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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Milk who wrote (9550)	5/22/1999 1:56:00 PM
From: goldsnow	Respond to of 17770

Milk, Why does it matter to Barry? Nato is winning and Milosevic loosing, right? FOCUS-Thousands of Kosovans flee to Macedonia 01:21 p.m May 22, 1999 Eastern By Anatoly Verbin BLACE, Macedonia, May 22 (Reuters) - Up to 5,000 ethnic Albanians, many of them on the brink of starvation and with ''very bad stories,'' fled to Macedonia from Kosovo on Saturday, aid agencies said. It was the biggest influx in one day since May 4 when nearly 9,000 came over. Ron Redmond, spokesman for the UNHCR aid agency, told reporters that 1,000 had crossed already and between 3,000 and 4,000 more waited in the neutral zone and at Serbian border controls. They came by train and by bus from the Kosovo capital Pristina and the southern city of Urosevac. ''A lot of those people have very bad stories to tell...it's terrible, there are a lot of really bad stories,'' Redmond told reporters at the Blace crossing some 30 km (18 miles) north of the capital Skopje. Some of the refugees had been out of their homes for a year, he said, but most for a month or two. Redmond said that for the last two days aid worker had heard consistent stories of a massacre a month ago when a convoy of tractors was surrounded by Serbian forces in Grastica, a suburb of the Kosovo regional capital Pristina. ''Paramilitary and police who were robbing people, stealing whatever possessions they had, pulled men off tractors and summarily executed them,'' Redmond said. ''One man said 'I saw 20 bodies. They touched young men to see whether they had any muscles, were strong and then pulled them off and shot them','' he said. ''One man said 'I saw a 10-year-old boy killed -- they were trying to get money from his parents'.'' The story of another killing was told by a family which lived in a house overlooking the village of Djulekara near Vitina. ''They said around April 15 they saw six people shot as militia went through the village trying to clear it out. This included two women, one in her 60s and another in her mid-30s, two young men aged 19 and 21 and two children aged five and 10. ''They said the two young men were wounded and somehow carried into their house but it was later burned with them in it. We have no way to substantiate this but we heard it from three different people there, including a young girl who gave a very vivid description of what she saw,'' Redmond said. Lindsey Daries, spokeswoman for the World Food Programme (WFP), who was also allowed to talk to the refugees immediately after they crossed into Macedonia, said they were on the brink of starvation. Many told her they survived only by scavenging in abandoned houses, often sending children and the elderly to do this. The daily ration for a family was about one loaf of bread. ''They are the lucky ones, others have nothing.'' Many had not seen a hot meal in two weeks, she said. It was only a matter of time for hunger to become the strongest force driving ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo. ''It is more 'when' than 'if','' Daries said, adding: ''It is confirming our worst fears.'' infoseek.go.com