The human toll of the violence in Yugoslavia grew more grim yesterday as NATO leaders said close to half a million terrified ethnic Albanians now have been driven from their homes.
As many as 50,000 refugees from the villages and cities of Kosovo have poured into neighboring countries in the last few days alone amid reports of horrifying atrocities.
“We have to recognize that we are now on the brink of a major humanitarian disaster … the likes of which we have not seen in Europe since the closing days of World War II,” said NATO spokesman Jamie Shea.
An estimated 27 percent of the population in the war-torn Yugoslav province has now fled, NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana said.
Violence – including mass murder, rape, looting and burning – against the ethnic Albanians has surged since the boost in attacks began, allied leaders said.
“The information we have at this time is very clear: President [Slobodan] Milosevic’s policy will undoubtedly lead to an ethnic cleansing of Kosovo,” Solana told French television.
Most of the refugees are women and children – who have no idea what happened to their men after they were separated from them by Serb forces.
Officials in nearby Macedonia and Albania pleaded for help handling the throngs flooding across their borders – and Albanian authorities called for NATO to send in ground troops.
But on its fifth day of airstrikes, NATO had no plans to commit troops to the region, Solana said.
Kosovars told contacts in London that Serb forces were roaming the provincial capital Pristina, pillaging and burning Albanian shops, and that almost half the town of Djakovica appeared to be demolished.
They said Serbian police were also emptying ethnic Albanian neighborhoods in the larger town of Pec, north of Djakovica, and setting fire to houses there.
The reports could not be confirmed as independent monitors have left and foreign reporters expelled.
U.S. officials shook off suggestions that the air strikes have caused the bloody crackdowns on ethnic Albanians.
“To say that this has now backfired is just dead wrong,” said Secretary of State Madeline Albright in an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation.
“Before [ Milosevic] was doing it with impunity. We are now making sure that he pays a very heavy price,” she said.