Refugees From Kosovo Fled in Terror, They Say

In two dingy rooms furnished with no more than a rug, a couple of sofas and a single-burner hot plate, Nebi G., his wife and their seven children are trying to start a new life in Albania.

A pot of macaroni, their only food for the day, was bubbling on the hot plate Saturday as Nebi described his family’s sudden recent flight from their home in Kosovo province, just across the border in Serbia.

Serbian forces attacked Nebi’s ethnic Albanian village, Vokshi, last Monday while his wife was baking bread, he said.

“They bombarded the whole region with heavy artillery, grenades, mortars,” recalled Nebi, who declined to give his last name for fear of retaliation against the elderly relatives he left behind. “We just dropped everything and ran. We didn’t even eat that day.”

His wife’s unfinished loaves were abandoned in the oven.

Nebi and his family then walked for 20 hours over the goat tracks that crisscross the rough, mountainous border area between Kosovo and northern Albania. When they arrived at last here in Bajram Curri, a local family offered them sleeping space on its floor.

“I’m grateful to the people here,” Nebi said. “We have been very well accepted. . . . But if we have to stay here [in Albania] for several years, then it would be better if the Serbs just came and killed all of us now. We cannot live like this.”

Walk the tumbledown streets of this and the other remote towns of Albania’s northern border zone, talk to the people, and you will hear Nebi’s story repeated hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

In the last two weeks, an estimated 14,000 refugees have fled from Kosovo into northern Albania, and about 7,000 have escaped to neighboring Montenegro, the small republic that, with Serbia, is all that’s left of the former Yugoslav federation. Humanitarian workers fear that thousands more displaced people are on the way.

Less than three years after an accord reached in Dayton, Ohio, brought a fragile peace to Bosnia-Herzegovina, authorities believe that they are seeing the seeds of a replay being sown in Kosovo.

Albanians say that Serbian forces appear to be in the early phases of an “ethnic cleansing” of western Kosovo, which is 90% ethnic Albanian. More than 200 people have been killed in the crackdown.

As a result, thousands of refugees are overwhelming northern Albania, the poorest region of Europe’s most impoverished country, a place that can’t possibly accommodate them.

And, most worrisome of all, the renewed fighting in the rump Yugoslavia is reviving old concerns that the Kosovo tensions will spread into neighboring countries--particularly if the fighting should divert the flow of refugees south to Macedonia.

Accounts Reminiscent of Violence in Bosnia

Though Serbian forces are preventing journalists from traveling anywhere near the operations in Kosovo, refugee accounts indicate that Serbian police and military forces are attacking, clearing and burning village after village in the border area. The operations appear to be an attempt to create a “sanitized corridor” free of ethnic Albanians and the threat to minority Serb domination of Kosovo that they represent.

The refugees’ accounts are consistent, and the events they describe sound disturbingly similar to the large-scale “ethnic cleansing” carried out during the recent wars in Bosnia and Croatia.

“Some people are talking about genocide,” said an international monitor based in Bajram Curri who has been assigned to the Kosovo conflict. “It looks very much as if they set out to cleanse the area.”

The monitor added that “it’s just too early to say” whether the word “genocide” can be fairly applied to the human catastrophe now unfolding in western Kosovo.

Nebi said that in Vokshi, the Serbian attack was devastatingly one-sided and came without warning.

“It just happened, boom!” he said. “You cannot fight back when they are using heavy artillery and grenades.”

He said his only hope now is that President Clinton will make good on his pledge not to let the Bosnian debacle replay itself in Kosovo.

“A Clinton attack! Yes! The biggest one!” he responded when asked how the Serbs’ military grip on western Kosovo could be broken.

Nearby, in Tropoje, the Albanian border town closest to the fighting, another newly arrived refugee, 39-year-old Sali Pepshi, said that when the Serbs attacked his village nine days ago, they used “weapons that caused us not to be able to breathe.”

“The smell was horrible. We couldn’t open our eyes,” said Pepshi, who sat under a tree in the Tropoje schoolyard surrounded by his wife, his children and the members of another family from their village, Junik, who crossed the mountains with them.

Pepshi said his family was trapped for an entire day in Junik as the bombardment continued around them.

He said it was hard to give a coherent account of the attack: “We only know that it was very loud.

