Kosovo: One Last Chance
(Refugees Magazine, Issue 116, 1999)
Cover StoryA race against time
Hundreds of thousands of Kosovars have returned home, but the approaching winter is a new enemy
By Fernando del Mundo and Ray Wilkinson
Osman Hysenlekaj found the body of his 83-year-old father stuffed into the well of the family house at the foot of the Mountain of the Damned.
In his frantic search for the old man after he returned from Albania in June, Osman had, at first, paid no attention to his surroundings. But now, in the fading light of a pleasant summer evening, he looked again at his father’s corpse and then at the once graceful stone house in the village of Stralc i Epërm in western Kosovo. The building had been reduced to a charred shell. His 40 sheep and 10 cows had long since disappeared and the nearby fields were wilted and empty.
Osman cleaned out a barn to shelter his wife and children and, a few days later, erected a tent he received from UNHCR under a nearby tree to make the blistering summer heat a little more bearable for his family. “All I know is that I have to get on with my life,” he says now with no obvious sign of bitterness. “I am ready to work and take on any job, but I need help from God and a miracle to get us through this winter.”
The Kosovar, like many of the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians who fled their homes earlier this year, said he had already given thanks to the Almighty once for delivering his family so quickly from the nightmare that had engulfed the region in spring.
It began on a Sunday, March 28, when a local gypsy came to the family home with an ominous message: they had one hour to leave, one step ahead of a military sweep of the region by Serbian forces. Hysenlekaj and his two sons escaped to the snow-covered hills and eventually made their way to the neighboring Yugoslav republic of Montenegro and then to Albania.
His wife, Sanise, and four other children clambered aboard a tractor trailer and, to the jeers of policemen telling them to “Go to Albania, Clinton is waiting for you,” lumbered slowly toward the frontier and the town of Mamurasi. Seventy years ago, Hysenlekaj’s father had sheltered in the same town to escape an earlier Serb pogrom. This time, the patriarch decided to stay home.The first casualties
On that bitter March day Hysenlekaj senior became one of the first of an estimated 11,000 people who were deliberately slaughtered during the following several weeks in what became one of the most dramatic and complex humanitarian crises in history.
There had been far larger refugee flights, even in the recent past: nearly two million Kurds were uprooted in the wake of the Gulf War. There were faster exoduses: in 1994, more than one million Rwandan Hutus flooded across the border into Zaire in just a few days.
Nevertheless, the Kosovo emergency was unique. The first of nearly one million refugees began fleeing the region within hours of the March 24 start of a 78-day NATO bombing campaign. Yet within three months, in a dramatic reversal of fortune, most of those who fled returned home to shattered villages and a devastated province. Perhaps never before had so many people left and then returned in such a short time.
Never before had a refugee crisis been so interlaced with big-power politics, involving virtually every important capital in the world and a military campaign by the most powerful military alliance, NATO, ever assembled. And never before had what all the major players insisted was fundamentally a humanitarian problem produced such a profound aftershock.
In a gruesome knock-on effect, the return of the ethnic Albanians triggered the next of a seemingly endless number of population movements in the Balkans, this time when around 200,000 frightened Serbs and Roma (gypsies) fled for their lives as revenge killing and other atrocities swept the province.
NATO moved the first of more than 50,000 soldiers into the prostrate province and the United Nations assembled a civilian administration, the U.N. Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), to oversee everything from garbage collection and street lighting to the re-establishment of a police force, judges and jails, from the reintegration of hundreds of thousands of people to the large-scale reconstruction of an entire region.
“Kosovo will be the most challenging, the most complex peace implementation operation ever undertaken by the U.N. system or the international community in modern times,” said former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt who had earlier run a similar but more limited international operation in neighboring Bosnia. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said putting Kosovo together again would probably take at least 10 years. The estimated cost could run as high as $30 billion.
