April Fool's Day
Skopje, Macedonia
After a few days of relative calm, the floodgates have opened here in Macedonia. Train after train of refugees arrives at the border, to disgorge thousands of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo to walk across on foot. Ethnic cleansing is a ridiculous phrase, really, to describe the scene. Many of these refugees are middle-class, from Pristina or the other larger towns that were largely unaffected by the war until the latest Serb offensive and NATO air strikes. Old women carried in blankets, crying babies, crying people, people trying desperately on their mobile phones to piece together their families and find out what's happened to those left behind. Stories of robbery, extortion, executions, arson. I don't suppose that I really need to add to what you can read in the paper or see on TV. And in Macedonia the visible crisis is confined to the border zone, which the police and army have sealed off to ordinary people (aid workers and journalists get through). Here in Skopje you wouldn't realize what's happening ten miles away, except for the news and the conversations.

For the last two days we were worried sick about one of our translators, Laura, we were able to talk to her still intermittently over the phone, and heard finally that she was going to try to get out. They left in five cars, and all except the one that she was in were stopped and stolen, and her friends told us that they saw no more of her after that, so you can imagine our relief when we saw her waving to us at the border post, and she got in at long last after hours of bureaucracy. Her father stayed behind, and we've now heard that their neighborhood in Pristina is being "cleansed," that is, everyone told to get out.

11 April