“They fired every weapon possible,” he said. “I saw my nephew killed before my eyes.”

Only when night fell, he said, was his family able to escape to the mountains.

With Pepshi was a neighbor, 29-year-old Drita Noci, whose husband was killed in the attack.

She said that about a week before the onslaught started, the Serbs gave her a clear warning of what lay in store.

“The police and army broke into my house,” she said. “They broke down my doors and windows. The police said, ‘Go away from the village, because we’re going to attack.’ Then they started firing almost every day near our village. Shells were falling into our garden.”

Noci, her husband and their five young children tried moving into another village where they had relatives, she said, but then that village was attacked.

“We moved twice, and then we stayed for two days in the open air because we couldn’t stand it anymore,” she said. “For three days, we had no food.”

Finally, when her husband went out looking for food, she said, a sniper fatally shot him in the back of the head.

“They will kill everything that they find,” said Noci’s brother, Adem Zenuni. “They don’t care if it’s women and children. What’s important is whether it’s Albanians. If it is, then they’ll open fire.”

International monitors say they fear that even as the thousands of refugees like the Pepshi and Noci families were escaping to Albania, thousands more fled in the opposite direction, eastward, deeper into Kosovo.

These people are believed to have stopped near a major highway running through the province, where Serbian forces and Kosovo Albanian insurgents are now battling for control.

The international monitors fear that those eastbound refugees may be pinned down as the Serbs close in on the insurgents’ positions with tanks, helicopter gunships and snipers.

With Serbian operations in the area continuing and the number of refugees rising, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Saturday that it is stepping up its activities in northern Albania, bringing in 65 tons of flour, rice and other basic foods, as well as equipment for the hospital in Bajram Curri.

The relief effort is being severely hampered by the isolation, lawlessness and disastrous transportation infrastructure of northern Albania.

Donor nations have been reluctant to send food and medicine to the region for fear that the goods will be stolen.

In addition, the northern part of Albania is cut off from the south by a large lake, which can be crossed only by ferry. There is only one ferry per day, and it is filled to capacity.

“We already had a food shortage up here even before the refugees started coming,” said Ruediger Luchmann, program manager for Humanitarian Cargo Carriers, a European relief group. “It’s ridiculous to talk about humanitarian assistance in an area where there’s already a food shortage.”

Expatriates From Province Returning

Arriving on the ferry, however, are large numbers of expatriate Kosovo men, many of them from Germany and Switzerland.

Some confide that they are coming home to help support the Albanian insurgency. Others say they are merely trying to find out what has happened to family members since the fighting started in western Kosovo.

One of the latter was Sadik Gocaj, a carpenter now living in Detroit who said he had researched the Kosovo situation on the Internet and decided he had better return to the homeland he left in 1969.

He was walking the dirt streets of Tropoje on Saturday afternoon and had already found 17 members of his extended family. He was still looking for more.

“They had a long walk, 22 hours,” he said of his refugee relatives, now billeted on Albanian villagers’ floors. “Everybody living close to the border got hit. They had no protection. What were they going to do? They had to leave.”

Just down the street from where Gocaj was standing, the region’s other new arrivals were active as well, in a small but busy weapon bazaar that has appeared on Tropoje’s town square.

Young men were selling Kalashnikov assault rifles from the trunk of a beat-up Mercedes-Benz, and larger machine guns were visible nearby. There were pack animals for hire, and Kalashnikov bullets to be had for 75 cents per round.

Armed Kosovo Albanians were standing about in camouflage and spiffy olive green berets, a sharp contrast to the drab gray uniforms of the Albanian army. French, German, Albanian and even English could be heard, and sporadic gunfire rang out over the fields at the edge of the town.

Military observers here say that many of the weapons for sale came from the various Albanian army warehouses--including one in Tropoje--that were looted when Albania went through a period of civil unrest in March 1997.

About 500,000 Kalashnikovs are estimated to have disappeared at that time, and observers assume that at least 100,000 are already in Kosovo.

Although there has been organized ethnic Albanian guerrilla resistance in Kosovo for several years, the increasing visibility of this weapon-supply network has raised concerns in Albania that this country will be drawn into the Kosovo conflict as the insurgents use Albanian territory as a staging area.