Dennis McNamara, UNHCR’s special envoy in the region and Kofi Annan’s deputy special representative in charge of humanitarian affairs in UNMIK, said since day one of the crisis, it had been a constant race against time for aid agencies; first to help the fleeing refugees find sanctuary, then to help them return home and currently to help them survive the next Balkan winter.Widespread destruction
Images from U.S. sources, taken from high-flying reconnaissance aircraft showed more than 67,000 buildings out of 271,314 surveyed had been damaged or destroyed. A separate initial assessment of villages indicated widespread destruction of schools and health centers, agricultural production halted, the availability of food dramatically reduced and water supplies polluted by ‘a range of materials, including human as well as animal corpses.’
[ picture http://www.unhcr.ch/pubs/rm116/p8.jpg ]
Aerial photo of one Kosovo village shows 80 percent of the buildings destroyed.Damage in the province was very uneven. While some areas escaped virtually unscathed, others were almost entirely destroyed. When UNHCR’s Maki Shinohara visited the small village of Cabra near Kosovska Mitrovica she discovered every one of the 175 houses “turned into piles of rubble” after being deliberately torched and then bulldozed. “Some men have returned during the day, living in blue UNHCR tents wedged between the heaps of rubble, wandering around the once prosperous homes, school and clinic,” she said.
But within weeks of the large-scale return to Kosovo, the province came back to life as people jump started their old lives, clearing rubble from destroyed homes, salvaging whatever was left in the fields, reopening shops and starting open air markets with goods from neighboring Albania and Macedonia.
To meet the approaching threat of winter UNHCR and European and American government agencies rushed 56,000 shelter kits which include plastic sheeting, timber and tools to Kosovo allowing families to weatherproof at least one room in a destroyed house before bad weather descends in November and December. UNHCR planned distribution of 30,000 tents, 60,000 stoves, more than one million blankets, 550,000 mattresses and 183,000 hygiene and kitchen sets.
Japan offered more than 500 prefabricated and self-contained family shelters which proved their worth when a major earthquake destroyed large parts of the city of Kobe several years ago.
“The return of refugees went relatively smoothly,” said Dennis McNamara. “And we should have few problems with long-term reconstruction. But our current headache is that one step in between—emergency rehabilitation. The challenge in the next few months is going to be getting Kosovo’s population through the winter into next spring when it will be an entirely new ballgame.”Serbian holyland
Kosovo is considered the holyland by most Serbs, ironically because of a battle there that their ancestors lost in 1389 to Moslem Turks. In the following centuries, legends flourished around the defeat until it was transformed into a mythical victory fought on behalf of the Christian world against invading Moslem hordes.
But by the late 1980s, in an estimated population of around two million, ethnic Albanians who mostly follow Islam outnumbered Serbs by a ratio of around nine-to-one. When Slobodan Milosevic inflamed Serbian partisan passions by revoking Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989, he set the stage for a showdown between the two groups.
While the outside world focused its attention on the violent breakup of the Yugoslav Federation in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s, the fuse was also running in Kosovo.
Between 1989 and 1998, as repression became widespread, some 350,000 Albanian Kosovars sought sanctuary in Europe. Widespread fighting erupted in March, 1998 and within months another 350,000 civilians were displaced inside the province or fled abroad.
UNHCR operated a $28 million program with 84 personnel, helping a total of 400,000 people but in late March of this year, along with other international organizations, it was forced to pull out of the province ahead of the NATO air campaign.
“We, like everyone else at the time, thought that if it came down to a shooting match between NATO and Belgrade, it would last for a few days, and we would soon be back in operation,” recalled UNHCR’s Fernando del Mundo who was working in Kosovo at the time.
The bombing campaign lasted for 78 days. Nearly one million people flooded out of the province into neighboring Albania, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Serbia’s sister republic of Montenegro. Several hundred thousand people were displaced within the province, hiding in the mountains or trekking from village to village, sheltering for weeks and months in basements and other hideaways.
