NATO planes and a cruise missile roared high over Kosovo yesterday while far below a wall of silence greeted a United Nations team trying to find ethnic Albanians driven from their homes.
The delegation, the first major international humanitarian mission to Yugoslavia since the alliance began bombing on March 24th, was taken to a village where officials in Pristina had told them there would be hundreds of refugees.
When they arrived, hoping to hear what had happened to some 10,000 refugees they believe are in the area, villagers said most of them had never left their homes. It was not the place they had wanted to visit. Their Serbian hosts said that village, Petrovo, was too dangerous because of what they said was fighting between the security forces and ethnic Albanian rebels. The head of the team, the UN's emergency relief co-ordinator, Mr Sergio Vieira de Mello, was impatient.
For 2 1/2 days in Kosovo, officials had played hide-and-seek with the team of 11 delegates from various international agencies, taking them to empty villages and towns and telling them places they wanted to visit were barred.
"We have asked for several places and the answer has been No," Mr Vieira de Mello told local officials, who protested there were no civilians there anyway.
"We now have a pattern of denial which raises questions."
In Kosovo, access to many areas where the UN team believed most of those affected by the conflict were was denied. In the nearby town of Stimlje, locals were reluctant to speak to foreigners.