Most of the pictures from Kosovo capture the sad plight of the hundreds of thousands of Albanian refugees who made it out. But they are the lucky ones, says a man who was in Kosovo just before the war broke out.

"We need to feel sorry for the people left, says Steve Guinta. "They are being murdered, they are being raped, they are being tortured. I can tell you that for a fact because I've seen it."

From early January until leaving in a hurry March 20, Guinta was part of an international monitoring team working for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Operating under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, OSCE's 2,200-member force was there to report any violations of the treaties that were in place.

Guinta, who lives in Lillington, N.C., is the son of the Rev. Frank and Peggy Guinta of Cape Girardeau. He lived in Cape Girardeau from 1978 to 1980 before joining the U.S. Army and beginning a career in special operations and military intelligence. He retired from the Army in 1997 as a sergeant.

Giunta now works for Dyncorp Aerospace Limited, a defense contractor that provides personnel and expertise to the U.S. government.

The section of Kosovo where he was located, the town of Srbice, was 90 percent Albanian. Serbs had not come into the area in more than a year, and the rebel KLA was not active, he said.

"They were doing nothing to provoke any kind of retribution that would have caused anyone to come into the area."

When the Serbs began moving in, their strategy was to shell around a village to drive everyone out, then go in and loot and kill anyone who remained behind, Guinta said. "They either burned the village or finished shelling until it was uninhabitable."

The Serbs illegally brought in tanks, and the monitoring force soon found itself threatened.

"The situation had gotten very bad," Guinta says. "The Serbs had pulled several people -- our people -- from vehicles and had beaten them. We had gotten death threats. None of us thought we were going to make it out of Yugoslavia when they decided to pull us out."

But they did, in a convoy on the main highway to Macedonia. The Serb troops made obscene gestures to them or ignored them but didn't try to stop them from leaving.

"No one could believe we got out that easily," Guinta says. "But as soon as we left, we knew the people still there were in for it."

Srbice was leveled, and anyone who'd had contact with the OSCE force was killed, he said.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is almost worshipped by the Serbs, Guinta says. "He has been compared to Hitler as far as stirring national fervor. He knows how to massage the people into doing what he wants them to do."

The hostility between Serbs and Albanians is real and felt on both sides, he says, "but I believe the person who's stirring it up is Milosevic."

He is not above bombing civilians and blaming it on the enemy, Guinta said. "We know he did that while we were on the ground. We know he did that a lot."

Guinta expects to return to Kosovo once some kind of peace agreement is in place. A peacekeeping force will be imperative, and NATO has estimated it will take three years for things to settle down and elections to be held.

Those who were part of the peacekeeping force concluded there are three sides to the conflict.

"Between the Serb military and the KLA, we couldn't decide which were the good guys," Guinta says. "The civilians were the good guys. They were the people we were there to help. They were the ones that no matter what were suffering."