Railway platforms are jammed as reports of ethnic cleansing spread

About 5,000 refugees waited in no-man's-land at the Blace crossing into Macedonia last night to be taken somewhere. They had been there most of the day, some since early morning.

UNHCR personnel said these new refugees had told them, like their forerunners on Wednesday, that railway platforms along the route from Pristina had been packed with people trying to get on board, indicating that thousands more are likely to arrive at Blace again today.

A further 1,500 refugees arrived at the Jecinze crossing in western Macedonia and at least 130 at the Lojane crossing in the east. No one knows exactly how many have crossed or are crossing at Lojane. Refugees are being absorbed quickly into the Albanian community, and police are not being told for fear they might be turned back.

Of the refugees at Lojane this week most have come from Presevo, a town in Serbia but not in the province of Kosovo. Between 2,000 and 3,000 Albanians have left there since Serb paramilitaries cleared them out last Sunday, and they have said that between 8,000 and 10,000 more are on the way.

They also told UNHCR personnel that Serb ethnic cleansing has spread beyond Kosovo into other parts of Serbia, while attempts were also being made to conscript Albanians outside Kosovo and to appropriate their property for military purposes.

The media were not allowed into Lojane yesterday to speak with Presevo refugees there.

Most of the refugees who arrived in Macedonia yesterday were expected to be accommodated at the new Cegrane camp in the west. Cegrane was not to have taken any refugees for three more days, but on Tuesday night 2,300 were brought there.

It was considered better to bring them there even though sanitation and water supplies were not prepared, rather than having them sleep in the open on plastic.

It had been planned that Cegrane would hold 5,000 people by the middle of next week. Now it is expected that it will have 6,500 people by tonight, and maybe more.

At Blace yesterday smoke from burning plastic had almost stopped, and the site of the earlier refugee encampment there was almost cleared to accommodate the new influx on the way. Blace will thus end April as it began it, crowded with displaced people with no place to go.

The transit camp there was so crowded that the living had started to share ground with the dead. A small Muslim cemetery at the edge of the camp also accommodated refugees.

Macedonian government figures yesterday indicated that 194,000 had registered in the country at the beginning of this crisis, one-tenth of its 1.9 million population. About 163,000 are still there. Of the 30,708 evacuated to date, half have gone to Albania.

Meanwhile it was confirmed yesterday that two refugees, including a 12-year-old girl, were killed by a landmine on Wednesday as they crossed the mountain to Macedonia. Ten others were wounded in the incident, six critically.

It is believed the mine was on Kosovo territory, not far from the ethnic Albanian village of Malina in Macedonia.