United Nations Report

Sunday, April 4, 1999

(Kosovo/refugee plight)

Karen Abu Zayd, U.S. Representative to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, says "we are now looking at perhaps up to a million refugees" coming out of Kosovo.

Refugees "are still streaming out, and all the refugees coming out, 25 kilometer queues of them past the border, are telling us that the villages behind them are being emptied out, just like Pristina was," Abu Zayd reported April 4 on CBS TV's Face the Nation interview program.

"We have exceeded our worst case scenario overnight," she said. There are now 360,000 refugees -- 204,000 in Albania, 115,000 in Macedonia, and 33,000 in Montenegro. The worst case scenario prepared not even a week ago had been for 350,000 refugees and the original estimate had been 100,000, she said.

Emergency teams are on the ground in the border areas, she said, and flights with supplies are going in, "but slowly." "We have asked NATO to help us" with logistical support, such as building tent cities, she said, noting that NATO already has set up a center for refugee operations at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva.

The fact that we have asked NATO to help, she said, shows the "desperate state of the refugees," because "we always try to keep the military operations separate from the humanitarian ones."

In Macedonia, she reported, "a lot of people are being kept in a kind of a no-man's land," not being able to move quickly into that country, while in Albania, where there are even more people in a poorer country, people are being moved on, and into people's houses, she said.

Abu Zayd said the U.N. High Commissioner made an appeal from Geneva the morning of April 4 to countries around the world to agree to take some of these refugees temporarily.

The refugees would much prefer to stay in the neighboring countries, so they could go home more quickly when it is possible, "but we have to respond to a country that says we are going to close our borders unless you take the refugees out," Abu Zayd said.

Asked how many refugees had died since fleeing Kosovo, she said "last night we had information that about eleven people had died, mostly the elderly and children, mostly from exposure and dehydration, so it's not too high the ones we can actually confirm."