SKOPJE (Reuters) - Some 40,000 Kosovo refugees stranded up to Tuesday in no-man`s-land on the Yugoslav border with Macedonia had disappeared on Wednesday and there were conflicting reports on what had happened to them. Paula Ghebini, spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR, said some 10,000 people had been brought to a holding centre at Blazhde. The centre is a transit point from which the refugees are either sent abroad, moved to permanent refugee camps or allowed to join their relatives living in Macedonia. UNHCR in Geneva said it believed thousands of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo had been bused out of Macedonia. Sources in Kosovo said there were rumours among the ethnic Albanian community that Serb forces had pushed some of the refugees back from the Yugoslav

side of the border towards the Kosovo capital of Pristina. They said that two days ago several trainloads of refugees bound for Macedonia had been turned back towards Pristina. Other sources said another possibility was that the refugees, hearing about a ceasefire offered by Belgrade, had gone back to their homes. Some sources working for international aid agencies said many people had been crammed into buses and sent to Albania, Greece and Turkey in line with Macedonian government policy. Macedonia says it can not cope with the flood of 120,000 refugees and charges that the West does little to help. It spares no effort in trying to send the refugees to other states. Ghebini said her agency was getting calls from people who have lost members of their families. "The refugees had been heavily guarded by police and the army. International aid agencies did not have direct access to the people who spent many days in a muddy field at the border waiting to be processed by the authorities. About a dozen died each night. Media reports about the plight of the refugees, with no proper shelter, medical or food supplies and the slow process of registering them and sending to safer places have provoked anger from the Macedonian government, which says it is doing all that it can.

JAZENOGIC, Macedonia - Yugoslavia closed the border point of Jazenogic on Wednesday and started sending back thousands of Kosovo refugees who had been waiting for days to cross into Macedonia. Reuters reporters saw Yugoslav police gesticulating to the refugees on their side of the border and car after car, full of those trying to flee Kosovo, started to turn back. International aid agencies estimated on Tuesday that no less than 20,000 Kosovars were waiting at this border point in a queue which stretched some 25 km (18 miles) back into Kosovo. Silence fell on some hundred Albanians waiting for their families and relatives on the Macedonian side as they watched the cars turning back. None of them believed the movement could be voluntary following Belgrade`s offer of a

ceasefire in Kosovo.