Monday, April 26, 1999 Published at 11:09 GMT 12:09 UK
A refugee diary
Kosovar Albanian refugees arriving at Kukes
By BBC Correspondent Jeremy Bowen
The weight of human traffic is so heavy that the Albanian police hardly give the refugees enough time to pick up some water, fruit and BP5s - the high energy biscuits they give to refugees around the world.
Have the Serbs forced them back into Kosovo or are they being used as human shields? Well the truth is that nobody knows.
We can see into Kosovo and the town of Prizren is only about 15 minutes' drive on the other side of the border. But nobody can get there. Well, except people who are wearing Serb uniforms.
I keep trying to imagine what its like to lose everything, to have your life turned upside down in a minute.
Kukes is an immensely squalid town set in a spectacular landscape. Northern Albania's mountains, especially around the border with Montenegro, are stunning. It is a shame about some of the people.
Albania is the poorest country in Europe, I suspect by a very long way, but it has opened its doors wide to the Kosovo refugees.
Unfortunately, some of the mountain villages are run by bandits and the refugees try to get out of them as quickly as they can. Our own BBC team was robbed by masked men firing assault rifles, the other week. It was a very nasty few minutes.
I reckon they would have killed us, if they thought it necessary, without thinking twice.
Some people think reporters should stay aloof from what they are seeing, which is fine if you are made of stone. I have to admit I find the sight of these miserable people and the stories they tell very moving. It also makes me very angry.
Before I came to this place, I was sitting in a hotel in Montenegro, that at the time seemed shabby and now seems luxurious, talking to a colleague, who like me, had covered refugee stories for 10 years and more.
That just shows the dangers of listening to experienced journalists sitting around bars. In fact, the opposite has happened. The continuing forced deportations of Kosovar-Albanians have intensified the impact of it all, on me at least.
I've been watching people being burned out of their homes in the Balkans since Yugoslavia started to break up in 1991. That's eight years, for goodness sake. It's too much.
All the refugees I've spoken to are delighted that Nato is trying to get them home but all of them think it will only happen if ground troops go in. Some think the Kosovo Liberation Army can do the job but having seen them I doubt it.
Wouldn't mind a break from this place soon. It looks as if the crisis over Kosovo is going to go on for months.
I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that the 20th Century is ending like this. After all, our century has been the most blood-soaked in human history.
I'm starting to think that the long peace that we had after 1945 and then the end of the Cold War in 1989 fooled us all. Perhaps Europe's natural condition is to be turbulent.
When the Balkan war started in 1991, I remember seeing a tank moving through a burning village in Croatia, one beautiful sunlit late summer afternoon. It looked like a movie.
But that day, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. War in Europe. That was supposed to belong to the past, but now we've got used again to war. The big powers are being sucked in and it seems to be escalating fast.