The survivor of a mass killing in Kosovo in which 30 men were herded into a pit, machine-gunned, then covered with petrol and set on fire, spoke of his ordeal this weekend as he recovered in hospital across the border in Albania.
"The Serbs came into the village in the morning. First they brought all the people together, then they separated the men from the women," said the farmer from the village of Velika Krusha, who would not give his name.
He spoke through a narrow slit which is all that is left of his mouth, in a face that is now a mosaic of black and red burned flesh like burned meat. "They put the men into different groups. They pushed us all to the ground. After they got us on the ground they hit us, then they chose some of the men. The men they chose, they kept beating us, shouting that we were terrorists. Then they put us, 30 or 40 men, into a big pit in the ground.
"They started shooting. They were shooting everyone. I don't know how I survived. After they shot us they put hay on top, and then they poured petrol on top of that. Then they set fire to it. That was the thing that gave me strength. I knew there was nothing I could do anymore, I have to give strength to my body or die."
The farmer climbed out of the burning pit and staggered away from the village, later finding help and making his way across the mountains in the great human tide being expelled from Kosovo. His hands, like his face, are severely burned by the flames. His sight is intact, but his left eye opens only to a slit, and his right eye not at all.
The interview, which took place amid chaotic scenes in the single crumbling hospital in the border town of Kukes, was cut short as doctors rushed him into an operating theatre. The following day he was taken south to a burns unit in the capital Tirana. His is the second story of mass killing to emerge from the Kosovo village of Velika Krusha this weekend, following the video footage of more men shot dead which was smuggled out by a villager who had a camera, and shown on the BBC. This village, near the south western town of Prizren, the scene of constant skirmishing for the past year between Serb and rebel forces, was one of the first to be cleansed as Serb forces last week began their massive deportation operation which has spread across the province.
As refugees continued to pour into this small town, more and more horror stories surface. In a battered metal bed in another room of the hospital, nine-yearold Burini lies sleeping with his mother, two white bandages marking his wounds - one where a bullet entered his lower jaw, the other where it exited. His father, Met, still suffering mild shock, said Serb positions had been dug in near the school building at the border village of Planeje for several months as the children continued having lessons.
"On Sunday [March 28th] the Serbs just started shooting. They shot at the school, the children ran out, they killed a 15-year-old girl. My boy was hit in this way because the shooter was lying on the ground, you can see by the shape of the wound that the bullet was going upwards."
The gunfire triggered pandemonium in Planege, with Met and his family fleeing with whatever possessions they could carry into the nearby hills. But Burini's ordeal was not over. "We stayed for three days in these hills, we did our best to look after Burini but we had no medicines. In the end we came down, we joined the line of people going to the border, we got out."
Another casualty of Velika Krusha was 50-year-old Zekeri. The first he knew of the Serb attack on his village was when a shell exploded in his back garden, blowing in the bathroom wall. "I was getting into the bathroom, all the stuff hit me in the face," he said. His face is now a mass of red splinter scars, his lower lip badly cut and a bandage with a pink stain in the middle wrapped tightly over one eye.
At Kukes hospital, an ambulance arrives every few minutes, and some patients are brought by private cars, their horns frantically tooting as they race up the badly potholed main street. The few staff, of a hospital which even before this crisis was on its knees, are showing the strain of roundthe-clock work.
Outside the operating theatre, we ask who the burns patient was, but in the chaos no written record has been kept. "His name?" asks a nurse. "I don't know, after all this, I can't even think what is my father's name."
The Irish government has announced it will give £2 million to the Kosovo refugees, while the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, said 1,000 refugees would be accepted here.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, called on the government to take a "significant" number of refugees, but denied a report that she had appealed to NATO to stop bombing Yugoslavia.
The former Taoiseach and Fine Gael leader, Mr John Bruton, issued an angry statement accusing the British Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, of being dishonest in his claims that nobody could have foreseen the scale of the refugee crisis engulfing the Balkans. He said this was a European problem which Europe now should handle.