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SOLDIERS from the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers are having to mount a 24-hour guard to protect two elderly Serb women, the only survivors of an ethnic Albanian purge of their home town.
The women, in their 80s, are besieged in a flat above the high street of the northern town of Podujevo. Looters and scores of children throw stones at their windows and spit at them in the street. Three or four times a week the soldiers take Jelica Cimburovic and Jelica Milanovic under armed guard to the local shops, but most storekeepers refuse to serve them.
Mrs Cimburovic, 87, said: "We are living in a jail. We don't know anything about what has happened to our relatives since the phones were cut three months ago." Hundreds of Serbs lived in the town then but now the two women - one almost deaf and the other with high blood pressure - are all that stands between Albanian nationalists and their dream of an ethnically pure town.
Six months ago Serbian interior ministry troops backed by Yugoslav army armoured personnel carriers and tanks roamed the deserted streets of Podujevo, barely five miles from Serbia. Most of the 120,000 ethnic Albanians who lived in the area eked out a miserable existence in the shadows in constant fear of arrest, torture or even death at the hands of the Serbian authorities.
That changed when the British arrived. Today the streets teem with traders, shoppers and children. But for the ladies living at 5 JNA Ulica (Street of the Yugoslav National Army) life has all but ended.
To add to the ladies' woes they have now fallen out. Mrs Cimburovic, who took in Mrs Milanovic when she was chased from her own home, now wants her to leave. As the two ladies sat together, Mrs Cimburovic said: "At the beginning it was OK and we even shared a bed. But now I hate her. All she does is smoke and talk a lot. I want her out."
A British military policeman said: "I'm afraid the old dears are having a bit of a domestic." But if Mrs Milanovic moves to her home that will mean more British soldiers and another 24 hour guard.