UN race against time to clear refugee camps

A newly-born baby and an 87-year-old man suffering from gangrene were among a group of Kosovar refugees bundled into helicopters as an international effort to empty camps near the embattled northern Albanian frontier gathered momentum yesterday.

In the first such airlift, 29 "vulnerable" refugees were flown in two Chinook helicopters to camps in central and southern Albania.

Frontier battles between Serbian forces and the increasingly aggressive Kosovo Liberation Army in recent days have heightened the sense of urgency among aid officials to relocate more than 30,000 refugees from camps around Kukes. The airlifted people were relatives of 1206 refugees who have been moved southward since the organised relocation began four days ago, said Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. "The idea is to convince them to move, and so far we have been successful," said Kaspriot Islami, the Albanian government's coordinator for humanitarian affairs. "I don't think they will refuse. They are intelligent enough." But many refugees prefer to remain close to their homeland, while the KLA finds the frontier camps fruitful recruiting grounds. "We have no future," said Jalldez Kabash, 61, who is partially- paralysed. Weeping into a handkerchief before boarding a helicopter, he added: "They told us we had to move from here because it was a dangerous area". Rocking her two-week-old baby on her knees, Hajrie Duborlluka was looking forward to a reunion with her husband, who left for the Hamallaj refugee camp, near the Albanian seaport of Durres, on Friday. Duborlluka said Serb authorities had ordered her out of a maternity ward in her native town of Kosovska Mitrovica, in the north of the country. Her family fled and she gave birth at one of the refugee camps around Kukes. Shouldering rifles, Italian, Dutch and American soldiers helped ailing refugees and small children into the helicopters. Some were carried in stretchers. One woman fainted. Bardhosh Idrizi, 87, was brought aboard in the arms of his son, his right foot thickly bandaged after an operation to amputate several toes. His gangrene, he said, was spreading. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that more than 840,000 people, the vast majority of them ethnic Albanians, have left Kosovo since Nato began its air assaults on March 24. Nearly 450,000 have sought refuge in Albania. A major international project is underway to set up or expand camps in southern and central Albania to receive the refugees from the northern frontier zone. A more informal southward move is taking place at the same time. While the exodus from Kosovo continues, recently those being relocated have outnumbered new arrivals, who have averaged several hundred a day. Rupert Colville, of the UNHCR, said 425 crossed into Albania at the border checkpoint of Morini on Friday. Lt Gen John Reith, who oversees Nato's humanitarian effort in Albania, denied rumours that Nato forces would move into vacated refugee camps around Kukes. "The military normally doesn't put its camps within range of enemy fire unless it's fighting forward," he said. Meanwhile, in Macedonia, more ethnic Albanian men released from a Serb jail this week have described how they were tortured and starved. Aziz Maksuit, his body covered with bruises, told how he had spent a month and 10 days in jail. His ordeal started, he said, when he was playing chess with a friend in his apartment in Pristina, Kosovo's provincial capital, about a week after the bombing started. Serb paramilitary police broke down the door, kicked his seven-year-old daughter, breaking her hand, and took Maksuit to the local police station. They accused him of being a member of the KLA and made him strip and lie face-down on a table. They slowly beat his body with a metal baton, starting with the soles of his feet. Then they turned him over and beat the top of his body. That night they took him to an ethnic Albanian graveyard, where he said they showed him a pile of bodies covered with blankets. They held a gun to his throat and pulled the trigger, but the gun was not loaded. "They told me, 'It's too early for you to die'," Maksuit said. His clothes - the same ones he was wearing when he was arrested - were filthy, and he pulled up his trouser leg to reveal a foot and leg which were green with bruises. Maksuit said that the next day he was taken with a group of ethnic Albanian men to a prison in the town of Lipljane, about 12 miles south of Pristina, adding that the men were given only tiny amounts of beans, salt and water, and were beaten daily. Similar stories of abuse were related by many of about 2000 former prisoners who arrived in Albania last week. It is unclear why they had been released. l A five-judge military panel in Belgrade convicted two Australian aid workers of espionage yesterday and sentenced them to prison. CARE worker Steve Pratt was sentenced to 12 years, and Peter Wallace was handed a four-year term. A Yugoslav CARE worker, Branko Jelen, received a six-year term. Pratt and Wallace have been in custody since March 31, when they were arrested by Yugoslav authorities for alleged spying when they tried to cross the border into Croatia en route to Kosovo. Attorneys for the aid workers said they planned to appeal to the supreme military court.

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