-Caveat Lector-
>From Irish Times
Friday, May 14, 1999
600,000 people in Kosovo 'struggle to survive'
----------------------------------------------------------------------
With expulsions from Kosovo still continuing, refugee agencies must
consider the long-term implications, Kathy Sheridan reports from
Skopje
KOSOVO: For now, the figures look neat. Around 79,000 places are
still available on the humanitarian evacuation programme for around
85,000 currently in the camps.
What they do not include, however, are the 150,000 refugees currently
billeted with host families in Macedonia. Nor do they include the
many thousands presumed to be sitting it out across the border in
Kosovo, where according to a new US government report, at least
600,000 displaced people "are now struggling to survive".
Far from diminishing, the pace of expulsions has continued to build,
averaging more than 10,000 a day into Albania and Montenegro, meaning
that it may be a matter of weeks before the Serbs achieve their goal
and most of those remaining will be out or on their way out.
No one knows how many are dammed up behind the Blace border but the
feeling in Skopje is of the calm before the storm. A second camp is
being built at Blace with a 9,000 capacity.
Yesterday, border police allowed 47 undocumented refugees through at
the Blace crossing - by far the highest number in the eight days
since it was effectively closed. It may signify a relaxation on the
part of the government here and it will certainly be encouraging news
for others left behind, who monitor the BBC and Macedonian television
for news of crossings and read the signs. "If we don't come back,
you'll know we've crossed," said those who went ahead.
Those crossing through mountain areas report that the Serbs are
continuing to mine unofficial crossings.
One woman claimed that she had been shot at by Macedonian police
while trying to cross two weeks ago.
They had their first night of peace last night in the not-so-
luxurious surroundings of Stenkovec 1, where yesterday some classy
paving was being laid in the baked earth outside the shabby building
housing the police station and three shops.
With refugees stubbornly refusing to be coaxed towards Albania - a
dirt-poor place of anarchy, criminals and rapists, they say, where
the camps are as blisteringly hot and horrible as anywhere else -
this may be an intimation of administrators digging in for the long
haul.
Despite an open invitation from the Albanian government to all
comers, only 166 have taken it up.
Flights to Slovenia and Turkey have also been poorly subscribed to.
Some observers believe that the UNHCR's central premise that all such
moves should be strictly "voluntary" is taken too literally and that
not enough is being done to educate or inform.
Meanwhile, planners must try to second-guess the politicians and
decide whether to "winterise" the camps - in these parts temperatures
can reach 40C in the summer and plummet to 20C in the winter - or
assemble materials for the rebuilding of Kosovo. The UNHCR says it
has begun to do both.
Should they build latrine blocks or exchange the tents for pre-fabs?
Seek to heat the (currently cold) water? Establish centralised
cooking points, fuel and heating? And how will the Macedonians
respond once they see a sense of permanence developing around these
eyesores, peopled with angry young men, the poor and the
dispossessed?
But the possibility of a return to Kosovo has also to be considered -
another imponderable as no one knows what remains standing there.
UNHCR logistics teams are storing timber supplies on the basis of the
Bosnian experience where returnees were able to make at least one
room habitable quickly.
There is nothing simple about this war. And there is no doubt that
some big players are in for the long haul. US civilians working on
the construction of the US army base here have told The Irish Times
that they have signed five year contracts.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>From Boston Globe
Life in the camps
By David Nyhan, Globe Columnist, 05/14/99
<V>olunteering in Tirana to help the American Refugee Committee set
up on the ground to help minister to hundreds of thousands of Kosovar
refugees, Peter Lucas promptly discovered what was most needed in the
1,000-person camp at Golem on the Adriatic coast: ''frozen chicken
and ladies' underwear.''
It was part Frank Perdue and part Victoria's Secret, but it worked.
Red tape, inefficiency, ethnic rivalries, and desperate shortages of
everything from good roads to adequate transport make it hard to
shuffle supplies to those most in need. So the veteran Boston-born
journalist-turned-bureaucrat, one of the first Americans of Albanian
descent to reenter the tiny nation after its half-century-long
isolation from the West under communism, played his hole card: the
plastic one.
