THE UN Human Rights Commissioner, Mrs Mary Robinson, has called on the Government to take a "significant number of refugees in the short-term" from the "deep catastrophe" in Kosovo.
She denied reports that she had appealed to NATO to stop bombing. However, she shared the view of the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, that "in a situation such as this the Security Council should be the focal point before any engagement takes place, and that did not happen in this case."
Mrs Robinson, who was in Ireland for Easter, said Ireland and other European countries should learn from the "generosity and willingness of African countries to take significant numbers of refugees" from wars in their continent. The most important issue now was to help the "tens of thousands of families who have lost everything in Kosovo - humiliated, cast out into muddy fields, scavenging like animals, their identities lost, paperless, countryless, carrying terrible images of what has happened to their neighbours."
European countries would have to support the people of Kosovo and neighbouring nations "over a period not just of weeks, but of months and years."
Mrs Robinson also expressed particular concern for the "ethnic balance" and human rights situation in Macedonia.
She said she would be sending the Commission's special rapporteur for Yugoslavia, Mr Jiri Dienstbier, the former Czech foreign minister, to investigate allegations of ethnic cleansing.
Meanwhile, the leader of Fine Gael and former Taoiseach, Mr John Bruton, yesterday angrily denounced those who claimed that the vast refugee exodus in Kosovo could not have been foreseen.
In a statement, Mr Bruton said: "The British Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook MP, is simply not making a truthful statement when he said today that no one could have foreseen a refugee crisis on the scale of the one now happening in the Balkans, following the decision to bomb Yugoslavia while refusing to commit ground troops under any circumstances. He is wrong."
"After the NATO announcement of bombing, but before the bombing had started, I attended a meeting in Berlin where Carl Bildt, Swedish Opposition leader and a former mediator in Bosnia, specifically predicted one million refugees within two weeks of the bombing starting," Mr Bruton said. "This outcome was guaranteed by the public announcements by President Clinton that ground troops would not be committed."
Mr Bruton called for a four-day cessation of the bombing next weekend, to coincide with the Orthodox Christian Easter. He said this time should be used to seek a negotiated settlement, possibly using a non-NATO European statesman such as Mr Bildt.