: War in the Balkans: `Over the ridge, a 21st century war rages. Here, it's a biblical tragedy'

AFTER MOST of the lights have gone out, and the darkness has obscured the details of clothes and shoes, it is impossible to tell what country or even what century you are in. Malina Mala is the village at the end of Macedonia - a few hundred yards to the north, over the ridge, is Kosovo, where who know what is taking place. At night, the soldiers guarding the border peer over onto the plain below and watch the fires - the exploding bombs of the Nato planes, and the villages torched by the Serbian police. But, by the skin of its teeth, Malina Mala is part of Macedonia and here, as a 21st century war is waged over the ridge, a medieval, almost Biblical, scene is acting itself out.

It takes the form of a procession: a long straggling parade of people and animals which begins at dusk and continues for most of the night. The lucky ones come in on squat ponies, lashed with bags and blankets, staggering lamely down the muddy village track. But most of them have walked here, for eight, ten, twelve hours or more - people of all ages and professions, in leather jackets, overcoats and shawls.

In front of the first house in the town they stop, and the men light cigarettes and talk quietly. There are hundreds of them outside, thousands more in the houses, but only two sounds make any impression: overhead, the distant supersonic roar of invisible Nato jets, and on the road the crying of babies.

Malina Mala has been swamped, and even the people in the village have lost count. On Saturday some 3,000 refugees arrived this way; by yesterday morning, the locals were saying that the same number again had arrived with more expected last night. Malina Mala has 60 houses, simple two-storey structures of stone and wood, in which the lower floor is given over to workshops and animals. Every available space is now occupied by refugees, and there is no more shelter to be had.

In the school, where many of the women and children are quartered, it is standing room only - there are bodies in the corridors, under and on top of the tables, pressed up hard against the walls where blackboards and maps still hang. The mosque is full of sleeping men; in the house where our small group finally finds room, there are more than 50 people. And when we wake up in the morning there are a few hundred or so men standing and hunching around fires. It is snowing.

In Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, the aid agencies are asking themselves where the refugees have gone, and the answer is here. By some unfathomable caprice of the Serbian army, the official border crossings between Kosovo and Macedonia - at Jazhince, Tabanovce and Blace - have been virtually deserted. Instead of allowing their victims through these places, where refugee camps, medical care, and a registration system have been prepared, they are squeezing them out, drop by human drop, across the bitter mountain terrain, to Malina Mala, one of the places in Macedonia least able to shelter them.

Even the journey from Skopje gives you some idea of what these people have been through, for on Monday when we made our attempt, there was no way in but to walk. There is a road to Malina - a terrible road, but accessible by Jeep. But ours was turned back five miles from the village, at a command post operated by the Macedonian police. On Sunday, two days of aid was successfully brought through by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP); on Monday even they were turned back by the border guards, who insisted that the ill-defined border road was too dangerous. Another road, blocked by snow, skirts the opposite ridge safely inside Macedonia. From here we walked.

Two thoughts occur to you as you travel through this kind of country. The first is the scale of the task which Nato forces face, if and when they finally do invade Kosovo. The valleys fall and rise in ankle-twisting descents and exhausting climbs. The mountains are forested, and the rough tracks pass beneath rocky overhangs and blind slopes, perfect terrain for ambushes and guerrilla defence tactics. The second thought is of the Kosovar Albanian refugees.

After three hours of walking, burdened only with cameras and notebooks, we arrived speechless with exhaustion. But the refugees know that anything they do not carry with them they will lose forever - hence the bulging suitcases, lugged across hills and rivers, and above all the human cargo of the sick, elderly and disabled.

There are so many stories here that it would take years to make an account of them all. In the school, I saw a smartly-dressed man on crutches, a woman nine months pregnant, numerous tiny babies, and men and women so old that they could barely stand. The local villagers, all of them ethnic Albanians, spoke of finding people with amputated limbs struggling through the mud. Yesterday, six old people were unaccounted for.

The fate of these people illustrates once again the most frightening thing about the Serb programme: its systematic nature. This is what happened: on 5 April, from various accounts gathered in the past two days, three men were executed by Serb police in the village of Lubozhde, close to the town of Vitina, 10 miles over the border. Their names were Mustafe Shema, Muhamet Muharremi and Xhemajl Ademi, aged 32, 28 and 20 respectively. No one I spoke to saw the killings personally, but the men were seen being chased by police and later their bodies were found by the river with a single bullet wound through each temple.

Lubishde was already swollen with refugees from eight nearby villages, which had been mortared by the Serbs - its population of 2,025 had grown to 5,000. The police came back and started ransacking houses and stealing valuables on the pretext of searching for guns. They took tractors and confiscated car keys. That night, a group of villagers decided to leave for Macedonia but, close to the border, they were fired upon by Serbs, and a child was wounded.

For 10 days, they stayed in the village. "We slept with our clothes on every night, expecting the Serbs to break in," said the village's doctor (like most of the people, the doctor did not want to be named). "We lived in terror. We heard voices talking outside the house and those nights we spent without sleep."

Last Friday, the military police came back, asking for villagers who had been active in Kosovo politics. "The food reserves were nearly at an end, and I couldn't treat people any more because I had no medicine," said the doctor. On Friday evening, the village collectively decided to move.

The Serbs taunted them as they left. "They shouted, `You asked for Nato - so why isn't Nato helping you now?' and `Nato is bombing us, so we're going to destroy you'," said one woman. Many of the refugees were robbed of money and valuables. "They threatened to kill us if we didn't hand it over," said Abdullah Bilalli, who arrived on Monday night from the village of Begunc. "There were cases of people losing two, three, four, ten, twenty thousand Deutschmarks. They said, `Now we take your money; next time we will take your lives'." But even after they had struggled to the border, their problems were not over.

It is clear why the Macedonian police do not welcome journalists into Blace. For the first day at least, they treated the refugees with callous aggression. "The Macedonians kept us sitting in the rain for two hours," said one father of two small children, who called himself Hazir. "They hit us, and pretended they were going to fire their guns at us, and said they'd shoot us dead if we tried to cross. We came here seeking shelter. We never thought the Macedonians would do this kind of thing to us."

They were driven back, but eventually found a way across with the help of the Albanians from Malina Mala.

The food the WFP brought was running out yesterday morning. Some of the children have rashes; many of the refugees have hacking coughs. Robert Allemand of Medecins du Monde, the only doctor to make it past the police yesterday, said there were malnutrition cases. The village offers only one kind of protection now: relative security from Serb attack, even if only by a few hundred yards.

Hundreds of thousands of Kosovars lack even that. The refugees in Malina Mala spoke of tens of thousands of their compatriots whose villages were almost certain to be cleared in the next few days. Nato intelligence sources in Skopje are predicting 200,000 refugees making their way to the borders of Albania and Macedonia and likely to arrive over the next 10 days. Another 600,000 to 800,000 are said to be marooned in the hills and villages. It was a desolate thing to drive out of the village yesterday, to look down from the road on to the Kosovo plain and think of those still out there.

Along the road out, a soldier said that Monday night had been the most spectacular so far. "There were bombs and flames everywhere. Kosovo looked like a bonfire."

Richard Lloyd Parry