''With my friend, Agim, I went to the American Express office in
Tirana, gave them my credit card, and eventually got $2,000 in
traveler's checks. I turned that into dollars. Then on the black
market I turned that into about 400,000 leks, the local currency.
Then we hit the market, an open-air bazaar.''
With cash and a truck to collect his booty, he paid for 50 boxes of
frozen chicken parts for the Kosovars, mostly women and children, who
had been denied protein for three weeks or more. ''The labels on the
boxes said the chickens had been packed in Gainesville, Ga.'' He has
no idea how it got to Albania.
Next stop: the section of the market where he bought ''4,000 sets of
women's cotton underwear made in Turkey - all sizes.'' On his first
visit to Golem, he had heard refugee women and girls lament a lack of
underclothes; most had fled on short notice. After a month of rough
living, their garments were tattered.
Think global, act local. Adopt a village was Lucas's response to the
sight of hundreds of workers for nongovernmental aid organization
thrashing around in the confusing melee of relief work.
''Albania is an ecological disaster,'' Lucas matter-of-factly
recounted for a Boston audience of two-dozen Wednesday, which also
heard from two other Bay State natives freshly returned from the war
zone. Dr. Tom Durant of Massachusetts General Hospital, a board
member of the American Refugee Committee, and Morton Dean, the Fall
River native and Emerson College alum who was ABC's man on the scene
for 31 days in Belgrade, nodded assent as Lucas explained the refugee
plight.
Gangs of feral boys, orphans scavenging for food, turn the roadsides
into grotesque pantomimes of ''Animal Farm.'' Lucas: ''There's
rubbish in all the camps, beside the roads. Come summer and the heat,
without adequate water or food there'll be cholera, tuberculosis, and
everything else.''
Durant: ''There are 800,000 people living in tents or shelters. The
tents are saunas in two weeks and refrigerators on Oct. 1.'' Lucas,
who covered the Vietnam War for the old Boston Herald, said Tirana's
airport reminded him of the US military presence in Saigon. Durant
said that what refugees run into everywhere, whether in Somalia,
Cambodia, or Kosovo, is ''the four B's - bureaucracy, baksheesh,
bribery, and bugs.''
Durant voiced skepticism about Clinton's ability to deliver on his
pledge that the Kosovars will one day go home. ''How you do that
short of sending ground troops, I have no idea.''
A month in Belgrade reporting from the Serb capital persuaded Dean
that ''most Serbs don't care what happens to the Kosovars or to
Milosevic,'' but they fear the bombing, hate NATO, and blame America
for the rising toll of bomb damage. ''Serbs look down on Kosovar
Albanians as lazy; they say they don't want to work,'' said Dean, and
are locked in the prism of the revenge of history. ''They give you
the history lesson: `In the year 1369, here's what happened.'''
Serb television does not show pictures of the Kosovar refugees, said
Dean, whose own video reports, screened but not altered by Serb
censors, were transmitted out of the TV station damaged by a NATO
missile attack.
Lucas, who has visited Albania 15 or 16 times in the last decade, is
on a first-name basis with most of the Albanian leadership. That
government hangs on the thin thread of hope that the United States
will redeem President Clinton's pledge to see the Kosovar refugees
safely home. ''I back the NATO bombing, and I back Clinton,'' said
Lucas in a later interview.
Like many Americans of immigrant stock, he has a deeper understanding
of his own good fortune when he sees how the old country is faring.
''The way I look at it, I've hit the lottery twice in my life. First,
in being born. Second, in being born an American. That's no bull.
When you come back out of there, that's how you think.''
As to the eventual outcome, Lucas thinks US and NATO policy will
ultimately prevail and that Clinton, often denigrated as an
opportunist, will be redeemed by backing a policy that looked like a
political loser at the outset.
''I think Clinton will pull this off, the refugees will go back, and
this will save his presidency - that this is what he'll be remembered
for.''
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
This story ran on page A23 of the Boston Globe on 05/14/99.
� Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
A<>E<>R
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