"Help these people. Tell the world that we are dying"

Torpezo, 19 September (ARTA) 2100CET--

"Every day an old man or a child dies, not being able to bare the cold", stated the reporter of the Berlusconi TV network and reporter of the private Slovenian TV, after the visit made to the village of Torpezo, a village never mentioned before by the media and the humanitarian organizations. 13-15 thousand refugees, are besieged by the Serb forces and for two straight months they have received no assistance.

"For five months, nobody visited the village of Torpezo, on the road to Malishevo, which for two months now is under an iron Serb police siege. We entered this village by chance. We ran into the police who told us to get away from that zone, because there were many KLA soldiers", tells the Italian in his thirties. "We tried to enter the KLA zone, from several hundred meters away, but a group of other policemen, dressed in black came out from the bushes and banned us from entering "the dangerous zone". We besieged the "bandits" here, thus "you cannot get in".

We drove some several hundred meters inside the forest and we met an old man and a woman, lying under a bush covered with a blanket, all wet from rain. They were barely heard asking for help. We couldn't understand anything they said, except for the five fingers they were raising constantly. We understood that they were saying "five months, five months...", but we couldn't understand what were they trying to say. She pointed her finger in the direction of the valley. Thousands of people could be seen lying on the ground, as their coughs were being heard as a chorus of a collective disease. It was a terrifying site. A catastrophe.

"Every day, an old man or a child dies, not being able to bare the cold", tells us a girl in her twenties, speaking English quite fluently. They were all lying, waiting for help. Nobody had been there before. "We are forgotten. There is no medical help and there is no food coming. We are all going to die".

"Here, there are no KLA soldiers and we are waiting for the police to come in every day. They have surrounded us and blocked every exit. This is a massacre, only without knives, was saying the girl, that was escorting us, showing us every corner of sick and hungry people".

Help these people. Tell the world that we are dying", were the girl's last words.

"We returned, without seeing any KLA soldier or armed person, all we saw was people dying, without receiving any help. They were buried in an open grave, were telling the journalists, who were hurrying of from Prishtina to Italy and Slovenia to sent their exclusive material for their TV stations.

"We will tell the world that they are dying for help", said the colleagues from Italy and Slovenia.