Central Pristina was still burning yesterday when we arrived a few hours after NATO's bombers departed. In the worst attack on a non-military target since the war started at least 10 civilians were killed and an unknown number wounded. Several square miles of the city centre were devastated, including the Central Post Office, government administration buildings for the Serb province and a 15-storey bank. Streets of shops and restaurants were destroyed, their roofs collapsed, their window glass carpeting the streets.
At least five civilians - a family of Turkish immigrants - died in Kosovo Street, the Serb quarter of small houses tucked away behind the high-rise buildings. A waiter and two post office workers were also killed. More bodies may lie beneath the rubble. The lodgings in Kosovo Street no longer resemble houses. Their embers burned red hot, like a fire in a hearth, with charred wood smoking on the surface. Torn photographs and identity papers were strewn in the rubble.
Two Serb women living on the edge of the bombed area said "terrorists" from the Kosovo Liberation Army continue to fight nightly gun battles with Serb forces in the city. We heard gunshots and mortar fire in the distance.
The city is eerily empty and many of its shops have been looted. An old Albanian man in a black raincoat carried a portable typewriter and a net bag full of clothing. He said he was going to live with his sister in Macedonia. Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, had 200,000 residents before the war started, but now its Albanian sector on the north side of town appears deserted, except for a few small groups and security police. A small group of sick and old people carrying bundles walked along railway tracks. A fuel depot on the edge of the city continued to burn after nightfall, hurling great spheres of orange flames hundreds of feet into the sky.
NATO also hit a Serb Orthodox cemetery, leaving a crater 10 metres deep by 30 wide amid broken headstones and crosses. Serb officials said they had gathered bones in a 40-metre radius around the crater. Pieces of coffin wood could still be seen.
NATO was apparently targeting a Jugo Petrol depot 500 metres away. But the desecration of the cemetery is sure to intensify the Serbs' hatred of NATO. Perhaps a quarter of the thousands of Albanian homes along the road between the border at Raska and Pristina have been burned out, many before the war started. The ghost villages we drove through were hauntingly reminiscent of the Serbs' "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnia in 1992.
But the bombing of central Pristina in the night of Tuesday and Wednesday can only be described as a revenge attack for the expulsion of the Albanians. NATO, it seems, has stooped to President Milosevic's level.
