The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Ms Sadako Ogata, arrived in Belgrade yesterday for a five-day regional visit to focus world attention on the plight of Kosovo's refugees. Her visit coincides with new moves towards military intervention in the conflict by the UN and NATO.
Ms Ogata met Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and called for a ceasefire and dialogue to end the conflict between Serbian security forces and ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo. She also demanded that the UNHCR and other humanitarian organisations be given access to the refugees. Mr Milosevic's office said after the talks that reports of a humanitarian catastrophe caused by Serbia's drive against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo were "just part of a campaign being waged against Yugoslavia".
But Ms Ogata's spokesman, Mr Kris Janowski, said: "We see it as more serious and more dramatic than Milosevic." Both parties nonetheless "agreed to do what is possible to bring more security and shelter" to displaced persons, "particularly those living outdoors," Ms Ogata said after the meeting. Ms Ogata will travel to the Kosovo capital, Pristina, on Saturday for talks with ethnic Albanian political leaders. She will also hold talks with diplomats and representatives of humanitarian groups.
The UNHCR is warning that almost 300,000 people have been displaced by the fighting in the Serbian province, since Mr Milosevic sent in troops and heavily-armed special police units in February to crack down on an independence drive. Kosovo's population is 90 per cent ethnic Albanian.
Around 200,000 people have sought shelter in the forests and mountains of the province. Others have fled across the border to Montenegro - Serbia's partner republic in the rump Yugoslavia - to neighbouring Albania or to Bosnia or Macedonia. Thousands have little food and no shelter as winter approaches.
Faced with a massive influx of refugees from Kosovo, EU justice and interior ministers yesterday offered additional aid, the Austrian Interior Minister, Mr Karl Schogel, said.
The ministers meeting in Brussels expressed concern for the refugees who are without shelter at the approach of winter and asked their foreign ministers to increase aid. In early September, the EU foreign ministers meeting in Salzburg agreed to give an additional 5 million ecus (£4.84 million) as humanitarian aid to Kosovo refugees.
EU member-states are experiencing a steep rise in the number of Kosovo refugees seeking asylum. Britain has registered a 600 per cent increase in the number of refugees from the former Yugoslavia, 90 per cent of whom are Kosovars. France lets in an average of 100 to 120 asylum seekers per month, while Germany allowed in as many as 3,457 persons in August, almost all of them from Kosovo.
Meanwhile, Mr Ahmet Krasniqi (50), Kosovo's so-called defence minister who was killed by unknown gunmen near his home in the Albanian capital on Monday, was buried in Tirana yesterday with full Albanian military honours.
Albanian national guardsman fired a round of honour as Mr Krasniqi's coffin was lowered into the grave, while a military band played the funeral march as several hundred people looked on.
Representatives of several Albanian political parties were at yesterday's funeral, along with a delegation from Kosovo, where Serbian security forces are battling ethnic Albanian separatists of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
In a funeral address, a Kosovo Albanian leader, Mr Ibrahim Shala, vowed ethnic Albanians would continue their fight for independence from Serbia until victory.
Albanian and Serb sources in the Kosovo capital, Pristina, said Mr Shala was in charge of placing KLA fighters under the command of the Kosovo armed forces, a small grouping that Kosovo's ethnic Albanian political leader, Dr Ibrahim Rugova, is trying to set up as an army.
"Ahmet Krasniqi was a brilliant figure who put in place the basis for the Kosovo armed forces," Mr Shala said. He accused Yugoslav secret services of being behind Mr Krasniqi's death.