UNHCR had emergency stockpiles in the region for around 100,000 people, but had not anticipated a deliberate, well-planned policy to virtually cleanse the entire province as Serbian authorities now began to do. Nor did anyone else, neither major governments such as the United States, France and Britain, NATO or the bulk of Balkan specialists. Until the last moment, in fact, it had been hoped that peace talks in Rambouillet, France, would piece together a face-saving compromise.A conundrum
Nicholas Morris, who was then UNHCR’s special envoy in the region, highlighted a conundrum which the agency faced at this juncture: key western governments were urging UNHCR to prepare to implement Rambouillet only days before the exodus began. It is unlikely, Morris argued (see separate article) [ http://www.unhcr.ch/pubs/rm116/rm11606.htm ], that these same governments who were subsequently highly critical of UNHCR’s lack of readiness when refugees did begin to arrive in neighboring countries, would have responded to a request for preparations predicated on the failure of their own peace efforts.
Refugee crises are often defined by one particular moment or one particular incident. Kosovo became embedded in the world’s conscience with the arrival in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia of the so-called refugee trains and the incarceration of thousands of fleeing Kosovars in a nondescript open field at a border crossing called Blace.
Tens of thousands of Kosovar civilians were packed onto the trains by Serbian authorities from the province capital of Pristina and other stations for the short journey to the border. Inevitably the trains and long lines of shocked people carrying only a few hastily gathered possessions were compared, if incorrectly, with the wagons which hauled Jews to the gas chamber during World War II. The word ‘genocide’ began to be used indiscriminately.
The Macedonian government, fearful that a massive influx of ethnic Albanians could destabilize its own fragile ethnic mix, at one point kept thousands of new arrivals in an open field with virtually no medical assistance, little food, and limited access for aid agencies.[ picture http://www.unhcr.ch/pubs/rm116/p6.jpg ]
Blace border crossing, FYR of Macedonia early April 1999. (UNHCR / H.J.Davies)Under growing international pressure and under cover of darkness, the authorities, in an equally controversial move to the initial detention, suddenly bundled the refugees on flights to Turkey and shipped others to Albania and to nearby hastily constructed camps. An unknown number of people died in that open field but by morning the only thing left was the sad debris of mass flight—sodden blankets, ripped clothing, a few children’s toys, a few pieces of flimsy shelter, and the wretched smells left by thousands of terrified people.
Crystalizing the conflict
Blace field crystalized many aspects of the crisis. The world at large, including governments, saw for the first time the sheer brutality and the careful planning behind the cleansing of Kosovo. Even though the destruction of the city of Vukovar, the siege of Sarajevo, the detention camps and the mass rapes of Bosnia had occurred only a few years earlier, there was an incomprehension, an unwillingness to admit that “This is happening again in Europe, in 1999.”
In addition to not forecasting the exodus, there was also now the perceived unreadiness of aid agencies once the influx began and their inability to deliver emergency supplies quickly enough, to build camps for the exiles and UNHCR’s failure to protect refugees at Blace field.
UNHCR admitted shortcomings in some areas including not getting more personnel and aid on the ground quickly enough, but Assistant High Commissioner Soren Jessen-Petersen insisted there had also been a lot of scape-goating and sheer ignorance in play.
At Blace, for instance, while UNHCR was criticized in some quarters for its alleged timidity, at least one government insisted behind the scenes that the agency tone down its public statements and even asked for the recall of one of its spokespersons. Humanitarian considerations at the time were less important than political efforts to stabilize a shaky government.
Seasoned journalists who wrote articles critical of UNHCR’s emergency response later admitted they were unaware of the constraints placed on the agency by a cumbersome financing setup; it has no ready reserves to meet a new crisis and must appeal to donors for additional funds for emergencies such as Kosovo, causing inevitable delays. To some degree UNHCR can only react as quickly as new funding is put in place.
And ironically, though Kosovo was the most reported humanitarian story in history, rarely has UNHCR been so underfunded during its own 50-year life.Living hand to mouth
“After the international community spent billions of dollars on a military campaign which was intended to pave the way for the return of refugees, it is a pity they are now not prepared to spend what we have asked for and see the refugees back to their villages,” Jessen-Petersen said at one point in the crisis. “We need about 10 million dollars a week and are living hand to mouth.”
