As Winter Nears, Death Stalks Kosovo Refugees

Ali Elshani, 52, is a frightened man: afraid to go home, afraid of starving and, perhaps most of all, afraid of the looming Balkan winter.

One of more than 300,000 ethnic Albanians driven from their homes this year by a Serbian offensive aimed at crushing separatist guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Elshani fears that returning to his devastated village could mean death at the hands of police or soldiers.

Camped out with his family of eight under plastic sheeting in a mountain valley, he worries that they may run out of food within days--and he knows they cannot survive the coming freezing months outdoors.

“If the international community does not help us, all of us will die this winter,” Elshani says as his wife nervously tugs her disheveled hair and fights back tears.

As tragedy stalks the Elshani family and other displaced people in Serbia’s breakaway Kosovo province, where more than 1,000 have already died in fighting this year, humanitarian organizations are scrambling to head off a fresh wave of deaths from cold, starvation and disease.

“We are in the midst of a huge catastrophe,” said Olara Otunnu, the U.N. special envoy for children affected by armed combat, during a recent visit to Kosovo. “I saw the exposed population, the traumatized children. The destruction is palpable. The military operations are continuing. Winter is around the corner.”

The world’s collective response so far “is woefully inadequate,” Otunnu said. “If we do not do enough to stave off the worst from happening, on this occasion we cannot have the excuse that we did not know. The facts are there for all to witness.”

U.N. refugee chief Sadako Ogata appealed to Yugoslav authorities Friday to end the offensive in Kosovo and curb the flight of refugees from their homes.

“Let’s not have any more displaced people in Kosovo,” she told reporters in Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital.

100 People Crammed Into One House

The area around this isolated mountain village, normally home to only a few thousand people, is one of the key centers of suffering in the unfolding Kosovo tragedy.

About 60,000 people have fled here to escape Serbian attacks, according to local leaders helping with relief efforts. Of that number, 50,000 have been crammed into villagers’ homes, sometimes at 100 people or more per house, while 10,000 more sleep outdoors, they say.

Right now, those indoors are not necessarily the luckier ones.

“It’s better to be outdoors than in a place with 100 people in two rooms,” Elshani said. “But we don’t know what to do when it gets cold.”

Similar situations are repeated in dozens of remote villages across central and western Kosovo, a Serbian province about the size of Los Angeles County that is home to 2 million people, 90% of them ethnic Albanian.

Diarrhea caused by contaminated drinking water and resulting dehydration is already causing deaths, especially of children, and medical workers fear epidemics of respiratory illnesses and tuberculosis.

The fate of those driven from their homes would already be far worse if not for the mutual help that is traditional among Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, said Jak Mita, vice president of the Pristina-based Mother Teresa Society.

“Any displaced person, wherever they ran away from, wherever they were, could knock on any door, and they were accepted,” Mita said. “This is based on a 5-century-old tradition that is alive today in the morality of Albanians. . . . Nobody is going to leave anyone to freeze to death out in the cold so long as there is any space to take them in.”

International aid agencies are already distributing about 500 tons of food per week--an amount that is expected to increase about eight-fold before November, a U.S. official said.

Washington has approved $22 million of food aid, and the U.N. World Food Program has issued an appeal for governments to provide $16 million for food.

U.S. charities and European aid groups are also involved in the effort, for a total of more than 20 agencies. Almost all work in close coordination with the Mother Teresa Society, an ethnic Albanian group set up before the fighting started to help elderly people and needy families that now uses its extensive local network to help hand out the aid.

The work is not without risks. Last month, three local volunteers with the Mother Teresa Society were killed by a Serbian shell lobbed at their tractor in what has been widely viewed here by aid workers as a deliberate attack.

The Kosovo Liberation Army, which in July claimed control of about 40% of the province, has been driven back by the Serbian offensive to more remote mountain strongholds. It has suffered no more than a few hundred fighters killed in a force usually estimated at 15,000 or more. The brunt of the suffering has been borne by civilians.

In a pattern repeated scores of times this summer, Serbian forces shelled villages viewed as sympathetic to the guerrillas to drive out the inhabitants, then moved in on the ground to burn and loot many homes and sometimes kill stragglers.

