Blair given a glimpse of the refugees' plight

The British Prime Minister, Mr Blair, has announced that aid from Britain to Macedonia will be doubled from £20 million to £40 million. He also said Britain would be taking more refugees from Macedonia than planned, and that it would also assist Macedonia in running existing refugee camps in the country. To date, 330 refugees have been taken to Britain.

Mr Blair made the announcements during a brief visit to the Brazda refugee camp in Macedonia yesterday afternoon. He said his commitment to defeating the policies of President Milosevic, which had led to the refugees being in the camps, was "total".

What was happening in Kosovo now was "not a battle for NATO, it is not a battle for territory. It is a just cause, a right cause", he said.

Beforehand, Mr Blair had visited a refugee family from Pristina, at Brazda. One of the family, Ms Suzanna Nazifi (22), a teacher of English, said afterwards that Mr Blair "doesn't like Milosoveic at all". She shares the small tent with her mother, her brother and a little girl who is not a relative. The tent almost collapsed when Mr Blair was inside because of media pressure. Ms Nazifi said her brother is in France being treated for stab wounds inflicted by Serbs.

She had told Mr Blair the family wanted to go back to Kosovo but didn't believe that would happen as long as Mr Milosevic is in power in Belgrade.

They had been driven out of their home in Pristina at gunpoint by police who commandeered ethnic Albanian property in their neighbourhood after their barracks had been destroyed in a NATO attack. They had been given 10 minutes to leave.

Mr Blair asked about conditions in the camp and she explained how it was very hot in the tent during the day but at night it was so cold you couldn't sleep. She wished the family could be together with her brother in France. At the exit earlier, before Mr Blair arrived, lines of children stood in the hot sun rehearsing a chant of "Tony, Tony". Some left intermittently and joined a boisterous gang in the stream nearby. They dived in, cooled off and, dripping, returned to the chant.

Everywhere Mr Blair went in the camp he was greeted with cheers, chants, and applause by delighted refugees. It was Blair Day at Brazda and though his visit was brief the refugees' gratitude to the first western leader, since the Crusades at the beginning of the millennium, to come among them as their and their culture's friend was unequivocal.

As he left they still chanted "Tony, Tony" and waved and waved. For some it was their cue to dive into the stream again.

Earlier, Mr Blair had met senior British army officers in Macedonia. Last night he met President Gligorov of Macedonia and the Prime Minister, Mr Ljubco Georgievski, before travelling on to Romania.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, spent most of her day yesterday in the Tetovo area of western Macedonia. She visited the Senokos refugee camp near there and an Albanian family which has taken in refugees.

Today she will visit the Yugoslav embassy in Skopje and will meet President Gligorov and government ministers before hosting a press conference prior to her departure from Macedonia.

Reuters adds: As thousands of Kosovo Albanians continued to pour into neighbouring states yesterday, NATO said it planned to build camps in Albania for another 160,000 of them, including up to 60,000 now in Macedonia.

Macedonia, which now has more than 170,000 refugees from Kosovo, has repeatedly warned that its economy is struggling with the constant flow of displaced ethnic Albanians.

As the situation becomes more desperate, senior UN refugee officials criticised European countries for not doing more to help.

Mr Soren Jessen-Petersen, deputy to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said that while Europe had pledged to accept over 85,000 refugees from Macedonia, only some 20,000 had so far left the region.

PA adds: A Serbian soldier, captured by the Kosovo Liberation Army, has spoken of atrocities being carried out by Yugoslav forces against ethnic Albanians.

In one of the first accounts of what is going on inside Kosovo from the Serbian military, he has told his captors of killings and rape inside the province.

The Kosovo Liberation Army has released a video of the infantryman Shefko Terovic (29) being interrogated after his capture in western Kosovo.

Speaking through an interpreter, he then apparently tells the KLA: "I remember a refugee area where we acted terribly - I heard from some friends from the camp where women were raped."

On extracts of the tape played on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he added: "We cleansed not only men but women children and the elderly. When we cleansed houses we took what we wanted - jewellery, money, cars."

A spokesman to the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry, Mr Milisav Paic, said using KLA "terrorists" as a source of information was "outrageous".

He said on the same programme: "These people from the KLA ranks - they spread many lies."