Macedonia Refugee Camps Completely Full -UNHCR

SKOPJE (Reuters) - Macedonia's refugee camps are now completely full and if any more Kosovo refugees arrive Tuesday, they will have to sleep out in the open under plastic sheeting, a U.N. humanitarian official said.

``We passed breaking point last night,'' Paula Ghedini, spokeswoman for refugee agency UNHCR told Reuters. ``If we get any more today, we're going to have to give them plastic sheeting and have them camp in between the other tents.''

Ghedini said the building of a new camp in Cegrane, 70 km (44 miles) from the capital Skopje, was behind schedule and it would not now be ready to receive refugees until Thursday at the earliest.

She said tents could not be erected between existing tents in the refugee camps because it would be a fire hazard. Although having refugees sleeping out was not ideal ``it's still preferable to being in no man's land,'' she said.

Some 150 tents had already been erected at Cegrane by Tuesday morning but work contracted out to a Macedonian company to level the land in preparation for sanitary installations was still incomplete. The work was due to have been completed within 48 hours.

Some 3,000 refugees arrived from Kosovo Monday, turning the main Blace border crossing into Macedonia into a bottleneck as they backed up behind 2,500 others waiting in a small transit area to be squeezed into the overflowing camps. Busloads of refugees began arriving Tuesday and another big trainload was expected later.