Up to 6,000 Kosovo Albanians fled to Macedonia yesterday, threatening to overcrowd its refugee camps again and raising political temperatures in the small Balkan state.
"It's between 5,000 and 6,000 now and they are still coming," said Ms Astrid van Genderen Stort, field officer for the UNHCR refugee agency at the Blace crossing between Yugoslavia and Macedonia, 30 km north of the capital, Skopje.
The new arrivals raise the total number of refugees who have come to Macedonia since Saturday to about 20,000.
The refugees came by bus and train to the border, where dozens of Macedonian buses started to take them to camps.
Chaotic scenes broke out as police eased controls and several dozen relatives waiting on the Macedonian side rushed to the buses trying to find loved ones they had lost in the exodus from the devastated Serbian province.
Many newcomers were too exhausted to speak. Some cried quietly.
Yesterday's influx came after a tense overnight standoff between Macedonian authorities, who wanted to send some of Saturday's arrivals straight to Albania, and the UNHCR, which said no one should go against their will.
Refugees who arrived on Sunday morning spent many hours in the no-man's land near the border in pouring rain. Finally, in the middle of the night, a long and silent stream of exhausted women, children, elderly people and some men poured into the holding camp by the crossing.
They were transported to other refugee camps yesterday.
The UNHCR has been trying to persuade some refugees to move to Albania but most of them see no sense in the move.
"If indeed they are willing, we are more than happy to do that," said UNHCR spokesman Mr Ron Redmond. "So far, we haven't had a lot of takers on that but we are still trying."
Mr Redmond said the UNHCR understood the concerns of the Macedonian government, which says it cannot cope with the massive influx.
"We are being told there are many, many thousands of people who want to come out. They [the government] are as much worried about this as we are," he said.
In the last few days the number of refugees in Macedonia has been growing quickly, despite continuing airlifts to other countries which have taken more than 66,000 people.
According to the UNHCR, there were 226,000 refugees in Macedonia less than a week ago, with 75,000 of them in the camps. Yesterday, Macedonia's interior ministry said there were 233,000, including 84,000 in camps.
Mr Redmond said about a further 10,000 could be accommodated in existing camps and talks were under way with the Skopje authorities to build another two.
Mr Redmond also said evicting people from Kosovo had been turned into a business.
"The Serbs are laying on a bus service there," he said. "Somebody is making a lot of money on that. They are charging 20 to 30 marks ($11 to $16) per person. It seems to be very well organised."
Meanwhile, more than 1,000 Kosovo refugees, including hundreds of exhausted and emaciated women and children and a new batch of ex-prisoners released from Serbian jails, crossed into Albania yesterday.
The women described how they had undertaken a two-week march and had had no food for the last two days.
Sixty men released yesterday morning from a jail at Mitrovica looked in a desperate state of health when they arrived.
Another busload of ex-prisoners was expected later yesterday. Most of the column of women were from Drenica in the centre of Kosovo and Orahovac in the south-west. Only a few men, mainly elderly, were in the group.
Weeping women described how armed Serb civilians had demanded money from them and then beaten them because they had none to hand over.
The refugees said younger men were hiding in the hills and sometimes tried to smuggle their way into the middle of columns of refugees heading for the border.
The UNHCR and the Albanian authorities are trying to persuade refugees to move to areas at a safer distance from the border.
But many refugees are refusing to budge, either because they want to stay close to their homeland, because they are afraid to move to another camp or because they still have relatives in Kosovo.
Aid agencies also need more space in the camps at Kukes, a small town in north-eastern Albania which has borne the burnt of the refugee exodus from Kosovo.
Albania is currently host to more than 437,000 Kosovo refugees.