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By Barbara Demick

April 6, 1999 | SKOPJE, Macedonia -- The refreshments were carefully laid out on a banquet table in Skopje's Continental Hotel. It was Friday morning and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees had summoned the diplomatic corps of Macedonia to a brunch meeting to discuss the emerging refugee crisis. Twelve miles away, in Blace, the main border crossing from Kosovo into Macedonia, there was little evidence of such careful preparation.

Alongside the railroad tracks that lead from Pristina runs a broad, green valley. Spilled into that valley Friday were more people than I'd ever seen in my life, a mass gathering to rival the most extravagant David O. Selznick epic. There were 50,000 Kosovo refugees, maybe 65,000 or more -- too many for anybody to count -- and that didn't include a column snaking back 20 miles from inside Kosovo, all waiting to cross.

At least at first, the refugees were giddy with relief to be in Macedonia. Most had been robbed, shelled, shot at by snipers and half-starved by the Serbs before being rounded up in trains and trucks, then dumped ignominiously in the field at Blace. But as the sun slunk behind the mountains -- the darkening sky exuding a steady drizzle, temperatures slipping into the 40s -- the horror of their circumstances began to sink in.

Panic swept through the crowd. They pushed over one another to grab woolen blankets tossed from a cardboard box. But without tents, without even plastic sheeting, the blankets would soon turn soggy. Food rations consisted of bread and water, and not enough of either. The refugees scrounged the ground for used plastic bottles to fill from a water tanker, turning to a none-too-clean stream next to the tracks when the tanker ran dry. They sheepishly looked for clumps of trees behind which they could relieve themselves, but with Macedonian soldiers wielding batons to cordon them into the valley, the call of nature overpowered decorum. By Saturday, the valley was filled with human excrement.

Endeavoring to maintain order, the Macedonian soldiers wanted to keep the journalists out of the valley. So I watched from above with my 24-year-old translator, Alban, a university student who had escaped Pristina himself two weeks earlier. The refugees in this field of horrors had come mostly from Pristina. Horrified, Alban scanned this writhing sea of human misery for familiar faces.

"I know these people. I used to see them in the cafes. I can't explain to you. They used to wear nice clothes. They looked cool. I can't recognize people now. It is night and day," he struggled to tell me.

It is a terrible thing to be a refugee, forced out of one's home at gunpoint with no money or belongings. It is quite another level of horror to be dumped into a field of mud and shit and left to forage like an animal for food and warmth. Where were the tents? Where was the plastic sheeting? Where was the food? Where were the portable toilets? Where was the evidence that NATO, which says it anticipated the mass displacement of Kosovars that would begin with the bombing, had prepared for this predictable humanitarian crisis?

"We are overwhelmed," pleaded Paula Ghedina, the UNHCR's spokeswoman in Skopje. "The mechanisms were set up for 2,000 to 3,000 people a day. We were taken aback by the numbers."

But although it is possible that nobody imagined Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic would have the chutzpah to empty out Pristina, a city of 350,000, so quickly, his campaign did not occur without warning. By March 26, two days after the NATO airstrikes were launched, NATO had reports that tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians had been kicked out of their homes in north and central Kosovo. On March 31, spy satellites detected up a column of refugees eight miles long being marched out of Pristina. How could anyone then claim to be surprised when those miles of refugees poured over the border on the weekend?

More plausible is a cynical, not-for-attribution explanation offered by another UNHCR official:

"People have to see these images on television before anybody cares. We did anticipate that up to 1 million people would come across the borders. But if we had said a few weeks ago, we need $2 billion and all these C-130s (transport planes) we would have been laughed at ... It is not until people start dying that the world pays attention."

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