THE Prime Minister was visibly shaken by his own first-hand experience of the plight of the Kosovan refugees - and rightly angered by the evil ethnic cleansing of the Serbs that driven 1.5 million people, 90 per cent of the province's Albanian community, from their homes. His wife was moved to tears.

Yet, sorrow and anger do not feed, clothe or house these victims.

And the war which is being justly waged by Nato to restore them to their homes and safeguard them there has had, in an interim whose end cannot yet be seen, the opposite effect of them being uprooted in hundreds of thousands.

They have, as Mr Blair himself saw for himself, swamped neighbouring Albania and Macedonia. The first, to where 400,000 have fled, is poor and volatile. The other, fearing unrest if its own ethnic balance is overturned by the influx of Albanian Kosovars, is a reluctant host, agreeing only to act as a staging point for the 200,000 already there.

But as the war drags on, the time has come for compassion - and for Britain to deliver its share. These people - many of whom have experienced horrors equal to those of Hitler's holocaust - cannot be expected to remain indeterminately in the tented limbo of the refugee camps.

We must welcome them here - and the announcement that Britain, which so far has accepted only 330 of them, will now take as many as 1,000 a week. This may be a departure from the previous policy of keeping the refugees as close as possible to Kosovo so that their eventual return would be easier whereas their widespread dispersal would, in effect, assist Serb dictator Slobodan Milosevic's evil aims of purging Kosovo of its ethnic Albanian population.

But it is much more right and humane to offer these people the opportunity of decent living conditions rather than the potential squalor and degradation of camps where the sheer scale of the exodus puts immense strains on the host countries, on the relief agencies, on the refugees themselves and on such basics as health, feeding and sanitation.

And though the influx of thousands of them here will put pressure on our own resources - to the extent that old hospitals, schools and prison and even a disused holiday camp in Lancashire may be employed to accommodate them - it is our duty to give them not only shelter and succour, but also hope.

The intention remains that these people will one day return to their own homes to live in peace and security. That is what this war is for, but we must also accept responsibility for the effect it has had in the meantime of putting millions of them in flimsy tents in faraway fields.

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