NEW SERB OFFENSIVE UPROOTS ANOTHER 10,000 KOSOVO ALBANIANS
USIA
18 September 1998
NEW SERB OFFENSIVE UPROOTS ANOTHER 10,000 KOSOVO ALBANIANS
(UNHCR says at least 13 villages in Kosovo were emptied) (430)
By Wendy Lubetkin
USIA Correspondent
Geneva -- The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says some
10,000 additional people have fled their homes as the result of a
government offensive now in its third day in Kosovo.
UNHCR spokesperson Kris Janowski said September 18 that at least 13
villages in the region north of Pristina between Podujevo and
Mitrovica were emptied by the Serbian offensive and the shelling of
some of the villages.
"We were prevented from entering the area yesterday by the Serbian
army," Janowski said. "We tried to enter the area from another entry
point and we were blocked by the police. Our staff could see smoke
rising from the villages in the area."
People fleeing the area told UNHCR staff most of the villages in a
swath stretching from Podujevo to Mitrovica were now empty.
"They said that the pattern, which we had before, was [that] they
became aware that an attack was coming and then shelling started,"
Janowski told a press briefing.
Along the road to Vucitrin, UNHCR staff met a family of 13, including
nine women and children crammed into the wagon of their tractor,
according to Janowski. They said they had slept in the open fields in
drenching rain for the past two nights. An elderly woman in the wagon
was crying.
UNHCR says it had located some 25,000 people who fled their homes in
the Drenica region after an offensive was launched there two weeks
ago. The UNHCR team who found the group said many people were sick or
wounded and they were living out in the open without food or medicine.
"These people are in very bad condition," Janowski said. "They need
virtually everything. We will try to get the basics to them as soon as
possible."
Meanwhile, UNHCR says there has been a large influx of Kosovo refugees
into Bosnia-Herzegovina.
"Yesterday we had about 500 people massed outside the UNHCR office in
Sarajevo asking for help," Janowski said. The Bosnian government
estimates that some 9,000 Kosovo refugees have entered the country
since fighting began. UNHCR says it has been approached directly by
3,000 people seeking assistance.
"It is an amazing irony that Bosnia-Herzegovina, which still has
hundreds of thousands of refugees outside in Western Europe and
neighboring countries, is now coping with a refugee crisis of its own
with Kosovo Albanians asking for protection in Bosnia," Janowski said.