[CTRL] Dispatches From the War Zone
-Caveat Lector- _ dispatch Dispatches From the War Zone, Message 32 By Masha Gessen To read these dispatches from the beginning, go to http://www.slate.com/dispatches/99-03-31/dispatches.asp?iMsg=1 Message #32: April 29, 1999 From: Masha Gessen To: Slate - dispatch If you are ever in Tetovo, the largest town in western Macedonia, and you want to find Edita Tahiri, academic and part of the leadership of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), go to Café Bolero, one block back from Marshal Tito Street. If, on the other hand, you are looking for the younger and hipper crowd from Pristina, specifically the drama and theater types, the place to go is smallest cafe on the third floor in the new shopping center. Then again, if you are looking for the journalists, the ones from the Kosovo Albanian-language daily Koha Ditore, then go to Cafe Arbi on Marshal Tito. Sure, Koha has an office, too, but what would be the point of following complicated directions if everyone who is anyone is holding court in the cafes? If there ever was a cafe society, the Kosovo intelligentsia in exile, currently resident in Tetovo, is it. As far from Skopje's lackluster tidiness as you can get, Tetovo reminds me of Pristina. Miserable in the drizzle of winter, stifling in the dust of summer, Pristina was never a particularly attractive or pleasant town, but back when life was allowed to go on there, it overflowed. The cafes blasted and burst onto sidewalks, crowds pushed cars off the roads, and the number of useless, kitschy, and colorful objects for sale overwhelmed. So when I saw decorative mobile-phone antennas for sale in Tetovo, I had a sense of recognition. And, with Tetovo's normal population of about 70,000 nearly doubled by the influx of refugees, the crowds were certainly there. The waiter at Cafe Bolero told me that Edita Tahiri had, unfortunately, gone to Skopje. She would be back tomorrow morning, and I could leave a message if I wished. Her cell phone, having as it does a Kosovo number, does not work. "Is anyone else from the LDK around?" I asked. "Well, Shkelzen is out of town," he said, "and he is not LDK anyway." "That's right," I responded, eager to show off my expertise. "He is Cafe Arbi, isn't he?" The waiter nodded and watched--ruefully, I thought--as I walked away toward Cafe Arbi. "Someone here to see you," the waiter said, leading me to Baton Haxhiu's table. Baton already had company, however, so I demurely scheduled myself for the next time slot, in half an hour's time. "So how does it feel to be back from the dead?" I asked in a couple of hours, when my interview with Baton began. The day after the NATO bombings began, the following news circled the world of those who were concerned with specific lives inside Kosovo: the offices of Koha Ditore had been attacked, a night guard killed, and Baton Haxhiu, the editor in chief, was missing, presumed dead. I heard the news in Moscow, then exchanged it with a colleague in Belgrade, each of us growing somber at the other's knowledge, which seemed as bad as confirmation. As Baton grew more surely dead with every passing day, strangely, no one seemed too concerned about the fate of Vetan Surroy, the founder and publisher of Koha Ditore, who was rumored to be abroad--some said in Turkey, others, in the United States. It wasn't until days later that we began to realize that Vetan, being Vetan, would surely make public statements if he were, in fact, abroad. The story of Koha Ditore, as told by the staff that has made it to Tetovo, goes like this. On the first night of the NATO bombings, its offices were, indeed, attacked. The night watchman was killed. Everything, including the computer equipment and all the archives, was destroyed or looted. The paper's printing plant, located a couple of kilometers outside of town, was also burned down. When Baton Haxhiu came to the office in the morning, he was stopped by the police. He called his editor, 25-year-old Ardian Arifaj, and told him not to come to work or leave the house at all that day. Then he went into hiding. Ardian, a short, prematurely bald man, is someone I know, the boyfriend of an old and dear friend, Vlera, who translated for me the very first time I came to Pristina. The first news I had of Vlera and her family was disturbing: They had not left Pristina before the bombing started. The second thing I heard, already in Belgrade, was that the family was safely in Macedonia. Still, when I saw Vlera walk by the cafe where I was sitting this afternoon, at first I did not believe my eyes, and then--for the first time, I realized--I actually believed she was alive. She is working at Koha now, with Ardi. But back to Baton. "I really felt like a dead man for 11 days," he says. He hid in basements, changing his location every couple of days, only occasionally sneaking a visit with his family. "I had a radio with me," he says, meaning short wave. "Radio
[CTRL] Dispatches From the War Zone
