‘Why are you leaving?’

Lynne Mastnak, a child psychiatrist, records the daily round in Kosovo before and since the bombing

1 January, Pristina. The UNHCR security officer rang early this morning to say that the main road through the area of Likovc, in Drenica, was now clear. We have been wanting to set up an emergency clinic there for the last two months, but it has been off-limits to all humanitarian aid workers since an International Committee of the Red Cross vehicle hit a mine, killing one doctor and seriously injuring another. Drenica was the poorest part of Kosovo long before the current wave of violence, and the region that suffered most from the weapons searches and arrests inflicted by the Serb police force on the predominantly Albanian population over the previous decade. It was here that the KLA first emerged a year ago, and here that some of the fiercest assaults were carried out by the Yugoslav military during the offensive of 1998.