Babies born in refugee camp as adults die of exhaustion

There was much talk of hell, but it seems that what faced the Kosovan refugees in Macedonia's largest camp at Brazda last night was more like purgatory. As dusk fell, many of the 25,000 were in long queues for food which would not be served for another hour.

A group of Italian soldiers stood waiting, too, at the head of the queue, beside mounds of baguettes, pallets of soft drinks and containers of hot food. The amount they had to distribute seemed of loaves and fishes proportions in comparison with the crowds.

Brazda is an enormous tent city made up of line upon line of green and beige in a flat valley surrounded by high mountains.

While they waited, the Kosovans talked, people like Vera and Veronica, two middle-aged sisters-in-law who had lost everything.

Both were, unusually, Albanian Catholics. They said that the Serbs had ransacked and desecrated Pristina's only Catholic church, St Anthony's, before they were thrown out.

The Serbs took Vera's car, her house, her papers and her passport, and put her on her a bus for the Macedonian border "with no water and no food".

When they got to the border, the Macedonian police kept them out for four days. People died, Vera said, because they had "no protection, no shelter". Then she began to laugh: "And 22 babies were born". She was adamant that she would not return to Kosovo unless NATO was there.

A youth called Behar stopped us for a cigarette and Igor, the interpreter, gave him his packet. Behar is 15 and from the village of Kosovo-Polie. There had been "a lot of hell there, a lot of killing". He had seen people beaten to death by the Serbs with bayonets. Afterwards, he was among people herded on to trains and transported to the Macedonian border.

Meanwhile, in the army compound at the rear of the camp, NATO troops unloaded tonnes of food and medical supplies from all over the world. Captain Nigel Francis-McGann, of the British army's Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, explained how once NATO was given the go-ahead they had built a camp for 20,000 at Razda within 36 hours.

He informed us that his grandparents were from Cork before going on to explain that about 800 NATO troops had been involved in setting up the camp. They came from the UK, the US, the Netherlands, Norway, Israel and France. They had also given up their own rations on those first few days to help feed the starving refugees.