-Caveat Lector- dispatch Dispatches From the War Zone, Message 31 By Masha Gessen To read these dispatches from the beginning, go to http://www.slate.com/dispatches/99-03-31/dispatches.asp?iMsg=1 Message #31: April 28, 1999 From: Masha Gessen To: Slate - dispatch It has stopped raining, the mud has turned to dust, and, instead of bringing relief to the refugee camps, this has brought heat. Tensions flare all over. At Stenkovec-2, the second-largest of Macedonia's refugee camps, I get into a shoving match with an overeager security officer from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He has been trying, with varying success, to keep people from entering the tent. Me, I just want information. But then, so does everyone else. In existence for nearly a month, the camps have taken on patterns and a tempo of their own. Stenkovec-1, being the biggest, is most like a city. People move about in a constant quest that almost invariably ends in a queue or a crowd of people working their elbows or--more and more often, it seems--in a scuffle. Lines form for no reason--because there is a rumor of someone up ahead giving out blankets or food or the names off the next airlift list. If only someone knew for certain where the right place to go or who the right person to ask was--but how can anyone know for certain? Some young refugee volunteers have set up an information tent at Stenkovec-1. The only problem is, they don't have enough information. After two days in operation they told me the most common question was where to get blankets: Some people, they say, have been here for two weeks and still haven't found the blankets. They send everyone to a particular tent--they've heard that's where blankets are distributed. Is that official information? No, they say, but that's what they've been told. Another common question is where to get a list of everyone in the camp to try to find relatives, but neither the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which registers camp newcomers, nor the Catholic Refugee Service, which operates this particular camp, will give the volunteers the lists. And then, they have an old man who has been kicked out of his tent by a family that considers it theirs. And then there are all these people who want to know how to get on an airlift. I also want to know how people get on an airlift. At Stenkovec-2, I saw people filling out forms and got in behind them--but these turned out to be "Lost Child" forms. I was finally able to learn that most airlift processing is done through Stenkovec-1, so I headed there. Carolina Spannuth, a UNHCR protection officer, explains the system: Coming into the camp, refugees register with UNHCR and check off their country preferences on the back of the form; then UNHCR prioritizes the cases, placing the sick and vulnerable at the top and being careful not to separate families; then the International Organization for Migration books them on flights--sometimes directly, sometimes after the country in question approves the choice. The IOM tent is right near UNHCR's, and it is crowded with staff and with refugees who have found their way in. Like all tents in this camp, it is stuffy and it smells: Many of the refugees have not had a proper bath in a month, and, though people manage to wash their clothes in what can generously be called a creek, in a far corner of the camp, the cumulative body odor in this camp is overwhelming. The IOM works a dozen notebook computers in two shifts, 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., and they still have enough of a backlog of names to fill planes and planes. There are 12 flights today--five to France, two to Turkey, one each to Sweden, Holland, Norway, Finland, and the Czech Republic. Every evening, lists of names for the next day's flights go up, alongside waiting lists in case of no-shows--so there are no empty seats. Each flight goes out with 15 or so passengers more than its capacity would allow, because infants and toddlers can sit in their mothers' laps. But what is a refugee to do in the endless weeks of not knowing whether he will ever get out of the camp? And what does the UNHCR understand about Albanian families, where a second cousin is a close relative? And what if the country options change, as they do constantly? And, most important, what is the guarantee that the piece of paper they fill out on arrival will not be lost or trampled in the mud before it can translate into a seat on the plane? This is why there is a crowd at the chain-link fence that surrounds the registration area. Dozens of people find a way in--tagging along with a journalist, or pretending to be one by speaking a foreign language. While I stand in-between the tents with Simona Opitz, IOM's public-information person, people come up to us, one by one, until another small crowd forms. A short, squat man with gray stubble of a consistent length all over his head and his cheeks explains that he has been living in Germany for 30 years but his
