Almost 400,000 people flee Kosovo: UNHCR

Almost 400,000 people flee Kosovo: UNHCR

GENEVA (Reuters): The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, said on Monday almost 400,000 people had fled Kosovo since NATO began bombing Yugoslavia last month.

The Geneva-based agency also reported that some of the tens of thousands trapped in squalid conditions in no-man's land at the Macedonian border had been allowed to move to a transit camp inside the former Yugoslav republic.

UNHCR, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, is the United Nations' main humanitarian agency for the Balkans region. This means it has responsibility for coordinating efforts to help the Kosovo refugees.

UNHCR chief Sadako Ogata has convened an emergency meeting to discuss the refugee crisis for Tuesday in Geneva. Representatives of 56 nations have been invited to attend.

NATO and the refugees streaming out of the Serbian province say Yugoslav forces have stepped up their campaign of "ethnic cleansing" in the area, forcing ethnic Albanians to leave, since the alliance began its bombing campaign on March 24.

UNHCR said its latest total for the number of refugees who have left Kosovo was composed of 226,000 people who had arrived in Albania, 120,000 in Macedonia, 35,700 in Montenegro, 7,900 in Bosnia and 6,000 in Turkey.

"By tomorrow morning it's going to be 430,000. It's growing by 30,000 a day," UNHCR spokesman Kris Janowski told Reuters. UNHCR said a transit camp set up to deal with the estimated 65,000 people stranded in no-man's land close to the Macedonian border town of Blace had received its first refugees.

"The operation began unexpectedly, in the dead of night late Sunday when Macedonian authorities sent 11 buses without any warning to the site," the agency said in a statement.

It said around 2,000 people had been bused to the camp at Brazda. The UN's World Food Program (WFP) said its staff on the ground had also reported the arrival of refugees at the camp.

The WFP's Geneva-based spokeswoman, Christiane Berthiaume, said the flow of refugees into the camp was very slow. "We still don't have access to the people in no-man's land," she added, saying only the local Red Cross was permitted to tend to the tens of thousands not yet allowed over the border and stranded in a muddy field without even basic sanitation.

Berthiaume told Reuters the WFP had begun airlifting food supplies into the crisis areas and the number of flights would be stepped up over the next few days.

Janowski said Tuesday's emergency meeting of a forum called the Humanitarian Issues Working Group, originally set up to deal with the Bosnia crisis, would allow different countries and agencies to pool information.

"It won't take any particular decisions. It's more to compare notes and draw attention to the gravity of the situation," he said.