Aside from a moment of drama here and there the war is dwarfed into seeming insignificance by the brooding mountain landscape on which high explosives leave hardly a mark. Ethnic Albanians of the KLA have been using northern Albania as a staging ground for their guerrilla war against Yugoslav army and police forces inside Kosovo for more than a year. The war is at its most bitter in the mountains where Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro come together, arguably the most remote, impoverished and lawless area in all of Europe. Here the writ of government has never supplanted Lek's Kanun, an elaborate code of conduct whose most remarked upon feature is the blood feud. Even that gritty lubricant of social relations has collapsed under the weight of war.
Bandits make the work of journalists and aid groups nearly impossible in some areas.
Heavily armed bodyguards are essential even though they must be drawn from the same pool of robbers who pose the threat in the first place. Frontieres was attacked on Wednesday in Kosovo, south of the capital Pristina, Serb sources said. There were unconfirmed reports of some dead among the convoy but it was not immediately clear who had attacked it, the sources said. Ambulances from Pristina were sent to provide assistance, the sources said. The nationalities of the people traveling in the convoy were not immediately known.