J. Brian Atwood, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development at the time gave his assessment: “UNHCR was not doing its job in the early days. They didn’t have the resources. They didn’t have the people. I say that their management failure was the direct result of our failure in providing them with the resources.” Financial cuts forced on the U.N. had “wreaked serious damage which was unconscionable” Atwood said.
Even as traditional government donors severely trimmed their financial support for UNHCR (at the height of the exodus Italy had officially contributed $800,000 to the agency. The Italian public donated more than ten times that amount privately), they channeled unprecedented amounts to government-to-government, or bilateral projects.
The Italians were the first to establish a camp in the northern Albanian town of Kukes and tens of thousands of refugees benefited from this and other government run projects.
But this type of assistance produced its own headaches. UNHCR was mandated to coordinate aid and protection for the refugees, but often was among the last to know about a new program or camp. This lack of coordination produced waste, overlap and confusion. In what in other circumstances might be comical, one European government established a camp—reaped the media payoff for its actions—but then its officials simply disappeared one night without informing any other aid agency. A private organization established another camp in Kukes, forbade UNHCR or any other officials from visiting ‘our refugees’ and refused to attend agency coordination meetings.
“Perhaps one of the most fundamental mistakes we made was to underestimate the enormity of the stakes on the table,” one senior aid official said later. “We knew of course that Kosovo was a huge humanitarian crisis, but the political and military stakes were even higher. In that environment every success, and every mistake was magnified. And while everyone was quick enough to take credit they were even quicker to pass on the blame. We were amateurs in this game.”Symbol of hope and tragedy
If Blace seared the Kosovo crisis into the world’s conscience, the town of Kukes is destined to enter refugee folklore, like Sarajevo and Srebrenica before it, as a vivid symbol of human tragedy, but also perhaps, ultimately of hope.
Northern Albania is a starkly beautiful place of wild mountains and deep fjord-style lakes. Communist-era planners scarred the landscape with a series of five-storey concrete apartment blocks at Kukes to house workers for nearby mines which have since closed. It is an area of feuding, gun-toting mafias, clandestine armies, smuggling and almost universal unemployment. A twisting, crumbling road links Kukes to Morini, a seedy and sleepy border post with Kosovo.
More than 440,000 refugees escaped into Albania, virtually all of them through Morini and Kukes, a town of just 28,000 people. It is difficult to imagine any small European or American town handling a sudden influx of destitute and terrified refugees around sixteen times its own population, but Kukes did so with a degree of aplomb.
One of the most remote places in Europe, Kukes suddenly became a nerve center for the world. Dozens of international news companies established permanent satellite links with the town. Hundreds of media stars, aid officials, NATO officials, and celebrities descended on the area, renting seedy downtown apartments from locals for $3,000 a month.
A down at heel hangout, perhaps appropriately called Bar America, became the unofficial hub of the whole affair where swaggering guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army kept journalists waiting for days promising trips into ‘the occupied territories’ and where local gangs were overheard wheeling and dealing alleged white slavery deals among the refugees. Unemployment disappeared as locals became drivers, translators and odd-job men. “It was Christmas in Kukes for the locals,” one aid official said. “They had never seen such wealth, even though it was generated by a refugee crisis.”
Thousands of tractors, some without tires and running on steel rims, carrying several families at a time swamped the little town. The Italians established their high-tech camp near a disused mine and officials and troops from the United Arab Emirates built, by refugee standards, a sumptuous camp with a hospital which would grace any town in the western world.
A rickety fleet of buses and army trucks moved tens of thousands of people away from the sensitive border zone to spots further inside Albania. It was not a pretty sight, but the convoy system worked amazingly well. Many other Kosovars moved in with local families or into seven camps on the fringes of Kukes and ignored entreaties from UNHCR to move out of range of Serb artillery. They wanted to be close to the border, they said, to reunite split families and return to Kosovo as quickly as possible.Ignoring the warnings
That seemed highly unlikely at the time, but as government and agencies geared up for a huge building program to house nearly one million refugees through the winter, an agreement was struck between NATO and Belgrade. The refugees were urged to stay where they were until Kosovo could be made safe, but they again waved away the warnings and within days headed home as fast as they could go.
