NATO says that 500,000 Kosovo Albanians have now been driven from their homes in a human wave by Serb forces, and reports from Pristina paint a horrific picture of fear.
Thousands of refugees are flooding out of the beleaguered province, some of them under coercion. About 30,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo were being forced to march to Montenegro with the guns of Yugoslav tanks trained on them, an Albanian association in the Netherlands claimed last night, quoting reliable sources. A spokesman for the Albanian Co-ordination Council said the Albanians might be used as human shields to protect the tanks from NATO air strikes.
The organisation's statement said Serb forces had also filled Pristina's sports stadium with displaced people, and that the notorious Serb paramilitary chief known as Arkan, who is wanted for war crimes allegedly committed in Bosnia, was present in Kosovo.
Albanians in contact with relatives in Kosovo say shops and restaurants have been burned by Serb forces, with nobody daring to go out. "My father and mother just stay in their apartment. They fear to go out, even to go out into the corridor of their block," said one young Albanian woman, too frightened of reprisals against her family to be named.
Other sources in Pristina say Serb forces are going door-to-door in many areas, arresting hundreds of Albanians. One report says suspects are being herded together in a football stadium, and that men are being separated from women and children.
KLA officials in Geneva say they have satellite phone contact with units in the field, but no contact in Pristina and other main towns. But the officials say they have one report of a massive explosion, presumably a NATO air strike, on the area of central Pristina where the police headquarters and army headquarters are situated.