In a scene the West vowed would never happen again in Kosovo, hundreds of ethnic Albanian refugees were found living rough on a wooded hillside above the snowline near the Macedonian border yesterday.
The group, more than half of whom seemed to be children and elderly people, fled their village of Gajre on Sunday after guerrillas ambushed a Serbian police patrol and fighting erupted. A police captain was killed in the ambush and four of his men were wounded.
Residents of Gajre said four members of the separatist ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had been wounded and one killed in Sunday's fighting. At least two civilians, including a 65-year-old man, were shot dead as well.
The OSCE's Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) joined forces with the UN to evacuate twin girls, three weeks old, and their mother from the hillside along with several other young children who had been taken ill.
A pregnant woman three days overdue was too sick to hike out of from the Llaku valley ravine.
President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslav flatly refused yesterday to allow an international military force to help implement the political settlement in Kosovo, the chairman of the OSCE said. "He doesn't see any possibility of an international military presence," the Norwegian Foreign Minister, Mr Knut Vollebaek, said in Belgrade after meeting Mr Milosevic.