On a few recent occasions, Serbian authorities have dispersed groups of refugees--primarily women, children and the elderly--with demands that they return to their home villages. Most have continued to flee, but some--perhaps a few thousand--have gone back. Young men from destroyed villages remain especially fearful of returning because they might be arrested and taken away as suspected guerrillas.

Some refugees also have returned home voluntarily, especially to Orahovac, the largest town affected by the fighting. Because of its size, diplomatic observers and aid officials have an especially high profile there, which has encouraged some residents to feel safe enough to come back.

Men of Fighting Age Face Uncertain Fates

The Yugoslav government, trying to project a sense that normality can be restored under Serbian control, has tried especially hard to encourage returns to Orahovac, again at least partly because of the town’s high visibility.

On some occasions, groups of people have been captured and the men of fighting age separated out for interrogation. In the best-known of these cases, most of the men were released, but the fate of some is still unknown.

The Yugoslav government has set up 12 aid distribution centers for refugees, a move that many critics view as a perverse propaganda ploy, because it was Serbian police and soldiers who originally drove the refugees out in terror.

The vast majority of refugees remain on the run. International aid agencies are preparing to feed at least 300,000 people inside Kosovo throughout the winter, while tens of thousands also have fled to neighboring Albania and to Montenegro, another Yugoslav republic, where they need assistance as well.

With the guerrillas in retreat, most homeless people are in areas outside of Serbian control but not under clear guerrilla rule: They are in scattered pockets of no man’s land within shelling range of Serbian forces.

Delays in Aid Could Bring Mass Deaths

Early indications are that the relief effort can largely succeed in keeping these huge numbers of people alive as long as it is not seriously impeded by the Yugoslav government, aid officials say. But any miscalculations or delayed deliveries could bring unnecessary deaths on a large scale, they add.

“Our capacity will grow, but as of today, it’s like we’ve got 20 fires burning and only two firetrucks,” said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition he not be identified. “In making decisions about where convoys should go, they can’t reach everybody.”

The logistics of the aid effort are a nightmare.

The village of Guncat, for instance, is reached by first passing from the provincial capital, Pristina, through several Serbian police roadblocks, past a dozen deserted villages of burned-out homes with holes from mortar shells in roofs and walls. Villages gradually come to life again as one climbs a winding gravel road to Guncat, untouched by police but within easy striking distance should they so choose.

An aid convoy organized by Doctors of the World and the Mother Teresa Society recently reached Guncat with 35 tons of flour, according to Hamez Shala, local leader of the main ethnic Albanian political party, who functions as village mayor.

But Guncat, normally home to 1,700, has taken in about 11,000 people who have fled their homes, Shala said. So the flour amounts to 6 pounds per person--enough for about a week.

“The situation is not good,” Shala said. “We are surrounded by police forces. We lack medicine. We don’t have doctors. A few days ago, a woman gave birth and the baby died because no doctor was there. The [food] reserves of the village were already at a minimum. At the beginning, we had food to help those who fled here. But now the villagers are at the same level.”

Without relief shipments, Shala warned, “the people here can only survive for 15 days.”

Only Politics Will End Crisis

Relief officials--and many people who have fled their homes--stress that emergency aid by itself is no solution. Only a political agreement that allows people to return safely to their homes can solve the humanitarian problem, they say.

In fact, despite the precarious nature of life in places like Guncat and Pagarusa, many people seem less worried about the reliability of humanitarian aid than they are about wanting the United States and other powerful nations to force a political settlement onto the government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

“The main help for us will be if the international community guarantees our safe return to our homes,” said Habib Hoxha, 40, a taxi driver who fled the heavily damaged village of Blace to Guncat with his father, wife and four children. They are now part of a group living 40 people to two rooms, one for men and the other for women and children.

“The international community said at the beginning they will not let Kosovo be the second Bosnia,” Hoxha said. “But today Kosovo is the second Bosnia. Every day there are killings, there are massacres and destruction of villages. Does the international community realize this? We thank the international community very much for the humanitarian help. But this is not a humanitarian question. We need help resolving the political question.”

Shala, the village leader, also stressed that the international community must focus on a political solution as much as on humanitarian aid.

“The key thing for us is resolving our security question,” he said. “We are afraid of a possible attack. We’ve heard that in other places around Kosovo, displaced persons have been targeted by police forces, shelled. We are afraid of this. . . . Probably the police can leave us alone, perhaps for three days, perhaps for five months,--but not more. They will again start to attack us.”