Serb forces have herded hundreds of Pristina residents on to a train and expelled them from Kosovo in their campaign to empty the province of ethnic Albanians, passengers said yesterday.
Weeping men, women and children were pushed off the train into a field just inside Macedonia before dawn and spent hours shivering in drizzle while local police registered them.
They spoke of being rounded up from several districts in Kosovo's capital early on Tuesday, marched to the main station and forced to board the train at gunpoint. The doors were locked by Serb police, and passengers spent hours without food or water.
"The police came yesterday morning [Tuesday] and told us: `Go, just go.' They shot in the air, so we left," said Berishe (38). He and his family were given three hours to leave.
The arrival of the train, which passengers said had 15 carriages, took the Macedonian authorities by surprise. It suggested Serb forces had begun to systematically empty Pristina, which previously had been spared such activity.
"My Serb neighbours came to us and told us we had to leave. They gave us five minutes and then we joined a line of people that went down to the station where the train was waiting," said Victor, who worked as a translator before going into hiding when NATO air strikes began last Wednesday.
Passengers feared they were going to be used by the Serbs as human shields against the air attacks.
The Pristina headquarters of the Yugoslav army and Serb police units have been hit hard by NATO warplanes in recent nights.
However, Victor doubted Serb forces were substantially weakened, with most police units moving into homes vacated by ethnic Albanians. "They think they are safe there from NATO," he said.
Passengers said friends who remained in Pristina had told them by mobile phone that men in the city had been rounded up and put in a football stadium.
However, another witness denied this persistent and disturbing report directly from Pristina to AFP, saying that the stadium was entirely empty of people yesterday evening.
The trainload of refugees added to the human misery piling up at Blace border point, some 20 miles west of the Macedonian capital Skopje. Hundreds of ethnic Albanian peasants who had spent nights sleeping rough in freezing hilltop forests have descended from the mountains where they crossed the border illegally.
Mr Nazim Zekiri, a local man who took relief supplies on horseback to the waiting refugees, said the Macedonian army was blocking other people from descending from the hills.
Despite promises to Western relief officials, Macedonian border guards did not appear yesterday to have accelerated customs formalities. Aid officials said on Tuesday that bureaucratic procedures were being used to deliberately limit refugee entries.