We have all seen the human devastation caused by the Yugoslavian war. Pictures on the television and in the press have captured the human misery of the Kosovan exodus. But they still did not prepare Sally Burnheim of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) UK for the reality of encountering thousands of refugees in a field at Blace, in the no man's land between Kosovo and Macedonia.

Kosovan refugees

She sent a despatch describing the squalor and heartache of the makeshift camp before the 60,000 refugees were forced to leave by police and soldiers. Before that sudden, unexplained clearance, this bleak field was their temporary home.

Around 20 people a day were dying. They had no shelter or sanitation, andinadequate food, water and medicines. On Monday, a French doctor at the overstretched medical post told UNICEF they were receiving a new patient every minute. They were being brought in, young and old, on stretchers, blankets, in wheelbarrows and on the arms of relatives.

Many are suffering from hysteria and exhaustion. No one can be sure where they are now.

"Twenty-year-old Lumnije Azema approached us in tears," said Sally. "'My daddy is down in the field - he's sick and he can't walk,' she cried. After four days in the open her mother had collapsed with a panic attack.

"She and her two siblings brought their mother to the health post, but her father, grandmother and two younger sisters were prevented from following.

"She said that police were beating, kicking and pushing people. When children fell down, they stepped on them.

"Mothers shouted 'Don't beat our children', but they then intensified their beating."

The scale of the tragedy is overwhelming. UNICEF and other aid agencies had pre-positioned supplies for an anticipated influx of refugees in various centres throughout Macedonia. But nobody had anticipated the mass forced expulsion of people from Kosovo, or the delays at the border.

Busloads of people were being transferred to improvised transit camps where they could be registered, fed and sheltered until they are found a host family or granted asylum in Macedonia. So far most of the 35,000 refugees that have been admitted to Macedonia have been accommodated by host families, but houses are becoming overcrowded.

Amid the mass squalor of Blace, individuals told of their experiences. Sally recounted how a 21-year-old woman, Fatmira, had asked to use her mobile phone to call her uncle to find out whether she should board one of the departing buses.

"She and her father had been separated from her mother who was still down in the field. Now it seemed there was an end in sight to their ordeal.

"She laughed frequently as she recounted her experiences. She said she had not eaten or slept for days, and she talked of seeing dogs eating the bodies of murdered people in the streets of Bablo during the train journey from Pristina.

"She may have been traumatised by the unspeakable things she had been through, but her joy at finally getting out of the hell of Blace was genuine."

Carol Bellamy, executive director of UNICEF, has watched the tragedy unfold on the television screen like the rest of us.

"I was watching the television the other night, and suddenly there on the screen was the anguished face of a child - a girl, no more than six or seven - tearfully describing how her father had been left behind in the merciless evacuation.

"And as she spoke, the grandmother beside her was motioning hopelessly to the interviewer something that the child had yet to know: that her father had not merely been left behind, but was dead.

"It was a moment that seemed to me a perfect distillation of the overwhelming misery of the situation in Kosovo.

"What will it take for a child to recover from such a trauma? How many lifetimes before her psyche is made whole again?

"And how many scenes of equivalent horror are being played out in the Balkans?"

The bald statistics of this crisis are terrifying. According to the 1991 census, the population of Kosovo was nearly two million. More than 1.6 million ethnic Albanians were then in the country. Nato claims that 1.1 million of these have been internally displaced or forced out of Kosovo.

It is easy to feel powerless in the face of such an unimaginably vast crisis. But we can each play a part in easing the suffering.

UNICEF wants to raise millions of pounds to provide clothing and shelter, medicine and decent sanitation for the refugees.

To help: send in a donation - cheques and postal orders should be made payable to UNICEF - to UNICEF/Evening Press Kosovo Appeal, 54 West End, Strensall, York YO32 5UH. Or send off for a fundraising pack. Quick to organise events can range from a coffee morning, to a raffle or sponsored word search. Every penny counts.

see COMMENT 'We must save their lives now'

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