But two men and a woman were prepared to take their chances for Nartila’s family.The bravest was a Serb, our driver Goran. Of course, no one did.
Some of the television crews were Serbs and understandably declined to enter an Albanian area. Several Western reporters thought, as one of them put it, that “the story can wait till tomorrow”, which was not a sentiment I planned to pass on to Nartila. When I persisted, he said he didn’t know where Nato’s liaison officers were but he took my mobile phone number and promised that someone would call back. The moment I saw one of the men scurrying away to another vehicle, I knew I had found my man. He couldn’t help, he said – without giving me time to tell of Nartila’s phone call. It was Nartila’s story of persecution that The Independent published last Friday.

I have to go back to try to save my parents.” Outside, in the dark, soaking streets of Pristina, there was shooting, some of it only a block away, but gunfire also came from the hill at Vranjevac where Nartila’s parents live. “It’s `Marija’,” she cried, using the Serb name by which we had agreed to call her “They are driving us out of our homes Please come – please bring as many people as you can. THE CALL came after dark, desperate and tearful. Our Albanian interpreter Nartila was on the phone, too frightened to come to our hotel but even more fearful for her parents. Mostly teenagers and exhausted, they looked so different from the figures we had seen on hilltop positions and who had occasionally fired at us to keep us away from the border..

How many minutes do you need to leave?”It was Col Delic who replied: “Six hours.”"That’s not possible You have 30 minutes,” said the German general. “If the refugees want to come in, they will not be stopped by German soldiers.”"But not now,” replied Colonel Jozef General Harff did not hesitate “This is not a border police force You are VJ (the Yugoslav army) and you must leave at once No discussion. “Kosovo refugees are trying to come across and we want to set up a roadblock,” said Colonel Feher Jozef of the Yugoslav army.”This is a free country There’s no frontier,” replied General Harff brusquely. Before the current crisis, there were about 10,000 Serbs in Prizren to 90,000 ethnic Albanians.Earlier in the day, General Helmut Harff, commander of German forces in Kosovo, showed the new German army is a force to be reckoned with. As the cameras rolled, he slapped down some of the Serbs’ rifle barrels and ordered them to move back down a side street. They did so slowly, shouting obscenities at the Albanian residents and waving the three-fingered Serb victory sign.Major List, in a red beret, quickly took on hero status here, wildly applauded every time he passed, always hanging precariously from the side of a Jeep.Almost single-handedly, he accompanied individual Serb civilian vehicles out of town.

That is when Major Harald List of the German army claimed his little part of history. They shouted: “We will be back and we’ll kill you all.”One soldier, wearing a black-and-white bandanna around his head, instilled particular terror on the locals and stopped only when he came up against a line of German soldiers.The Serb commander in Prizren, Colonel Bozidar Delic, fired three rifle shots over our heads and those of German soldiers. But it was difficult to feel sympathy.Some made a run for it in groups as German infantrymen tried to hold back the angry crowd. Others, including paramilitary fighters who had changed into civilian clothes, including a notorious paramilitary called Wilson who is in fact an ethnic Albanian, were still here last night, standing in streets alongside convoys of their vehicles, apparently waiting for the German troops to clear a path.Many of the Serb civilians cradled automatic weapons only 30 yards from where Albanians cheered the Germans.At one point, a Serb army platoon moved up to a main Prizren crossroads on foot, entering homes and threatening Albanian residents. “Where did you get the nice cars?” I asked, knowing most had been stolen from local ethnic Albanians.

“They are ours,” they replied.As we entered Prizren, we passed hundreds of civilian vehicles packed with Serbs, with their belongings piled on roof racks, waiting to try to leave in convoys. Clearly terrified Serbian civilians, in everything from ice-cream vans to packed lorries and a tractor, made it through the gauntlet just in time as the Albanian residents’ anger rose.When we drove into Kosovo from Albania after a tense drive ahead of German tanks that had postponed their entry – “there are mines and booby traps within centimetres of the tarmacked road surface” warned a senior German officer – we first passed deserted, burnt-out villages and huge craters caused by Nato bombs. The Serbs fired shots from their car windows, sending locals scattering.The Serb soldiers huddled in their vehicles as windscreens and windows were smashed. Ethnic Albanian residents tried to block the exit of local Serbs, then stoned their vehicles, kicked them and spat at them.