Camp is filling up again with human tide it cannot absorb

At the Blace transit camp, where 65,000 Kosovans languished for days at the beginning of April but which was empty last Thursday, an estimated 3,000 refugees sat yesterday on dusty gravel and caking mud. For the second time this month, Blace is filling up with a human tide it is not equipped to accommodate.

There is no place else for them to go. And as they told tales of the Serb killings in the villages around Lipjane, which drove them out of Kosovo on Tuesday, 4,000 more of their compatriots were in no man's land on the roadway above, awaiting entry to Macedonia. The new refugees said there were thousands more on the way.

Ron Redmond, of the UNHCR, was frank. They were going to Brazda, he said: "We are just dumping people down there and hoping they can find space to squat, basically."

There is no room in the Blace camp. Hundreds of men, women and children slept in the open on plastic over the mud and gravel there for the last two nights.

Some had been placed between tents with plastic hanging overhead, but inside those improvised shelters it was stifling yesterday as exhausted people lay around in air fetid with the odour of warmed, damp, stale salted clothing. Outside was not much better. For the past few days, smoke from burning plastic stung eyes and nostrils wherever one went in Blace. JCB crews are clearing and burning off the remnants of Blace 1 in anticipation of Blace 2. Nearer the mud-coloured Lepence river below, where new tents have been erected, the water had seeped inside overnight to mattresses spread on the bare earth. But if the conditions at Blace are just dismal, Brazda is in deep trouble. Originally intended for 19,000 people, it has over 30,000 already and is growing. At the entrance yesterday, some policemen wore latex gloves.

This followed talk of disease and a UNHCR report that there had been cases of measles at the camp. Macedonian doctors warned people on national television last Tuesday night about the dangers of skin rashes and fleas spreading from the overcrowded camps.