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	Horror by design: The ravaging of Kosovo.

Although the purge of more than one million ethnic Albanians from Kosovo since late March seemed to be a random kaleidoscope of violence, a reconstruction of the early days of the operation shows that it was meticulously organized from the outset.

Western officials say the plans were drawn up by the Yugoslav Army and the Interior Ministry of the Serbian Republic, then carried out by a variety of Serbian forces acting under a single command.

It seems evident now that the operation had at least two major goals: crushing the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army and permanently changing the ethnic balance of Kosovo by driving out as many Albanians as possible.

By early May, the State Department says, 90 percent of all ethnic Albanians in Kosovo had been expelled from their homes; 900,000 were driven across the province's borders and 500,000 more were displaced inside Kosovo. An additional 4,600 were reported killed -- a number that is likely to increase as time goes on and more is known.

By expelling ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, Serbian forces aimed to restrict the guerrillas' base of support and cover. By controlling the borders and the devastated corridors along the major highways, the Serbs planned to isolate and then eradicate the Kosovo Liberation Army in the forests and mountains.

The violent emptying of the Djakovica region is an example of such an operation. Hours after the first NATO bombs fell, special police, paramilitary officers and local police used a focused fury of violence and fear to clear the area of ethnic Albanians. In just seven days -- March 30 to April 5 -- some 51,880 people were herded on foot from Djakovica to a tiny remote border crossing in the mountains, according to records of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

But the Serbs did not limit their attention to suspected KLA strongholds. Another opening assault of the drive to empty Kosovo, this one in the troubled province's capital city of Pristina, illustrates another apparent aim of the Serb offensive: depopulation.

By expelling ethnic Albanians from Pristina and other large cities, Serb officials were seeking to defuse a potential demographic time bomb. At the beginning of the Serb offensives, ethnic Albanians accounted for 90 percent of Kosovo's population. Moreover, the Albanian population was growing at a far faster rate than the Serb population.

Still, for all the signs of logic and planning behind the purge, many of the individual episodes -- including the systematic gunning down of women and children -- appears inexplicable in military terms, except perhaps as an indication of the unpredictability and savagery that drove the exodus.

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