Kosovo Refugees Find Odd Shelter--in Bosnia

The war ruins of a Coca-Cola plant here don’t offer much in the way of furniture, so the first arrivals from Kosovo had to make do.

Stuff a cushion into a plastic Coke crate, and it becomes a baby’s chair. Lie down on a wooden pallet scavenged from the warehouse, and you have a bed.

And the empty ammo crate that carried a dozen 60-millimeter mortar bombs for Serbian fighters on Bosnia’s former front line makes a fine stool now that the war is raging in another place: This time, in your homeland.

“Whenever everything is over, I would like to go back,” Jasminka Secic, 31, said. “But it is getting worse and worse. It’s very bad. It’s the second Bosnia.”

Secic fled Kosovo province in neighboring Yugoslavia six weeks ago with her husband and their four children, driven from their farm in the village of Ladrovic by fighting between Kosovo Liberation Army rebels and Yugoslav forces. “There was fighting all around,” she said. “We were afraid for our children and ourselves. That’s why we left.”

Now Secic and her family live on the outskirts of Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, with about 1,000 other Kosovo refugees in the cold, squalid shell of the Coke plant, while Bosnian and U.N. officials argue over what to do about them.

Almost half are children, many of them sick with runny noses, heavy coughs and skin diseases such as scabies. The indoor toilets don’t work, and the floor is filthy with human waste. The refugees have no running water or electricity and depend on candles for light.

With the Balkan fires now burning in Kosovo province, Bosnia--where peace is enforced by 30,000 NATO troops--has become a bizarre sanctuary.

At least 12,000 refugees have taken refuge in Bosnia-Herzegovina after fleeing warfare in Kosovo, where 90% of the province’s 2 million people are ethnic Albanians ruled by minority Serbs. Because many refugees cross the porous border without registering, some estimates place their number at 30,000.

They came to Bosnia, a nation still devastated by war, largely because other countries either can’t or won’t help them. Montenegro, which along with Serbia--where Kosovo is located--makes up what remains of Yugoslavia, closed its border to Kosovars early last month. Getting into the neighboring nation of Macedonia requires a passport, which most of the refugees don’t have, and rumors of land mines along the border apparently have helped discourage Kosovars from trying to enter there illegally.

Thousands have crossed the mountains illegally into Albania, but it’s one of Europe’s poorest countries and is teetering on the brink of anarchy.

Bosnia, its borders poorly regulated in the wake of its own war, is the best choice left. Even so, refugees related stories of being abused and robbed by police on both sides of the border.

More refugees are about the last thing that Bosnia needs as it tries to heal the ethnic wounds of its own 3 1/2-year war, which ended in 1995 with the Dayton, Ohio, peace accord.

While North Atlantic Treaty Organization peacekeepers have stopped the fighting, about 400,000 Bosnians are still displaced in their own country, while another 800,000 are refugees abroad, the United Nations reports.

Several countries that gave refuge to Bosnians during the war are pressuring them to go home; Germany alone sent back 55,000 during the summer. About 100,000 Bosnians have returned home this year, and the sudden surge of refugees from Kosovo is adding to the strain on a weary nation, said Haris Basic, Bosnia’s assistant minister for refugees and emigration.

“This is a state ministry, and I haven’t received a salary for three months,” Basic said. “So everything should be clear to you. Pensioners’ checks are three months late. We have no money.”

Bosnia’s government offered the Coke plant as an emergency shelter when the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees refused to take sole responsibility for the Kosovars’ care. As the living conditions worsened, the U.N. offered only basic necessities such as food, a few portable showers and foam mattresses, while trying to squeeze a permanent deal on caring for asylum seekers out of Bosnia’s leaders.

“It’s also taking a risk, for the [Bosnian] government to open a sort of Pandora’s box,” conceded Ariane Quentier, spokeswoman for the U.N. agency. “If the 200,000 Albanians who are out in the woods [of Kosovo] know about this, and even just 10% of them come to Bosnia, that’s another 20,000 people.”

Privately, U.N. officials blame age-old European prejudice against ethnic Albanians for the refugees’ suffering here. “They don’t want the Albanians to be here, and every excuse is good enough to make our lives miserable,” said one U.N. official, who added: “But if it’s true we have 30,000 Albanians in Bosnia, that’s the last thing we need. I mean, everyone agrees with that.”

The Coke factory was supposed to house only about 300 people, but with at least 40 more Kosovars reaching Bosnia each day, the shelter’s population quickly grew to 1,000.

Secic, a Bosnian Muslim who married an ethnic Albanian in Kosovo, lives in a factory side room with her husband and children. The youngest, 4-year-old Liridona Gegaj, sits quietly in her mother’s lap as Secic prepares breakfast over a wood fire in the plant’s parking lot. Liridona’s face is sooty and pocked with small red scabies sores.

When the autumn sun drops behind the mountains, the family moves inside, where there are six metal cots lined up beside an open pit filled with a tangle of broken bed frames. A large pressurized gas tank, with a rubber hose and wheels, stands in one corner, a battered steel cabinet in another. Much of the floor is a mess of dirty plates and pots, trash, boxes of clothes--and a child’s crutches.

Secic and her family are lucky. Most of the refugees have to live on the factory’s main floor, where they sleep two to a mattress in rows of about 20 laid out on wooden pallets.

They eat, sleep, argue, embrace--all in a few square feet per family. A couple of families have hung plastic tarps from twine to provide a little privacy. But nothing can keep out the noise of crying children and hacking coughs.

“Even pigs would not live here,” Ermena Redea, a 22-year-old refugee, said with disgust. “Even pigs would get ill here.”

The United Nations has long pressed the Bosnian government to offer better shelter. Last week, months after the Kosovo refugees began arriving, Bosnia’s government finally announced a plan to build wooden dormitories, with 18 rooms each. They are designed to sleep four in a room, with communal bathrooms, kitchens and dining halls. They are meant to provide shelter only until it’s safe for the Kosovo refugees to go home. The U.N. will pay 80% of the project’s $1.6-million price tag.

But the dormitories are no substitute for the permanent agreement for handling all asylum seekers that the U.N. wanted; they’re only a temporary arrangement to provide a place better to live in than an abandoned factory.

“I hope that, within the next month, we will be able to move these people from the Coca-Cola plant to more humane accommodations,” Basic said.

That will not come fast enough. Peace has been pretty good for the soft-drink business, so the local owners have given the refugees until Tuesday to find somewhere else to live. The Kosovars will have to move to another building nearby while they wait for the new shelter Basic, an economist by training, said that throughout Bosnia’s war he kept a promise to himself to stay away from political debates. He would rather keep that promise than say what he thinks about the West’s repeated threats to intervene in Kosovo if Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, long seen by the West as an instigator of conflicts in the Balkans, doesn’t stop his troops’ offensive.

But Basic can’t resist laying blame for the refugee crisis at the feet of the Yugoslav leader--and the West.

“The U.S. and NATO keep saying they will help, but in reality they are waiting for Milosevic to finish the job,” he said. “And Milosevic will create a big problem in the Balkans. He has been doing that for seven years.”

* STRIKE OPTIONS: NATO mulls whether to target Serbian forces in Kosovo or elsewhere in Yugoslavia. A18

* MASSACRE SURVIVOR: A survivor of a weekend slaughter gives chilling details of alleged atrocities. A16