FED: Kosovars due to leave Australia today

AAP General News (Australia)
04-16-2000
FED: Kosovars due to leave Australia today

Almost 150 Kosovar refugees are due to leave Australia today, having exhausted all
possible avenues of appeal in their bids to stay.

And the federal government has moved against nine of the Kosovars who don't want to
leave, taking them into detention.

Immigration Minister PHILIP RUDDOCK says the nine have made it clear they won't leave
voluntarily by today's deadline.

The nine are among 146 refugees at the Bandiana Army Base near the NSW-Victoria border.

More than 30 of the Albanian Kosovars, given temporary refuge in Australia last year
to escape Serb violence in their homeland, are still refusing to return home.

Mr RUDDOCK says any more Kosovars who don't agree to leave by today will also be taken
into detention.

Albanian community spokesman ERIK LLOGA says the refugees were in a distressed state
when he visited them at Bandiana yesterday.

Mr LLOGA says most of those still refusing to go are from a region called Eastern Kosovo
-- an Albanian-dominated area inside Serbia itself.





Mr RUDDOCK's declined to say where the nine have been taken, but observers believed
they may have been flown to detention centres in Port Hedland or Woomera.

AAP RTV jg/sj/nl/rt/rp

KEYWORD: KOSOVO AUST (MELBOURNE)

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