Nearly 4,000 ethnic Albanians have fled Macedonia during the weeklong fighting between ethnic Albanian guerrillas and Macedonian forces, the United Nations refugee agency said yesterday.
Mr Kris Janowski, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said 2,300 ethnic Albanians had crossed from Macedonia into Albania and 1,300 into southern Serbia.
A further 7,640 Macedonians have been displaced within the country, according to the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
Mr Janowski, who called for a halt to the fighting, told a news briefing the exodus from Macedonia was "not a mass movement" and that families on both sides were taking precautions to "wait out" the clashes.
About half the ethnic Albanians crossing into Albania went on to Kosovo, while many of those arriving in Serbia planned to go to Bosnia or Croatia, he said.
"The people who are fleeing are ethnic Albanians who do not want a war and don't want their families in harm's way, just like the Macedonians don't want their families in harm's way," Mr Janowski said.
Mr Denis McClean, spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said that the Macedonian Red Cross had registered 7,640 displaced Macedonians.
The Red Cross spokesman, Mr Vincent Lusser, said the Swiss-run agency was doubling its staff to 10 in Skopje. It is distributing food and aid to the displaced, and is supplying a hospital treating wounded in the flashpoint town of Tetovo.
"To stir up trouble in Macedonia is extremely dangerous. Really it is playing with fire," Mr Janowski said. "In the end, this kind of thing always causes mass suffering of civilian populations on both sides. So it is in everybody's best interest just to stop it."
About 150 refugees from Macedonia, mostly ethnic Albanians, arrived in the northern Bosnian town of Tuzla yesterday, the UNHCR in Sarajevo said. "We are aware that three buses from Skopje arrived in Tuzla on Monday via Zvornik [a border crossing between Bosnia and Yugoslavia]," Ms Aida Feraget, the spokeswoman for the UNHCR in Bosnia-Herzegovina said. "They are mostly ethnic Albanians," she added.
The UNHCR interviewed the refugees, and established that none of them wanted help from the agency. They said they would stay with their Bosnian relatives and friends, a spokeswoman said. "We also learned that none of them had been forced to leave their homes in Macedonia," she added. A Western diplomat who requested anonymity said another group of some 200 refugees from Macedonia was expected to reach Bosnia via Yugoslavia in the next two days.