100,000 missing as Serbs begin final assault on refugees

[Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>]

What do you wanna bet they have gun control too?

<http://www.telegraph.co.uk>

100,000 missing as Serbs begin final assault on refugees
                       By Sandra Laville in Morine, George Jones and Christopher Lockwood

SERB forces were last night reported to be shelling enclaves containing 850,000 refugees in a last push of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

America's ambassador for war crimes said he feared that 100,000 Albanian men were missing and may have been killed and the United Nations food agency, quoting "reliable" military and aid sources, said ethnic Albanians were being "bombed out" of their country.

As the refugee crisis deepened, Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, told the House of Commons that Slobodan Milosevic had lost his claim to Kosovo because of the "ruthless butchery" of his forces in recent weeks.

In a significant shift in the avowed aims of the Nato campaign, Mr Cook dropped from the Allies' terms for ending the war a specific reference to Milosevic agreeing to work on the basis of the Rambouillet accord, which envisaged the Serb army maintaining a presence in Kosovo.

He told a subdued Commons that the international community would have to accept for an interim period "a more direct responsibility" for Kosovo than previously envisaged. He said: "What makes that necessary is the sheer scale of the brutality directed from Belgrade against the Kosovar Albanians."

Last night, aid workers in Albania were preparing for hundreds of thousands more refugees. The information came as Milosevic broke off diplomatic relations with Albania and the tide of refugees crossing the border at Morine stopped abruptly. An eerie silence descended and Albanian police ordered journalists to stay well back.

The whereabouts of refugees who were waiting in an 11-mile queue at the border on Sunday, was not known, but there were reports of vehicles abandoned on the Serbian side. Refugee traffic across the border into Macedonia slowed almost to a trickle, even though tens of thousands are known to have been heading towards Blace.

Kris Janowski, a spokesman for the UN High Commission for Refugees, said: "It all sounds fairly ominous and we don't know to what end they're doing it." Angela Walker, spokesman for the UN World Food Programme, said tens of thousands were fleeing to the mountains and forests to escape the shelling.

She said: "Ethnic Albanians are being bombed out of Kosovo at this moment. Our sources estimate that 175,000 will be heading towards Montenegro and 100,000 towards Macedonia. They are being fired on from tanks in the mountains and the forests."

Diplomats in Macedonia said they had heard reports from central Kosovo of heavy shelling of refugees in the Pausnik area.

A diplomat, quoting the Kosovo Liberation Army as a source, said: "As we understand it there are tens of thousands of civilians on the high ground. The commander said as many as 100 people, including some children, have been killed. They're sitting ducks."

Nato officials confirmed that it puts the numbers of people trapped in five pockets of territory at 850,000, ranging from 100,000 near Urosevac to 250,000 between Vucitrn and Podujevo in the north.

But Nato said it could not confirm whether they were being fired on. Artillery has been used against villages, but not probably against refugees. Helicopters have been seen over Kosovo, but again it is not clear that they were firing on refugees.

WFP called for more food to cope with the new wave of refugees expected in Albania, where there are already some 350,000 Kosovars. Their spokesman said: "We are appealing for six million more daily food rations. These people are going to be in an extremely weak condition when they do cross the border."

Ten additional food trucks arrived yesterday in northern Albania to cope with refugees already there. Food queues stretched all around the town of Kukes and the surrounding area where there are more than 110,000 refugees. But as more refugees reach safety, the question of the missing men looms ever larger. Only about 10 per cent of the refugees are men, far less than the experience in other conflicts.

Concern that Serbs are engaged in mass extermination is mounting, as Nato has accumulated evidence - including some aerial photographs - of 43 sites which may be mass graves.

It is not yet clear what the sites are because there are no observers on the ground. The fact that many of the areas of freshly dug earth are in the open rather than concealed suggests that they could be the graves of Serbs killed in Nato attacks.

But refugees report that their men are being rounded up by Serbs and taken to separate and unknown destinations, while women, children, the old and feeble are left to join the mass exodus.

David Scheffer, Ambassador-at-large, said the Nato figure of some 3,200 Kosovars killed so far was "a very low" estimate. "You're actually looking at the possibility of tens of thousands of Kosovars who not only are at risk, but may actually have perished by this stage," he said. "We have upwards to about 100,000 men that we cannot account for . . . we have no idea where they are now."

Mr Scheffer said Serb paramilitaries massacred defenceless civilians before the Nato bombardment began four weeks ago - forcing them to kneel in ditches and shooting them in the back of the head. If current fears are proved to be true, he said, Milosevic could be indicted for war crimes, "he is certainly a prime target for investigation".

Chancellor Schršder of Germany said Milosevic, "has his own people deported, has his own people killed and eliminated [and] that certainly shows a certain type of character, and I am sure the international tribunal in The Hague would certainly take him to court."

A group of 13 backbench Labour MPs, led by Tony Benn and Tam Dalyell, rebelled against the Government in a late-night vote at the end of a 6.5-hour debate on Kosovo. They forced the vote on a technical motion but were attacked by Clare Short, the International Development Secretary, as a "disgrace to the Labour Party".