Because of the dangerous situation, relief workers were forced to leave Kosovo and abandon the people trapped there without food. At the borders, evidence of the Serbians' apparent desire to eradicate all Albanians from the former Yugoslavia province seems to grow stronger. In one startling instance, Macedonian authorities met a train of weeping men, women and children. Serb forces had herded them at gunpoint into the locked carriages and shipped them to a field just inside Macedonia. The arrival of the train from Pristina revealed that Serb forces had extended their rampage into the Kosovo capital, which originally had been spared from the assault.
Residents pick up refugees to take home.
Other stories of suffering revealed the gravity of the situation and the desperation in which refugees are finding themselves. Hundreds of ethnic Albanian peasants, who had spent several nights sleeping in a freezing forest to avoid Yugoslav military patrols, crossed the border illegally. Refugees claimed that even civilians, and in many cases their Serbian neighbors, were contributing to the massive ethnic cleansing by forcing people from their homes and burning entire villages. Some refugees claimed they encountered landmines and saw fellow wayfarers die in the explosions. Pregnant women and injured men traveled miles on foot, some without shoes and nothing but the clothes on their backs.