Kosovo: One Last Chance
(Refugees Magazine, Issue 116, 1999)
NGOsSaving lives... but losing their own
A local charity helped many old and infirm Kosovars, but volunteers paid a heavy price
As hundreds of thousands of people fled their homes during the Kosovo war, in each village and town pockets of people remained behind. They were the old and infirm, men and women who either couldn’t physically leave or had simply given up the will to live. Unable to fend for themselves “as the days went on, it became apparent they were facing starvation,” says Fatima Boshanjaku from the Mother Teresa Society.
The Albanian charity had been helping 500,000 people earlier this year, but as the NATO air campaign began and Serbian troops intensified their campaign of ethnic cleansing, this aid effort collapsed.
Still, some volunteers remained behind and as food levels dwindled they began scouring ruined houses for wheat flour to feed the old people.
The charity workers saved many lives, but at a high cost to themselves. In the town of Djakovica, six society workers were killed, two were wounded, six captured and tortured and nine simply disappeared. Throughout the province 100 society personnel were killed or went missing.
The society was named after the late Albanian nun who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work among the poor of Calcutta. In its first year in 1990 society volunteers helped an estimated 15,000 people, mostly families of the unemployed.
By 1998 its network had expanded so rapidly, it was able to help as many as a half million people and became UNHCR’s main distribution partner for relief supplies.
For months leading up to the NATO bombing campaign, multi-agency convoys hauled food, blankets, mattresses and other supplies to society warehouses from where volunteers distributed the aid by tractor-trailer to remote areas, many of which had been cut off by Serbian military activity.
It was dangerous work. In a foretaste of things to come, Serbian tanks targetted one tractor-trailer convoy in August last year, despite aid agency logos being clearly visible on relief boxes, and killed three volunteers.
As the chaos increased, virtually all the Mother Teresa warehouses were looted and torched. Of 92 clinics, 78 were destroyed. Most of the society’s 22 officials and 8,000 volunteers fled to neighboring countries where they helped organize relief operations.
Today, the society is back in business. The majority of volunteers have returned, 38 of 44 branches and as many as 500 of the 636 sub-branches operating before the war have reopened. “Conditions are better now,” says Jak Mita, the society’s vice- president. “We can work freely.”
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