Makbule, a 20-year-old Kosovo student, decided to become a refugee in a split second last Wednesday. She looked from the balcony of her house in a leafy suburb of Mitrovica and saw the nearby house of her aunt in flames. It was then that she realised her town was to be "ethnically cleansed". Makbule's father and brother had already fled Mitrovica, joining the guerrillas in the mountains as stories of ethnic cleansing in other towns filtered through.
By Wednesday, Makbule and her grandmother, Vezire, mother Kumurije and sister Selvie dared not leave the house. Then, just after 11 a.m., came the sound of muffled cries and the crashes of doors being demolished. They could see in the streets some of their neighbours rushing away. Makbule went to the balcony.
"It was the house of my aunt. Everything was on fire," she said. She ran downstairs, and told her grandmother. "We left right then, there was no time to pack," said Vezire. "We just got out with the clothes we had on. We thought they would kill us."
"The whole town was on fire," said Selvie. "I was frightened. The Serbs were very big men. I could see them around our house. I don't know what happened to our house. I suppose it is burned." Outside the town they met a cousin driving a tractor with its trailer already crammed with people and clambered aboard. "The police were waiting in cars on the road. We couldn't go left or right, only straight. They were shouting, shouting all the time, they said `where is your NATO? Go to your NATO'," said Makbule, wearing the same dark jeans and beige jacket she left in.
"They were beating on car windows with their guns." It was the start of a three-day ordeal as Serb forces forced the town's population along a route that took them from one side of Kosovo to the other. The first day saw them moving westwards in stops and starts. "The road was full of cars and tractors, and on both sides there was just this tide of people walking along. I saw a neighbour taking his paralysed mother in a wheelbarrow," she said. They moved through a landscape of burned, deserted villages and in the fields saw cows, horses and pigs machine-gunned by the Serbs.
"Whatever was Albanian, they destroyed," said Selvie. Dawn found them on the outskirts of the north-eastern town of Pec, seat of the Serbian orthodox church.
For the rest of the day, and through a second night, they sat shivering in wet clothes as the procession wound its way around Prizren, the prettiest of Kosovo's towns, in its mountainous south-west. Again they found desolation.
"All the Albanian homes were empty; a lot had been burned. There were Serb houses in all this mess which were all right. The people living in them were standing outside watching us pass." The column, with more and more vehicles now dropping out through lack of fuel, wound its way through the mountain pass that led to the border. But it took the rest of the day to drive the 20 miles along the queue of people to get to the border post at Morine.
Home is now a crowded Tirana sports hall. The tears come to Makbule and her sister at the end of the interview, not when describing their ordeal, but when remembering the lives they had. "The house was a very nice house," said Makbule. "I was ready to be a student. I wanted to study literature. I had all the books and materials. Now I don't know what to do."