American special forces helicopters yesterday spearheaded the beginning of a massive airlift of relief supplies to the tens of thousands of Kosovo refugees who continue pouring into neighbouring Albania.
Two giant helicopters touched down on a makeshift airstrip outside the border town of Kukes. The helicopters, joined by four more from the Italian Navy, disgorged commandos and 60 tonnes of army food boxes and hundreds of water bottles.
The supplies were ferried from the airport of the capital, Tirana, where a fleet of NATO transport planes, mostly American, have begun to ferry in supplies. "We're just beginning the operation today," said Col Cliff Bray of the US Air Force. "We just want to get it off the airfield and to somebody."
NATO plans to land 60 tonnes of supplies a day into this town to cope with a continuing flood of refugees but the UN says much more equipment, including medal supplies and sanitation equipment, will be needed to keep people alive and prevent epidemics.
"I think the journalists are very impressed with the helicopters, they have nice pictures to show on the TV," said Mr Jacques Franquin, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner For Refugees in Kukes. "The majority of food is coming by truck."
Only one road links Kukes and the coast, and this eight- or ninehour bone-shaking journey grows more difficult by the day as parts of the highway crumble under the weight of so much traffic.
Attempts to ferry the refugees to a giant "tent city" on the coast are being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers swamping the fleet of buses and army trucks available. Many local people have offered help. "I have 70 people in my house, the place is packed, people are sleeping everywhere, but we have to help," said one local man.
But Kukes is one of the poorest towns in Europe's poorest country, and the refugee influx is too vast for the authorities to cope. "For the moment, we see a capacity for absorption that is quite amazing," said Mr Franquin. "People are being housed by families, but what is the capacity for the future, I don't know."
The Kukes Evangelical Mission has mobilised its 25 young Christians to distribute aid. These teenagers have abandoned most of their Easter celebrations to take relays of water and apples in borrowed cars to give to the refugees by day and night.
"What does it mean, Easter? It's not bunnies jumping around and eggs. Easter for me is when Jesus Christ is alive," said the Mission's Ms Kirsten Dern, from Germany. "We didn't have a special celebration because we didn't have the time."
The UN said last night that a total of 202,000 Kosovans have arrived in Albania since the exodus began, many herded over dirt roads in the mountains by the Serbs in their haste to empty Kosovo.
Aid officials wonder how long this figure will continue to grow. There are an estimated 1.8 million ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, and all of them appear to be destined for expulsion.
Reuters adds from Geneva: The head of the United Nations refugee agency, Ms Sadako Ogata, yesterday urged countries outside the Balkans to take in some of the hundreds of thousands of people streaming out of Kosovo.
"Kosovo's neighbours are swamped and they are no longer able to cope with the influx," said Ms Ogata, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. "All nations must now help to save lives."
Ms Ogata's agency had originally hoped to take care of all the refugees in countries neighbouring Kosovo. Her appeal represented an acknowledgement that the sheer scale of the problem meant this was no longer an option.
Ms Ogata's office said that by 10 a.m. GMT yesterday about 360,000 people had left Kosovo - mainly moving to Albania and Macedonia - since NATO began bombing Yugoslavia.
UNHCR described as "totally chaotic" the situation on the Macedonian border, where an estimated 65,000 people were trapped in no-man's land after the former Yugoslav republic slowed down the flow to a trickle.