Snow and cold rain has begun falling in Kosovo, threatening to make life worse for 300,000 people displaced by fighting in the Serbian province and hamper aid deliveries, a UN food agency said yesterday.
"This marks a new phase in the humanitarian crisis," Mr Robert Hauser, head of the World Food Programme's (WFP) Eastern Europe unit, said in a statement. "We have been dreading the arrival of winter and the certain increase in suffering it will cause to those who have been displaced."
The WFP said snow had fallen over the Bjeshket and Nemuna mountains separating Kosovo from Albania, where several thousand displaced people are hiding to escape months of fighting between Serbian security forces and separatist guerrillas. Several hundred people were seen descending the mountains on foot.
The Rome-based agency said it was sending a convoy with daily rations, including food, plastic sheeting, clothes and blankets, to the people in the mountains.
"The coming winter will make life far more difficult for the 300,000 people . . . Many of them are still living in covered wagons, under plastic sheeting, or unfinished houses without windows or doors," it said.
"Snow and rain will also render delivery of humanitarian aid far more complicated, as many of the displaced people are located in isolated areas, along narrow dirt roads." His remarks came as Mr Kris Janowski, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said a Serb offensive, which started on Wednesday, had prompted about 10,000 people to flee from 13 villages in the region between Podujevo and Mitrovica in the north.
Attempts to enter the area have been blocked by Serb army and police. But Mr Janowski said UNHCR staff saw smoke rising from at least one village, Bojcina. All fleeing villagers told the same story: firstly, word that they would be attacked and then shelling after they fled.
The offensive appeared over yesterday with ethnic Albanian sources saying that Serb army and police units were pulling out of the region.
On Thursday, aid workers located about 25,000 displaced people from central Kosovo living without food or medicine in a canyon along the border with Montenegro, Mr Janowski said. Many were sick or wounded.
More than 260,000 people - mostly Albanian villagers - have been made homeless by the fighting, including an estimated 50,000 refugees living in the mountains and forests. With temperatures plummeting daily, the most exposed are at increased risk of disease or death.
Kosovo's Albanian leader, Mr Ibrahim Rugova, endorsed a US peace plan yesterday but other ethnic Albanian politicians said it would prolong the crisis.
Mr Rugova, head of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), the largest ethnic Albanian party, said the draft aimed at stopping the violence in Kosovo where separatist guerillas have been fighting Serbian security forces for more than six months.
It envisages a three-year transitional period during which Kosovo would have governing institutions free of Serbian or Yugoslav control and its own judiciary and police.
The draft made no attempt to define Kosovo's political status or say whether it would be part of Serbia or Yugoslavia.
"This is an interim agreement that our group is working on together with (US envoy Christopher) Hill and with the Serbian side . . . We have agreed in principle to a three-year interim accord, which is very important," Mr Rugova told reporters in Pristina.
Mr Rugova's words came amid bitter reactions from other ethnic Albanian leaders to the plan.
Mr Adem Demaci, ex-political prisoner and the political representative of the Kosovo Liberation Army, said he hoped the Albanian side would not accept "such a distrustful project".
"(It) will leave the problem unsolved and the crisis will not end, but will appear in other forms . . . (Hill) is prolonging the agony of both sides," Mr Demaci said.