- Title: MACEDONIA: KOSOVO REFUGEE CRISIS.
- Date: 9th April 1999
- Summary: BLACE CAMP, MACEDONIA AND KORCE, ALBANIA (APRIL 8, 1999) (REUTERS - ACCESS ALL) BLACE CAMP, MACEDONIA 1. SV: NIGHT SHOTS - QUEUE FOR FOOD 0.04 2. GV/MV/CU: PEOPLE WITH BREAD/ PEOPLE GETTING SOUP/ MORE OF QUEUE/ DRINKING (5 SHOTS) 0.27 3. MV: BOYS MAKING THEIR OWN COFFEE 0.44 4. GV/PAN: RED CROSS DRIVE THROUGH CAMP 0.53 KORCE, A
- Embargoed: 24th April 1999 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: KORCE, ALBANIA AND BLACE CAMP, MACEDONIA
- Country: Macedonia
- Reuters ID: LVA8LFYAH94IIU3976P2UE2GCHXH
- Story Text: Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees from
Kosovo faced terror and despair on Thursday in a widening
humanitaran crisis engulfing the Balkans.
NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana said Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic could use refugees in Kosovo as
human shields against increasingly successful air strikes on
Serb forces.
In London, Britain's international aid minister Clare
Short said Serb forces were rounding up refugees queueing to
leave the country and returning them by force.
Around the region, refugees endured hunger, squalor and
the fear of never seeing missing loved ones again.
"I have a five-month-old baby in the hospital.I need my
husband," wailed 26 year-old refugee Mevljude at the Radusa
refugee camp in northern Macedonia."We were separated at
Blace.I know he is here.I must find him."
In the nearby Stenkovec camp, over 20,000 bedraggled
refugees queued for seven hours for breakfast as NATO
officials warned that food would run out in less than 24 hours
unless aid organisations delivered fresh supplies urgently.
The United Nations refugee agency said it could account
for 55,000 refugees hurriedly evacuated from the Macedonian
border but expressed concern about the fate of several
thousand more.
But Macedonia said the 84,000 ethnic Albanians who had
passed through the Blace no man's land zone since March had
all been accounted for, and dismissed international
complaints.
At a NATO news briefing in Brussels, spokesman Jamie Shea
said alliance members had expressed great concern about the
fate of fleeing ethnic Albanians trapped within Kosovo when
Yugoslavia closed the border on Wednesday.
"We don't know what has happened to these people, who seem
to have been forced back inside Kosovo," he said, noting an
estimate by the U.N.refugee agency in late March of 260,000
people displaced within the southern Serbian province.
Asked on Spanish radio why Milosevic had closed the border
crossing, NATO's Solana said he might want to avoid pictures
of a mass exodus being broadcast around the world.
"Or he could be trying to use people as human shields in
case the alliance's military action is concentrated more on
the ground," he said.NATO said missiles hit the heart of
Belgrade overnight and scored successful strikes against
Yugoslav ground forces in Kosovo in the past 24 hours.
Britain's Short told a news conference that Serb forces in
Kosovo appeared to be rounding up refugees on the border and
returning them by force.
"We do not know whether they have been driven back to
their homes or elsewhere within Kosovo," she said."It is not
known where the refugees taken back to Kosovo are and what is
happening to them."
A Yugoslav government statement said security forces had
ended an offensive against ethnic Albanian guerrillas and
peace had been restored in Kosovo.
It said that under an agreement between Milosevic and
Kosovo Albanian political leader Ibrahim Rugova, "a process of
return of displaced persons from Kosovo, predominantly of
Albanian nationality, has been initiated".
The United Nations says 430,000 ethnic Albanians have fled
or been displaced from Kosovo since the start of NATO air
strikes on March 24.
About 300,000 are in Albania -- including some 14,000 who
were among 40,000 refugees abruptly uprooted from the squalid
camp at Blace, Macedonia, on Wednesday and bused out by night.
At Korce, refugees from Blace accused Macedonian police of
terrorising them when they herded them onto buses.
They were prodded awake before dawn on Wednesday and taken
against their will in a convoy of more than 100 buses through
the mountains of Macedonia to a sports stadium in Korce, a
dusty, impoverished town in southeastern Albania.
The deportees were not told where they were going, and
many family members who had struggled to stay together in the
flight from Kosovo became separated in the renewed chaos.
"There was great confusion," Stipend Poti, a 25-year-old
baker from Pristina, told Reuters, in an account echoed by
others."They hit us with their sticks and pointed their guns
at us to make us hurry up.
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