Bomb explodes during camps visit by UN chief

A BOMB exploded in the Albanian old quarter of Skopje yesterday, only yards from the city's oldest mosque, the Jaja Pasha, and about a mile from visiting United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan. Two people were critically wounded.

Police said Mr Annan and his convoy may have been planning to use a main road, Yugoslavia Boulevard, close to the site of the bombing at around the time of the explosion. Minutes after the blast, the UN chief took a different route to get to a camp for Kosovo Albanian refugees and to reach the Macedonia-Kosovo border.

The blast raised fears of new ethnic tension in Macedonia, which borders Albania, Yugoslavia (both Serbia and the province of Kosovo), Bulgaria and Greece, and has a 30 per cent ethnic Albanian population.

At the Blace crossing on the border with Kosovo, Mr Annan appeared to have difficulty holding back tears as he saw the full human tragedy of the Kosovars' enforced evacuation.

He talked to a woman who was 104 years old. Unable to walk any further, she was swinging like a holdall between the arms of two male refugees. She had walked or been carried across the hills of southern Kosovo for days but still she managed a faint smile for a face she recognised from television.

Mr Annan also chatted to a young woman who had wandered Kosovo for two months trying to avoid Serb checkpoints. She was cradling a three- week-old baby born in the mountains.

Earlier, at the Stankovic One camp, Mr Annan said he had come to see for himself and "to express solidarity with those whose lives have been brutally uprooted and who are living the nightmare we are all trying to end". His wife Nane walked with him through the camp, the two of them receiving the warmest welcome of any foreign dignitaries so far. Refugees lined up to applaud him as he walked past the crude hole-in-the-ground toilets, past women washing their clothes in plastic basins, with little children running alongside him. "We want to go home, Mr Annan," some shouted in English.

On the road to Stankovic One, he passed 10 busloads of refugees who were headed for another camp. Then he passed two coachloads headed for Skopje airport. These people had already spent weeks in the camps and were bound for France, their chances of returning home perhaps increasingly dependent on the UN chief's diplomatic skills.

The previous evening, 1,400 refugees arrived at the Blace border crossing. Serbian police kept their tractors and sent them across the border carrying all they had left in plastic bags.