KUKES, Albania -- Milaim Bytyqi's tractor was all he had left to him when he and his family fled from Kosovo, and when it was stolen by thieves in Albania it meant more than just the loss of his last bit of property.

"It was the one thing that saved the family -- all 30 of us," he said, surveying the rubble-strewn plot where he had last seen the tractor that had carried them to safety, beyond the reach of the Serbs in Kosovo.

It was Thursday, just before dawn, when a half-dozen men with Kalashnikov assault rifles hooked a chain to his tractor and dragged it down to the road behind a car, firing shots in the air to warn the family away.

"We came here to find a haven," Bytyqi said. "We didn't expect this from our own brothers."

Albanians have been generous in welcoming about 330,000 Kosovar refugees into their country, but thieves have descended on this border city to steal what local con artists have not already chiseled out of them.

Albania is poor by any standard, and a great deal of material wealth is flowing in -- from the tractors, cars and money the refugees were able to bring with them, to the clothes and food sent here for distribution, to the television cameras, satellite phones and ready cash of the foreigners who have come here to witness and help.

In a country such as this with a long tradition of banditry -- and a more recent history of national pyramid schemes that collapsed with $600 million in people's savings -- the temptation to steal has proved too strong to resist.

"Christmas probably comes to a place like Kukes once in a generation, and this is Christmas," said Ray Wilkinson, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. "You see everything from exorbitant rents to outright banditry."

Rampant thievery

Three men grabbed Abide Arife's son at the tractor settlement where they live, outside the organized camps, and demanded 500 German marks, or about $300.

"Look, I have nothing," he replied. "The police in Kosovo already took everything."

The thieves ran when Arife began to scream, but on other nights the family has lost shoes, clothes off a clothesline and two tractor batteries. A tractor tire was slit by bandits after they were unable to make away with the tractor.

The Arife family is already paying about $120 a month to sleep in a farm outbuilding with a concrete floor and plastic sheeting across an open wall -- 22 people in one room. Next to that is another stall with 30 people and next to that one with 17, each renting for $120.

Four men tried to steal the Maxhumi family car one night, only to discover Fahrije Maxhumi, 69, sleeping inside. They tried to drag her out, but she put up so much fuss that her son came and drove them away.

One afternoon, a man grabbed Rexhep Maxhumi's coat, which had about $250 in it. Maxhumi and his brother caught the man and put him in their truck, at which point he threatened to blow them up with a hand grenade. Police took the thief away. They also took the coat and the money.

"I am grateful to Albania for letting us stay here," said Maxhumi. "But it's so dangerous."

Ymredin Tahiri has been able to fend off would-be tractor thieves. "This is all the wealth I have left, and when I go back to Kosovo I will need to sleep in it while I rebuild my house," he said.

But it annoys him to see local aid workers distributing goods to their Albanian friends rather than to Kosovar refugees. When Westerners aren't there to oversee the disbursement, Albanian toughs push their way to the front of distribution lines and help themselves to the donated aid, he said.

'The final indignity'

Wilkinson said pilfering has been a problem, but he doesn't think it's excessive. He said bus drivers taking refugees from the border crossing to Kukes, a half-hour ride, have been shaking down refugees for money, even though the trip is supposed to be free.

"There's a sense of things deteriorating," he said. "It's the final indignity, but I don't think it's epidemic proportions."

At the more organized camps, security has been beefed up after attacks by thieves. In Kukes, three European correspondents were held up at gunpoint.

But Kukes, at least, is in a part of Albania where the police can be said to have some control.

To the north lies the worst bandit country, a mountainous area of clans, feuds and vendettas that has never been tamed.

The centers of this activity are Bajram Curri and its satellite town, Tropoje.

Several television organizations have sent vans with equipment, staff members and bodyguards up to Bajram Curri, only to see the vans stolen at gunpoint while the guards stood around looking defeated. (Days later, the equipment is offered for sale back to the groups.)

A captain in the special forces police said bandits in the region got a tremendous boost when rioters took to the streets after the collapse of the national pyramid schemes in March 1997. The country's arsenals were raided, with most of the guns finding their way to the bandits or the Kosovo Liberation Army.

"The bandits have bigger and more expensive guns than the army does," he said. "Plus, the geography's in their favor."

Suppressed during the Communist era, the ancient laws of vendetta are also fully back in force, he said.

"And you know," he said, "once you've killed one or two men, you're well on the way to a life of crime."

Aid convoy attacked

Mike McDonagh is the Kukes chief of the Irish aid organization Concern Worldwide. It's his job to bring supplies to the unfortunate Kosovar refugees who ended up in Bajram Curri.

Last week he organized a four-truck convoy carrying 18 tons of flour, sugar, high-energy biscuits, soap and blankets.

"We had an idea we might run into problems," he said. So he arranged for an escort of two police cars, each with three or four officers. When asked what kind of men he wanted, he replied: "Those who'll shoot back."

And those he got, as he discovered when the convoy was pinned down by gunfire about 14 miles south of Bajram Curri. The trucks were beside a wall, so they were safe from being hit. McDonagh's "army" charged up the slope toward the bandits, guns blazing.

"Jesus, our guys were gung-ho," he said.

Nonetheless, the fight went on for 40 minutes until an Albanian army truck happened on the scene, together with police reinforcements from Bajram Curri.

No one in the convoy was hurt, and McDonagh dismisses such problems as "a nuisance more than anything else."

There are worse places.

McDonagh said Albania is nothing like Somalia, where he used to travel with 18 bodyguards, including two who sat on the roof of his car at all times. The only real threat to security here, he said, comes not from the locals but from the Serbs.

"The crowd on the other side of those mountains," he said, gesturing toward Yugoslavia, "have the equipment to land a number of shells in here. That to me is a much greater danger than a bunch of bandits on this side."

Pub Date: 5/05/99