin, Nifa Bajrami, 40, was not able to talk about his death.

She was too sad, she said, suffering too much from the shrapnel that had torn across her face and head, too confused by the events of a long day that had started at 7 a.m. when Serbian police knocked on the door of her home in the village of Koshura, near Dakovica.

"Everything had been more or less regular until they came and told us we had a half-hour to get ready to leave," she said. She gathered her family and friends from the village, and all 15 squeezed aboard her cousin Ferat's tractor and cart.

The Serbs forced them along a route that took them to the main highway from Dakovica to Prizren. Theirs was the second tractor in line.

Many others joined them, so many that when she turned her head, she could not see to the end of the column.

Blinding explosion

The bomb appears to have hit on or very near to the first tractor. The blinding explosion blasted the second tractor with searing metal and knocked the wheels off the cart it was hauling.

"Small pieces of metal fell on my face," she said. She had a bandage on her forehead and blood still on her blouse. As she spoke she pulled at the taut skin on her face, already lined with obvious suffering and the marks of a pain.

"We left the bodies," she said.

Cime Nuraj, 44, also had trouble talking about the neighbors who had been left behind.

"We walked through the dead bodies and the injured people who had arms and legs blown off," she said. She also saw at least one body that was decapitated.

Nuraj said she had a good view of the bombing because the tractor-pulled cart she rode in was three behind the lead tractor.

"There were about 40 of us on the tractor and cart, all family or neighbors," she said. "We saw only one warplane and it was flying very low.

"I didn't see any markings but some people told us you must leave the tractors, they're bombing civilians. He circled the column of tractors twice before he dropped the first two bombs," she said, recalling they fell in the soft sand at the side of the road.

"Then about two or three minutes later he made another circle around the tractors and dropped two more bombs," Nuraj said. One fell in front of the lead tractor and the other, she said, hit it directly.

"I could see the explosion. There was lots of black smoke but no fire," she said.

For the second time in a day, Nuraj and her husband, Rexher, had to abandon their belongings.

They left behind the damaged tractor and took just one bag filled with clothes -- by now everything in the world they owned.

"It would have been better if they had killed us," she said.

Nhevahire Kajtazi, 22, who arrived at the camp in Kukes late Wednesday night, said her family's tractor was near the head of the column when the attack began.

"Nobody could say anything because we were very, very scared," she said. "But we heard someone say 'The Serbs are bombing us.' "

Kajtazi recalled that bombs fell first on one side of the road, then on the other. "Another bomb fell on an Albanian house," she said.

Finally, one bomb -- she thought it was the third -- hit the lead tractor, which she estimated was about 300 feet away.

"A lot of people were hurt. We saw people who were headless, people without legs, people who couldn't move and who were wounded very badly," she said.

In all, she counted eight people killed, "and many, many who were wounded."

Pub Date: 4/16/99