“The scene at Morini crossing was surreal,” said Kris Janowski of UNHCR as he watched floods of Kosovars going home. “Two gigantic red billboards with skull and bones painted on them in black warned against the danger of landmines. Albanians just flashed a ‘V’ for victory sign and went home. ‘We don’t mind the mines,’ said one old man, ‘as long as the Serbs have gone.’
“Aid workers armed with hand counters quickly gave up attempts to monitor the flood. Locally built Zastava cars which normally seat four were often crammed with nine people, roof racks groaning under the weight of mattresses and furniture piled higher than the cars themselves. Their chassis scraped along the road. A U.N. aid station had been established handing out free food, but in the rush to get home, vehicles just drove by.”
“When hundreds of thousands of refugees like these decide they want to go home, you just step aside and let them,” one awed aid official said of the return. “You go with the flow.”
The dangers officials warned about were real enough. Dozens of people were wounded and some killed in the first few weeks, not only from the hundreds of thousands of mines which had been deliberately planted, but also from unexploded ordnance, especially deadly cluster bombs, dropped by NATO aircraft. Mine experts said Kosovo was at least as dangerous as Bosnia, Cambodia and Angola, and it could take ‘a generation’ to make the region even relatively safe.
As the crisis entered a new phase, all of the parties involved faced problems and headaches as large and complex as during the emergency itself. In addition to mine hazards and the race against winter, how could the new U.N. administration successfully coax back the tens of thousands of Serbs and gypsies in the face of continuing atrocities against their communities?
There was general agreement that a lasting settlement would be impossible without addressing the grievances of these groups. And though it would be dangerous to draw too many parallels, it was discouraging to note that hundreds of thousands of persons displaced in other parts of the former Yugoslavia, 500,000 in Serbia and Montenegro, and many others in Croatia and Bosnia, were still waiting to return to their homes years after the shooting had stopped in those regions.
The bulk of the ethnic Albanians forced to flee this year, even the more than 90,000 who were flown to 29 countries around the world for temporary refuge, had returned home by autumn or signalled their intention to do so. But what about the estimated 350,000 Kosovars who fled during the early 1990s? Would they be allowed to stay in European countries where they had lived for years or, if they returned home, how successful would their reintegration be?
Carl Bildt noted that in the case of Bosnia a formal and binding peace agreement, the Dayton accords, had been signed, but there was no such framework to guide the new administrators in Kosovo, making their task even more difficult.
The regional repercussions were immense. Serbia itself was crippled by the effects of the bombing campaign and a virtual international pariah. The political situations in Montenegro and Macedonia were fragile. Albania remains the poorest country in Europe. Bosnia hosted more than 20,000 Kosovars and its own internal problems remained sensitive to regional developments. There were concerns that once the spotlight shifted from Kosovo, the international community might not deliver the billions of dollars needed for humanitarian aid and long-term reconstruction.
In the broader humanitarian context, how will the preference shown in Kosovo for government-to-government programs affect the coordination of future complex emergencies and the funding of organizations such as UNHCR? What effect will NATO’s role as both belligerent and major aid participant have on future humanitarian-military cooperation?
The debate over NATO’s decision to bomb Kosovo will continue endlessly. Was it the only way left or was it the case, to use a Viet Nam-era analogy, of ‘destroying the village to save it?’
Whatever the merits of those arguments, however, it is clear that once the crisis began, the humanitarian operation was an overall success. Despite the initial slowness in responding to the exodus and despite other mistakes, nearly one million refugees did receive assistance. Local governments and host families played a major part, of course, but the end result was that there were fewer deaths than would be expected among a huge and vulnerable population which quickly received at least minimal shelter, food and medical care as they left Kosovo. And when they returned home, the refugees showed a resilience and strength of purpose to rebuild their homes which will be a major building block in trying to patch together the shattered province.[ picture http://www.unhcr.ch/pubs/rm116/p11.jpg ]
Kosovo refugees pass a KFOR tank column on their return to the village of Sopi.
(UNHCR / R.Chalasani)[ There are some more pictures on the website ]
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