As the human tide flowing out of Kosovo continued yesterday, the Macedonian Prime Minister, Mr Lupco Georgievski, strongly criticised the West, saying it had attacked neighbouring Serbia and then walked away from the problem of refugees.
"The people in Brussels [NATO headquarters] started the war and left for Easter holidays," he told a news conference. "They left the problem for Macedonia."
Mr Georgievski said Macedonia had done as much as it could to deal with the tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians washing up on its borders after what the West says is a campaign of ethnic cleansing by Serbia.
"How many do we have to take to satisfy Europe, and for the Kosovo people to say thank you," he asked. "As fast as European countries take refugees from Macedonia that is how fast the problem will end."
Mr Georgievski also complained that the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, had not done its job. "All this time we have tried to get the UNHCR to take care of the refugees. The problem is that they are not doing anything."
Macedonian officials said yesterday that some 130,000 ethnic Albanian refugees were either inside their territory or massed on the border of the former Yugoslav republic.
European Commission officials in Brussels said the EU would try to find ways of keeping a million or more Kosovo Albanian refugees close to home rather than evacuating them to member-states. But EU interior ministers, meeting in Luxembourg before foreign ministers discuss the deepening refugee crisis today, could not discount the possibility of a co-ordinated move to take in a limited number of refugees, they said.
"There is a clear preference for the refugees to receive help in the countries neighbouring Kosovo," a European Commission spokesman told a daily news briefing. "But we should not exclude other ways and means, like the acceptance in the Union of a certain number of refugees."
NATO has said that more than one million people have been driven from their homes. But Germany says sanctuary for refugees should be temporary and wants other EU members, several of which have expressed reservations about such an evacuation, to help shoulder the burden.
A spokesman for the EU's Humanitarian Aid Commissioner, Ms Emma Bonino, who visited neighbouring Albania and Macedonia last week, said on Tuesday she had reservations about plans to airlift refugees from the region.
She believed a similar exercise in the central African country of Rwanda had shown the exercise would be fraught with logistical difficulties, her spokesman said.
He said the EU was on the verge of un-blocking the last €8 million tranche of €20 million earmarked for humanitarian aid in the Kosovo region this year. After that, the cupboard would be bare, and the EU would have to discuss dipping into its reserves.
A spokesman for the External Relations Commissioner, Mr Hans van den Broek, said the Commission was still investigating ways of topping up €15 million worth of aid aimed at helping Macedonia and Albania shoulder the refugee burden economically.
In Washington, officials said the United States would temporarily house 20,000 Kosovo refugees at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
They said it would take several days before the refugees would begin being transported from the Balkans to the site.
"We wanted to show that we are willing to do our part," said one senior US official.
In Geneva, the UN refugee agency started a special meeting with representatives of 56 donor nations to discuss how to finance a vast operation to cope with the flood of refugees.
The session was chaired by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Ms Sadako Ogata, and included about 30 humanitarian organisations.
The Turkish-Cypriot leader, Mr Rauf Denktash, said yesterday that he would apply to the UN to house refugees from Kosovo in the abandoned Greek-Cypriot village of Varosha.
Varosha, a suburb of the east coast town of Famagusta, was abandoned by its Greek-Cypriot inhabitants when the Turkish army invaded in 1974 and is now under Turkish control, although UN troops patrol the area. Before that it was a prime tourist destination.