Among the worst affected by Serbia's ethnic cleansing of Kosovo have been the translators and local staff employed by the monitoring mission of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The monitors pulled out four days before the NATO air strikes. The chief of mission, William Walker, evacuated some of his own local staff, and the smaller independent American monitoring team evacuated its translators. But more than 1,400 translators, drivers and office staff, many known to be at risk, were left by the OSCE to fend for themselves. Many are still missing.
Alma Sallauka, a 24-year-old English language student, worked as a translator for the British-led monitoring centre in the south eastern town of Prizren, one of five operated in Kosovo by the OSCE. Her nightmare began on the morning of Friday, March 19th, when she arrived for work with her team, named Co-ordination Centre Two, to hear from her boss that they had been ordered out. "He called us all, about 18 members. He said we must leave and that's our order," she said. "He said he could take us as far as the border but no farther. It was hard, but anyway I had to stay with my mother. He said `I hope we can work again with you'. I said `OK if you find me alive'."
Alma and the other translators helped the OSCE monitors pack and destroy documents at their base, a former factory headquarters on the outskirts of town. The next morning they stood watching as the monitors, in their orange jeeps nicknamed Pumpkins, drove out of the compound and away to the border.
Four days were to pass before NATO, after seeing a final round of talks fail, ordered in the bombers. But Serb attacks began even as the Pumpkins headed south.
On Saturday afternoon, Serb artillery began hammering rebel strongholds north-west of Prizren. From the fourth floor of her large family house in the town centre, Alma could see smoke from the bombardment of one village, Bella Crka. "I could hear the shells, I wanted to count them. There were about 175 just for two hours, just into Bella Crka."
Soon refugees arrived in town telling stories of attacks by the Serbian paramilitaries - gangs of armed civilians: "There came some women and they said that their husbands were all killed in front of them - 70 massacred," she said. "We didn't leave, we were waiting for when NATO is going to start bombing. We had great hopes for NATO. They weren't good at all because they started bombing on the 24th. Until those days it was all around fighting."
Prizren was quiet, the streets empty. She called friends across the province - including her best friend in the northern town of Pec, who said the paramilitaries were on the streets, the town was ablaze and she was terrified. It was to be their last contact, and Alma has yet to locate her friend.
Serb troops meanwhile spread out from nearby Prizren barracks, commandeering local houses whose inhabitants fled to the Sallauka home, already housing five families who had lived there since last year's fighting.
"We were about 100 people in that basement - old, children, women. The men of those families who came to our houses, they were hiding somewhere near to see what would happen to their houses."
Four days later came the first bombs, initially hitting only the capital Pristina, but blasting the nearby barracks two nights later. "It was eight o'clock in Prizren when they bombed. The whole house was shaking."
As if on cue, Serb paramilitary units emptied into the streets, blasting volleys of machine-gun bullets in all directions. "My father was outside, he didn't show up for half-an-hour. We were really scared. Those shootings were very near. We thought he must be dead, we thought we were going to find him dead in the morning. We had to lock the door, no hope for him." Half-an-hour passed in silence. Then from the basement they heard someone thumping on the front door. "Then my father came, we were so happy."
Then came the first of several lucky breaks for Alma. A Serb policeman repaid an old friendship with an uncle to tip the family off that police wanted both Alma and her father, Isa. He was suspected - correctly - of helping the Kosovo Liberation Army. She knew about her problem. "When I would go to see the Serbs with CC2, they would look at me and do this," she said, drawing a line across her throat. "Our local police, some of them were kind. They had one picture of me in the police station. They said anybody who worked for the OSCE or the KLA must go away."
She had 10 minutes to pack. "All my room I wanted to take with me. I had my paintings, my poems, I had lots of clothes." She could take one bag, and filled it with a few clothes, a pocket radio, washing kit, some of her modelling photographs and her diaries. "I took letters from OSCE people, I took some of my poems and my diaries."
An uncle drove the family - Isa, Alma, her mother Nurije, 17-year-old sister Albana and 13-year-old brother Alban - through Prizren's back streets, as paramilitary and police units wandered along the main roads, to a friend's house near the town centre. For five days they hid, keeping the blinds drawn, close to the river that was the jewel of Prizren, Kosovo's main tourist attraction in years past with its cobbled streets and ruined castle high on a nearby hill.
More bombing followed, and more shooting. "After NATO bombed, they would start shooting. We didn't know where to hide. Very scary."
Only her mother continued to go out - she worked as a nurse at Prizren hospital, and had a special pass. She bought groceries for her own family and the dozens of others hiding with them, using money saved from Alma's OSCE work. Shops remained open - ordered to do so by the police, who wanted to ensure that the Serb minority in the town could continue to eat.
"There were too many people in that house; we were sleeping on stairs; everybody was sleeping on first and second floor, on the stairs, under the stairs."
Her mother returned one day to say she had watched as houses which had been rented to the OSCE monitors were bulldozed. "In those days they were destroying all the OSCE houses. They destroyed them with tanks because they were so angry with OSCE," said Alma. "The families had already left these houses because they knew what was going to happen."
News of the war came via her radio, tuned to the BBC and the crackling stations in Albania. By day they watched Albanian Television, wondering when NATO troops would arrive. Then, at 11 o'clock one night, a car stopped in front of the house. Alma, trying to sleep wedged under the sill of the large sitting-room window, lay still. There was a pause, then a loud bang. Someone had tossed a grenade into the garden. It landed in front of the family's car, which took the brunt of the blast, and her window remained intact. But it was time to leave.
They ran upstairs, the men clambering on to the roof to get to the house next door and urging the women to follow. "I could fall off so I said `no I'm not going to do that'," she said. "Anyway, the old ladies, my mother, could not do that. I said I'm going to stay with my mother." They ran back downstairs, went outside and scrambled, helping each other, over the wall into the next garden.
But the next day they had to move again. "The occupants of that house were afraid because I was a member of the OSCE. They were very polite, they didn't mention that but I could see they were frightened about me. I said `I'm going to move away'."
By now it was too dangerous to use the streets, but the inhabitants of Prizren had found another way of moving through town. They smashed holes in the partition walls in the lofts of each house, allowing people to move along an entire street inside a row of terraced houses. In this way her family moved across town, waiting for quiet before dashing from one row of houses the short distance to the next, on a journey which skirted the town centre to the Turkish quarter.
Prizren had once prided itself on being home to the most ethnically diverse population in Kosovo - possibly in the Balkans. As well as having Serbs and Albanians, it was home to Croats, slavic Muslims, Jews, gypsies and one of the smallest ethnic groups in the Balkans, the Gorans. The Turks, who lived in a jumble of pretty houses in the shadow of the town's medieval castle, occupied an uneasy halfway position between Serbs and Albanians - distrusted by the Serbs for being Muslim yet not as detested as the Albanians.
For five days they lived in a basement, listening to the radio, while the man of the house brought bread and eggs and pasta. "I didn't eat much," said Alma. "I think I was 40 kilos, not more."
But, as the days passed and more and more stories came, some via Alma's radio, of raids, shootings and rapes, their hosts got nervous. "The people in that house, not the man who knew us but his brother, said the Serbs are searching for OSCE. He was not so polite, he said I do not want to have OSCE members here because I fear for my family." It was time to move yet again.
They went to another house in the Turkish district, where they got a very different reception. "He was a very good friend of my father. He said `What happens to you, happens to us, I don't mind.' "