Aid agencies swamped by tide of refugees

The United Nations refugee agency is staggering under the weight of people displaced in the last week by fighting and ethnic …

The United Nations refugee agency is staggering under the weight of people displaced in the last week by fighting and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, its head of mission said yesterday.

"We are chasing a problem, and the problem is that there are people on the move, and there's no solution on how to stop this," said Mr Joe Hegenauer, chief of mission for the Kosovo office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

"Until a political solution is found it's going to continue. We're just trying to put Band-Aids on a much larger problem. . . In the last week we've had probably the biggest movement of internally displaced persons since September."

He estimated that 4,000 people had been driven from their homes by fighting in the Podujevo area, north of Pristina, on Saturday and that 5,000-10,000 had been displaced from around Srbica and Glogovac in central Kosovo.

READ MORE

The UN reckons that 100,000 people have fled their homes this year, at least 70,000 of those in the six weeks since Kosovo peace negotiations first opened in Rambouillet, France.

With the peace process stalled, international monitors and many humanitarian aid workers have been withdrawn from Kosovo in recent days, creating a dangerous vacuum filled by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and Serbian security forces.

So the last week's refugee flows have come at a time when the international community's ability to respond to them has been greatly diminished.

Mr Hegenauer estimated that 40 of the 55 international aid agencies that had been operating in Kosovo had pulled out, along with 95 per cent of their foreign staff, who once totalled more than 500.

"It's a lot harder now. We don't cover Kosovo the way we used to. It's more difficult with the reduced number of aid workers we have," the UNHCR official said.

Mr Hegenauer declined to describe the situation as a "humanitarian catastrophe", which is one of the developments that Western officials have said could trigger NATO air strikes on Yugoslav military targets, but he left little doubt that Kosovo's situation was grim and getting worse.

"There are people running. The Kosovo Albanian community are running throughout Kosovo and the Serbian community is leaving," he said.

"Homes are being damaged and destroyed. It's difficult for the aid community to cross into some areas because clashes are going on. I see this as a continuation of what started in February of 1998. It's still going on."