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UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Secretary-General Kofi Annan has expressed alarm at the humanitarian situation in Yugoslavia and said help is urgently needed if people there are to make it through the winter.
Annan urged donors to give ``prompt and generous support'' to a strictly humanitarian operation for vulnerable groups -- the poor, the elderly, children -- in Serbia and Montenegro, Yugoslavia's two republics.
Data collected by the United Nations indicates that this vulnerable population is growing, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said.
In addition to half a million refugees and internally displaced people from previous Balkan conflicts, an estimated 200,000 people from Kosovo have moved to other parts of Yugoslavia, he said.
U.N. officials are especially worried about the upcoming winter and whether people will have enough electricity to survive. Supplies are believed to be 30 to 50 percent below what is needed.
This ``threatens to deprive the urban poor -- the displaced, the elderly, children, the unemployed, the institutionalized -- of heating, running water, health care and the capacity to freeze and cook food,'' Eckhard said.
The Yugoslav population also faces other serious problems.
``The sharp contraction of the economy in 1999, coupled with inflation, is compounding severe pension and salary problems and dramatically reducing the population's resources,'' Eckhard said.
NATO launched airstrikes in late March to force Yugoslavia to withdraw its troops from Kosovo, a province in southern Serbia, and end a crackdown on ethnic Albanians.
In early June, Yugoslavia's government accepted a Western-backed peace plan that paved the way for NATO troops to enter Kosovo, for the United Nations to take over civil administration of the province, and for over 800,000 ethnic Albanian refugees to return.
Eckhard noted that a U.N. mission sent to the area in May drew attention to the atrocities in Kosovo but also advised that emergency humanitarian assistance was needed for vulnerable groups in Serbia and Montenegro.
Since July, he said, the United Nations has been gathering and disseminating data on priority needs from Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital.
``The secretary-general is alarmed at the deteriorating humanitarian situation in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (excluding Kosovo), particularly in view of the coming winter,'' Eckhard said in a statement.
Annan has asked U.N. humanitarian chief Sergio Vieira de Mello to lead efforts to mobilize resources to meet the needs, Eckhard said.