Kosovan men describe how they were treated by Serbs

Hundreds more ethnic Albanian men crossed the Kosovo-Albania border yesterday, saying they had been released from a Serb-controlled prison in Smrekonica where they were beaten and underfed.

Some of them looked like teenagers, and several were weeping in shock as they crossed the border. The older men looked the most haggard, their faces drawn, hollow-eyed and haunted. Many looked emaciated.

Aid workers gave them blankets, food and liquids at the border point, a stone’s throw from the nearest Yugoslav police post. Some of the men wrapped the blankets around their shoulders and stared emptily out of the windows of buses as they chugged down the mountainous road to Kukes where tens of thousands of Kosovo refugees are sheltering.

The UNHCR refugee agency said 506 people had crossed the border yesterday, although it was too soon to confirm whether they had all come from the prison. At least five busloads of the men were seen descending into Kukes.

Of 608 people who crossed the border on Saturday, 523 said they had been held in the prison, the UNHCR reported.

"They treated us like animals. They beat us. They cut some men’s ears. They beat us in front of our families," Mr Bahri Hyseni (30) said, as he recalled the day he was separated from his family and put in prison 22 days ago.

"The first four days and nights they gave us nothing to eat. After that they gave us only one piece of bread a day. There were 450 of us living in one room about 12 metres square. We could not lie down, only sit," he added.

The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have fled Kosovo to Albania and Macedonia have been elderly people, women and children. Many of them have reported their men of fighting age being taken off by Serb militia.

This weekend’s arrivals at the main border checkpoint to Albania at Morina brought the first big group of men of fighting age, held on suspicion of being members of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

None of the men who have crossed the border was wearing a KLA uniform. The UNHCR said there was no evidence to suggest they were KLA members.

All the men interviewed said many hundreds more were still being held when they left.

Mr Fitim Syla (24) said he was so weak he could not lift even five kilograms. "I was lucky. I was beaten only on the hands, 70 to 100 times. Others were forced to fight with each other. They gave them broomsticks and told them to fight," he said.

A UNHCR spokesman said the men had been seized from a group of refugees which set off from the town of Mitrovica in central Kosovo in mid-April.

The men gathered around aid agency tents on the central square of Kukes to be registered. They were at a loss to explain why the Serb police had freed them but generally suspected it was meant as a sign that the men of fighting age who have been largely absent from refugee groups crossing into Albania and Macedonia had not all been killed.

A group of men in their 20s, 30s and 40s said they had been separated from their families fleeing Kosovo in a convoy, held first in private buildings and later in prison.

Based on their registration numbers and by adding up how many groups were let out of their cells for food, their estimates for the population of the prison ranged from 2,000 to 3,000.