This week, one of those weary caravans almost crossed paths with another convoy on the highway linking Belgrade and the southern town of Nis. They did not meet and it will thus forever remain a mystery what they had to say to each other.

One was the motorcade of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who went to the town of Aleksinac, touring provincial Serbia. The other, stopped by police until the official group had passed, was a column of some 40 vehicles carrying Kosovo Serbian refugees.

They were part of the stream of more than 50,000 that have already left Kosovo, according to the latest figures provided by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, fleeing the ethnic-Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

``They carry weapons, they act like NATO has liberated Kosovofor them and they seek revenge,'' a Serb from the Kosovo town of Suva Reka told IPS at a highway near Belgrade.

According to the Red Cross, some 200 refugees are pouring into Serbia's largest cities each day. Red Cross officials in the southern town of Nis, the third largest in Serbia, said on Friday that at least 30.000 refugees had passed since last Sunday, when the exodus began. Dennis McNamara, UNHCR's special envoy to Albania and Yugoslavia, told mediapersons in the Kosovo capital of Pristina that it would be ``a terrible formula'' if the return of some 750.000 ethnic Albanian refugees to Kosovo would be parallel to the exodus of 200.000 Serbs.

``We don't want 750.000 people back in their homes and another 200.000 leaving,'' he said.

Earlier in the week, Orthodox patriarch Pavle chose Pec, a town 290 km south of Belgrade and seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church for five centuries, to remind Serbs how important their presence in Kosovo was. Addressing a crowd of some 2.000 Serbs, from the balcony ofthe 14th century Gracanica monastery, near Pristina, the patriarch said that Kosovo Serbs should stay ``where our ancestors survived for centuries both in freedom and in slavery.''

``If all Serbian people leave, this holy land is worthless,'' he said.The province is considered by Serbs to be the cradle of the Serbian medieval state, which fell under Turkish rule after a battle in Kosovo in 1389 and got its independence five centuries later.

But now many Serbian refugees from Kosovo simply say they have lost faith in everyone.

``First they (the government) told us that they would never give Kosovo away,'' says Darinka Milicevic, a refugee from Prizren. ``Now they act as if nothing has happened and we see the army leaving and the KLA coming together with NATO soldiers.''

``People are being killed, abducted, how could we stay? Who are we to believe? Yes, the archbishop told us to stay, but look what happened to him,'' she says.