Eleven-year-old Merinda Fejzul'ahu broke down crying when told she had to leave the safety of Australia and go home to Kosovo.

"She's afraid of going back, because she remembered what she went through in Kosovo," her mother, Mirvete, said yesterday in the Bandiana camp, near Albury.

Merinda does not lack courage; she walked nearly 24 hours on her own last April when her family fled their home in the Serb stronghold of Presheva.

Merinda she has learnt English and can even sing Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.

But yesterday Merinda had little to sing about as her parents defied Federal Government orders to return to Kosovo.

Most of the 100 Kosovars who refused to leave Bandiana yesterday on the bus to Sydney Airport are refusing to eat.

Mr Driton Beka was the first to call for a hunger strike. His home in northern Kosovo was destroyed by Serb bombs and the father of five would rather die here than be sent home.

Soon after the bus to Sydney Airport left with only 21 passenger, a large group assembled defiantly in an oval.

Distressed faces showed their desperation, and their resolve at having made the right decision.

Mrs Qefsere Berisha held a letter from the regional health service stating that she and her husband, Samedin, who has tuberculosis, were too sick to go home. They are among about 60 at Bandiana awaiting a High Court Appeal against repatriation.

About 230 of the Kosovar refugees still in Australia have failed to convince the Minister for Immigration, Mr Ruddock, that they have a case for staying.

Mr Ruddock decided late last week that 246 Kosovars should be sent home but considered information faxed to him as late as midnight Friday and allowed 14 more some form of extension.

Arrangements to fly the Kosovars from Australia on Saturday night fell though; so did another to fly them out of Melbourne at 3pm yesterday. Finally, a plan was made to fly them out of Sydney at 9 o'clock last night on Air Sri Lanka.

In Sydney, brother and sister Driton and Blerina Dula (he is 20, she 23) spent an anxious day outside the East Hills refugee centre, uncertain of their fate.

Separated from their family last year during the Kosovo war, they were told that unless they agreed by last Saturday to return to Kosovo they would be locked up as illegal immigrants, and deported.

When told last Monday that the Government had given them the thumbs down, Ms Dula cried for hours. Yesterday she said: "We spoke to our parents for the first time after we had been here seven months. When I spoke to my father, the first thing he did was to break down and say don't come back."

The Dulas, in Australia since June 20, stayed at East Hills for six weeks. Then they rented a home in Belmore and got bar jobs at Revesby Workers' Club.

Mr Dula, a languages student, and Ms Dula, who has completed three years of a dentistry course, won the hearts of staff and patrons at the club and built up a groundswell of support.

In Bandiana, Merinda's father, Mevlud, also has bad memories too: most of all, he remembers the next-door neighbours who perished under Serb fire.

He does not want Merinda or her two younger brothers to go to Kosovo, even if they spend the first anniversary of that last long trek in an Australian detention centre.