The Serb games continue. Yesterday morning, a single train pulled into the Blace border crossing bearing up to 1,000 desperate refugees, many of whom had made it to the same place the previous day and been held there for several hours before being turned back. This time, somebody somewhere tossed a coin and decided they should be allowed through.
They disembarked with their rugs and buggies and plastic bags, two families in particular so obviously traumatised that aid workers separated them from the rest and took them down to the transit camp to rest before travelling further.
It emerged later that in the past month, they had witnessed at least three separate massacres involving as many as 330 dead in the Globovec area.
Others described how, on the previous day, Serb border guards had told them the border was closed on the Serb side, and had beaten and verbally abused them before turning the train back to Urosevac where they were forced to disembark. There they spent the night in empty Albanian houses scavenging for food. Some of them reported visits during the night from Serb military yelling at them to get out by morning - which is why so many of them battled to get back on the train yesterday.
Conditions are deteriorating by the day for ethnic Albanians still in Kosovo. Like others before them, these new arrivals reported a scarcity of flour and pasta, and Serb shopkeepers refusing to serve Albanians. They accused the police of stealing humanitarian aid rations and selling them at five times the normal price. According to these refugees, the police also travel to neighbouring towns, take food by force and bring it back to sell in their own areas. There are further reports of Serb forces blending carefully into the landscape and Kosovan life; of driving around in civilian cars in civilian clothes; keeping anti-aircraft missiles in private houses; using schools, hospitals and mosques as headquarters and barracks; hiding out in barns in the centre of towns and forcing civilians to remain with them when NATO attacks begin.
Yesterday afternoon, with the arrival of a busload of refugees from Drobesh, came news of a new expulsion strategy. In this case, everybody who didn't have Yugoslav citizenship had been rounded up and told to get out. Many of these were people who moved to Kosovo many years ago, set up home and raised their children there, without registering themselves as citizens. It had never been an issue up to yesterday, when suddenly everybody was forced into a school yard for three hours and terrorised before being dismissed or put on the bus.
Those people who made it through may not know it yet but even in safety, much hardship lies ahead. The large number of men gazing wistfully outwards from inside the wire fences of the camps tells a story of increasing frustration. Many spend their days queueing for telephones attempting to trace loved ones. An old man lay in an intolerably clammy tent in Blace yesterday surrounded by 10 of his extended family. His wife and two daughters-in-law are somewhere in Macedonia. Two of his sons are still in Kosovo, status unknown.
Reports are also coming out of another kind of pressure for Kosovans staying with host families. Thirty people to a house is not uncommon.
On top of that is the pressure on the more liberal Kosovan Albanians to conform to the conservative religious and social practices of their non-Kosovan brethren. Women and girls who once wore western dress and skimpy T-shirts are being ordered to don the flowing garb and headscarves of the traditionalists; men are told to attend the mosque and pray. In villages where traditionalist politicians control the flow of aid, this pressure is much more than merely moral.