IT WAS like a scene from Africa, not from Europe. But this was Europe in early spring and it was cold and it was raining. More than 20,000 ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo were by yesterday massed on the Macedonian border at Blace near the railway line on which they were deported by the Serbs. As you draw closer to the frontier checkpoint across the road, you realise that the vast, dark expanse in the valley below is made up of humanity.
There is movement. There is faintly discernible murmur, punctuated by the cries of children and the screams of babies. There are lights here and there from fires the refugees have lit, and a pall of smoke that hangs over the vast crowd.
Among them are heavily pregnant women, mothers with babies, old men and women all sitting in a field. Some were entering their fourth night in the open.
Increasingly desperate Macedonian officials pleaded with the West for help yesterday, warning that they were losing the fight to cope with the surging numbers of refugees flowing across the border.
By yesterday the Kosovans had been offered no shelter, no sanitation and seemingly precious little food. The only provisions I saw taken down from the road that snakes through the pass were a half a dozen crates of bread and some bottles of mineral water.
When ambulance drivers tried to distribute bread, refugees scrambled for it, punching each other and 10 or 20 people fought over a single piece. When loaves were thrown into the crowd from a cart pulled by a tractor, everyone raised their hands to catch them in a scene resembling mass prayer.
And when the first small camp hospital opened, a steady stream of stretchers headed for it. Many patients arrived unconscious. Yet the only person I saw evacuated came out of the crowd on a stretcher, his arm dangling limp from under a blanket.
╥I am a doctor. There are many doctors here. We can help but we need at least medicine,╙ said Arta, a woman in her mid-30s.
A 17-year-old boy called Arden said: ╥We are young. We can last here for days. But there are too many children and old people here. Unless the Red Cross does something, they are going to die.╙
There is growing anger here that the West has been sufficiently concerned for the Kosovan Albanians to go to war with Slobodan Milosevic, and yet the humanitarian aid to arrive has been woefully inadequate. In an emotional statement, deputy foreign minister Boris Trajanov said that only 300 tents had been sent from abroad so far.
╥Our neighbouring countries let alone Europe have lost their sense of responsibility to accept even one refugee.╙
In Albania, where 90,000 refugees were by yesterday camped along the northern border, similarly desperate notes were sounded. The Albanian government issued what it called a ╥strong SOS╙ to the world.
╥We hope that the international community will not leave Albania alone at this moment,╙ the information minister, Musa Ulqini, said.
He said the amount of international aid was far outweighed by the scale of the problem. ╥The
situation is becoming more and more dramatic and it requires urgent intervention.
Nato now puts the number of ethnic Albanians forced to flee their homes in Kosovo in the past year at 634,000 a third of the province╒s population. Thirty thousand of them have been expelled from the capital, Pristina, in the past 24 hours alone.
Jamie Shea, the Nato spokesman, said that at the Macedonian border there was a queue stretching back six miles with 25,000 people in it waiting to cross the frontier. ╥Many of them have died in that queue and others have had to cross a minefield in order to get there,╙ he said.
It is not just the international community that has been slow off the mark. The sole visible contribution from the Macedonian authorities has so far been to allow people to enter at a painfully sluggish rate. Apart from that, there was a detachment of riot police to hold back the multitude, and some soldiers posted at intervals around the shifting perimeter whose job it was to turn back reporters.
When I climbed down from the road into the meadows that fall away to the valley floor, to talk to the people who were spread across them, I was turned back at gunpoint by a Macedonian soldier.
╥The first thing that strikes you is, if you╒ll pardon the expression, the smell of shit,╙ said a Macedonian woman. She recounted how an old man held up a loaf of bread to her and said: ╥This is what I have to feed a family of eight with.╙
While the Kosovans wait for bread, others are profiting. An ethnic Albanian employed by a UN aid agency said that at the village of General Jankovic, on the other side of the border, Serbian paramilitaries were extorting the more prosperous refugees who were waiting to enter Macedonia by car. ╥They go from car to car. They ask for not less than DM500. Nobody knows what will happen if they don╒t give it to them.╙
