BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Fearing vengeance from returning Kosovo Albanians, about a quarter of the Serbs in Kosovo -- more than 75,000 -- have fled the province in the 18 days since Serbian forces began pulling out of the province, according to officials from the Yugoslav Red Cross.
Those officials said they were running short of food and other supplies to care for a flood of refugees that they did not expect and are not prepared to handle.
The senior official in Belgrade for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said the plight of the Serbs who have become refugees inside Serbia is urgent, although not yet desperate. He said, too, that the world has an obligation to act quickly to help the homeless Serbs this summer, just as it acted in the spring to help Albanians chased out of Kosovo.
"There is a risk the international community will not maintain its objectivity and sensitivity," said Eduardo Arbleda, the representative for the refugee agency.
The Serbs, running from what aid officials in Kosovo describe as a dangerous and unstable situation, are the latest in a seemingly endless and invariably miserable series of forced mass migrations that have characterized life in the former Yugoslavia during a decade of ethnic war.
The trigger for this latest exodus, which is sending most of the Serbs into impoverished towns in central Serbia where factories and bridges have been pounded by NATO bombs, was the success of the alliance's effort to undo the forced exodus of nearly 1 million Albanians from Kosovo.
Albanians seek vengeance
Reassured by the presence of NATO forces, more than 415,000 Kosovo Albanians have returned, and hundreds of thousands more are expected in coming weeks. But aid officials say that many of them are coming back with their hearts set on vengeance and that the 21,000 NATO troops deployed so far are not enough to guarantee the safety of Serbian civilians.
"The Serbs are very much under siege and very much want to get out," Dennis McNamara, the special envoy to the Balkans for the U.N. refugee agency, said by phone from Pristina, the Kosovo capital.
The agency estimated last week that 50,000 Serbs had fled Kosovo for Serbia. But Arbleda, the agency's chief here in Belgrade, said the 75,000 figure given yesterday by officials from the Yugoslav Red Cross is probably more accurate.
All these numbers, aid officials say, are rough estimates because of the confused flow of people in Kosovo.
