War In The Balkans: Refugees - Riddle as hundreds of `disappeared' turn up

DAY AFTER day we had seen women, children, babies and the elderly. This time it was the turn of the young men. Missing for a month and given up for dead, they were hungry, emaciated and, as a United Nations official put it, "in pretty pitiful condition" - but they were alive.

After nearly 600 arrived in Albania on Saturday, another 506 came yesterday, mostly in their teens or twenties, some with crudely bandaged broken hands or feet and barely able to walk. They hugged each other and wept after stumbling across the border from their homeland, Kosovo, their tears apparently as much of relief as of sadness.

It was the first time the Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, had let so many men of fighting age go and no one was quite sure why. They were put in a convoy of buses from a central Kosovo prison but forced to walk the last three miles. UN refugee workers were taken by surprise but relieved to account for at least some of the thousands of Kosovo Albanian men missing after being detained by the Serbs.

The Serbs had freed them from Smrekovnice prison near the Kosovo capital, Pristina. They had been held for about a month after being taken from tractor convoys carrying their wives and children.

"They beat me with wooden clubs across my hands because I wouldn't reveal the names of KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] fighters," said 38-year-old Lef Veseli, a tailor from the Smrekovnice area who said he had no idea where his family was. All his fingers were broken and bound up in filthy bandages.

"They burnt down the whole town before putting us in prison, where some of the men died from the torture," said Fehmi, a 21-year-old from Mitrovica, in the same region. He feared that giving his surname would endanger his family, although he hoped most of them had made it to camps in Albania.

"From the prison, they took 57 men away to Terrnavc, where there was combat between the KLA and Serb forces. They said they were going to line the men up along the front line to stop KLA bullets," he said.

The men said five to 20 men were fainting or seriously injured each day at the prison. All the men interviewed said many hundreds more were still being held when they left.

A spokesman for the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) also said yesterday there were new reports that the Serbs were using Kosovar prisoners as "human shields" against the KLA.

After the 583 men were packed into marquee-style tents in Kukes, 16 miles from the border, refugee women arrived to look for their missing husbands. But there were no happy reunions. Conditions in the tents and camps were made worse yesterday afternoon when a thunderstorm turned the ground into a quagmire.

Were some of the new arrivals members of the KLA? They denied it but UN officials implied some of them may have been. Once they have recovered, they may soon be. KLA fighters, some in uniform and including one commando of the KLA Special Forces, were quick to visit the men after they had been bused from the border to Kukes. Some of them said they would be joining the guerrilla army.

Whether they were civilians or fighters, the UNHCR admitted the sudden arrival of so many men posed "a special problem".

"These are fighting-age men. We don't want them to get involved again," said UNHCR spokesman, Rupert Colville. "We've got to make sure they're not tempted to go off and do something else."

He said the men would be taken to camps away from the border in line with UNHCR policy of getting as many refugees as possible out of the overcrowded Kukes camps and out of shelling range of Serb artillery. Hundreds more refugees were moved from Kukes to camps in the Albanian interior yesterday.

Those arriving at the Morini border crossing confirmed that the Serbs were still going from village to village, continuing their policy of "ethnic cleansing", at the weekend. Now, even those most reluctant to leave, the old and infirm, were being forced out, they said.

Leaning heavily on a walking stick, Yahir Dana, 86, from the village of Delloc, tried to walk across the 100 yards of no man's land from the Serb border checkpoint to Morini alone but was too weak. He collapsed and had to be carried to the Albanian side by aid workers. He was still wearing the grey carpet slippers he had on when Serb forces came to his home on Friday and gave him five minutes to leave.

"I turned around and saw them pour gasoline into the house where I'd lived all my life. Then it went up in flames. The whole village was burning," he said, his face bloodied from several falls on his walk to the border. Complaining of serious chest pains, he told an Albanian aid worker who handed him some hot tea: "I will die soon, I'm afraid. I fear I will not see a free Kosovo. But better to die than to live outside my homeland."

West European military officers helping with relief work cast doubt yesterday on reports that the Kukes refugee camps could be emptied to make way for possible Nato ground troops.

"That's rather far-fetched," said an Italian officer who did not want to be named. "Look at the terrain. It would be a logistical nightmare getting heavy equipment into these highlands. Removing refugees is simply for their safety and comfort."

The fact that the Serbs could hit the border camps with their big guns was very much in the minds of refugees, aid workers, KLA fighters and their sympathisers after Nato's accidental bombing of a KLA forward base at Koshara, several miles inside Kosovo, at the weekend.

"Number one, how come Nato were the only people who didn't know the KLA had been in control of Koshara for months?" asked a uniformed KLA fighter in Kukes who refused to give his name. "And, two, even if it had been a Yugoslav army position, why bomb so close to the border and risk retaliation by Serb artillery?"