As we settle down to a warm and secure Christmas we should spare a thought for the 200,000 Roma and Serbs that have been ethnically cleansed from Kosovo to spend a cold Balkan winter within Serbia alongside several hundred thousand other traumatised Serbian victims driven from Bosnia and Croatia.

It is the largest concentration of refugees on the European continent.

To the eternal shame of Nato's political leaders the now-accepted illegal attack on the former Yugoslavia has brought suffering, pollution and death to thousands of people leaving us a direct moral responsibility for their plight.

The multi-billion pound bombing campaign was to prevent ethnic cleansing, or so we were told. Yet it has been reported last week that the KLA were still systematically persecuting the Serbs in the presence of Nato forces. The same terrorist KLA that was supposed to de-militarise within months of the Serb withdrawal.

Most Albanian refugees have now returned after their expulsion immediately after Nato's attack began. They are going to face difficulties with cluster bombs, minefields and depleted uranium pollution from Nato's ordnance. But they do have hundreds of aid organisations helping them rebuild their lives.

The Serbs have no such aid, just the slight hope that the Western public will one day understand their injustice. They never stood a chance in the propaganda war vigorously mounted against them when the initial air strikes resulted in the politically-devastating exodus of the Kosovo Albanians. We, and our MPs, should be demanding to know when all the refugees can return home in peace. Alec Featherstone,

Outgang Lane,

Pickering.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.