-Caveat Lector-
>From Int'l Herald Tribune
""The overcrowding at the camps is sowing tensions that have already
provoked scuffles in food lines and at tables where refugees can register
for third-country transfers. UN relief officials have been trying for weeks
to open new camps, but Macedonian officials have moved slowly, and those now
in the works are not large enough to accommodate the overflow. Worried
officials at the World Health Organization anticipate outbreaks of hepatitis
and tuberculosis and have stepped up testing.""
Paris, Tuesday, May 4, 1999
Life in Refugee Camp: Stench, Mud and Despair
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By R. Jeffrey Smith and Anne Swardson Washington Post Service
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BRAZDE, Macedonia - Five weeks after thousands of Kosovo Albanians began
arriving here in a quest for safety and shelter, daily life in Macedonia's
largest refugee camp has settled into a numbing routine of boredom and
despair.
A visitor approaching the unsmiling Macedonian guards at the front gate is
met first by the sharp odors emitted by hundreds of overflowing latrines and
as many as 28,000 refugees who have not bathed in a month.
Inside the overcrowded camp, built in a few hours on farmland as a temporary
holding site for thousands of Kosovo Albanians, all the defects of an
unplanned city are instantly on display: Lice are commonplace, rodents make
nightly visits to the garbage areas and everything that might make living
comfortable seems to be missing or in extremely short supply.
Thousands of tents, aligned in hundreds of rows, stretch as far as the eye
can see down the mud of flat landscape, all fenced in by 2.1-meter-high
(seven-foot-high) chicken wire.
Waiting in line often occupies much of the refugees' day. People begin
lining up at 4 A.M. for the daily ration of food, which is distributed at 8
A.M. It can take hours of waiting to make an outside call on one of the six
cellular phones available.
Other lines form at the medical tents and at the tables where people
register to be transported to refugee camps that are being established in
other countries.
Small children in ragged clothes line up to try to kick a soccer ball
through a cardboard goal.
A handful of shops sell plastic sandals, scallions and cans of Coca-Cola -
all at prices that few refugees can afford. Most refugees are penniless,
their money taken from them by Yugoslav troops, Serbian police officers or
paramilitary units as they fled their homes and headed for Kosovo's southern
border.
Mathematicians, doctors, engineers, shopkeepers, salesmen, lawyers, students
and housewives wake up each day to an existence that provides no opportunity
for expression, creativity or individuality. Every day has the same low
point - making do with a ration of sardines or canned tuna - and the same
high point, the 6 P.M. posting of a list of those who will be leaving for a
third country.
''It is an art to stop thinking here and a problem to think too much,'' said
Mufail Limani, 40, a writer. ''There is no object for thinking, nothing
concrete. Just some illusions, some hope, some fictional things.''
After five weeks in a virtual prison with no knowledge of how long their
sentences will last, everyone at the camp ''has lost perspective,'' said
Selman Llap, 50, a coffee salesman from the Kosovo capital, Pristina, who
spends his afternoons seated with 60 other men on a thin edge of concrete
that juts out from the sole permanent structure here, a blue metal shed
surrounded by mud. ''They don't know about their future. Just pay attention
to their faces. No one is laughing.''
The camp was erected by NATO troops and then turned over to the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Catholic Relief Services. Its
population is more than five times what aid workers say is the optimal size
for efficient, humane housing of refugees; its density is three times what
international standards specify.
Instead of a temporary transit camp, it has become the only home that its
residents are likely to know during the summer - and perhaps the fall and
winter. Only a small fraction are being airlifted elsewhere, with their
places in tents refilled each day - and then some - by thousands of new
arrivals.
More than 25,000 refugees have been flown out of the seven refugee camps in
Macedonia during the last two weeks, but Kosovo Albanians keep arriving at a
greater rate. On Sunday, more than 5,000 crossed the border, swelling the
total in Macedonia to 185,000, according to the UN refugee agency.
The overcrowding at the camps is sowing tensions that have already provoked
scuffles in food lines and at tables where refugees can register for
third-country transfers. UN relief officials have been trying for weeks to
open new camps, but Macedonian officials have moved slowly, and those now in
the works are not large enough to accommodate the overflow. Worried
officials at the World Health Organization anticipate outbreaks of hepatitis
and tuberculosis and have stepped up testing.
No one at the Brazde camp has any privacy.
Ismet Zeka, 48, a high school teacher from the Kosovo town of Gnjilane, says
he tries to sleep each evening atop a thin slab of foam on the floor of a
tent shared by 60 refugees from 11 families. Twenty-five are children, and
at least a few cry each night.
''At night, it's very cold, and during the day it's very hot,'' Mr. Zeka
said. ''We need more food for the children.''
His wife, Zana, also a high school teacher, said she no longer had the
willpower to leave the tent during the day. ''When I go out, I get so
depressed and worried,'' she said.
''I cannot see all this misery. Every day we have new information from
someone new who comes from Gnjilane. But we don't have any optimistic news.
The only hope we have is that NATO will increase the bombing.''
<<One thing I think about is along the lines of the old movie, "Stalag 17"
with B. Holden playing a character in the POW camp and is accused of being
an infiltrator / collaborator via the Germans. Now, with the 'ethnic
Albanians', stripped of their identification (along with everthing else),
how are they to tell who's who? Could there be a number of non-'ethnic
Albanians' blending in planning a little 'mischief' ?A<>E<>R >>
~~~~~~~~~~~~
A<>E<>R
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