Serb-Run Hospitals Hold Fate of Infants Left Behind

When the order came to get out of Kosovo, many ethnic Albanians had to leave behind what they loved most, even if that was a newborn child.

The soldiers, police and paramilitaries who drove them from this Serbian province, some disguised in black masks, weren’t very sympathetic to a mother’s pleas for a little more time to get her baby from the hospital.

Some of the infants were too small to be moved safely anyway, so their mothers had no choice but to join the columns of deportees and hope that the doctors and nurses at the hospital had bigger hearts than the men with guns.

Fortunately for at least five premature babies, they did. The babies, all ethnic Albanians, lie in a corner row of metal cribs on the maternity ward of Pristina’s main hospital, the Clinical Medical Center.

They are wrapped as tight as mummies in white cotton, with only their sleeping faces exposed. Their names are not written in the ward’s registry because, officially, they don’t have any.

The babies’ names are with the memories in the minds of their parents, who are living in a refugee camp in Macedonia or Albania, or maybe even farther away by now.

It is anyone’s guess when, or if, the five Kosovo Albanian babies will be reunited with the parents who were forced to abandon them. For now, they are in the hands of fate, and of Serbian medical staffers like Mirjana Rascanin.

She swore long ago to care for all of her patients, no matter how they came into the world, or her ward, and that is what she is doing.

“When I arrived here the first day, the chief doctor told me to leave all of my prejudices at home and to do my job the best that I can,” Rascanin, an intern in charge of the maternity ward, said Saturday.

“This is a situation where people can react in different ways and can be driven by different motives,” she went on. “But we have to continue with our work, and do it as correctly as possible.”

As Rascanin read from the ward’s registry, the first of five names was that of Ymrane Gajtani, of the town of Urosevac, who gave birth on March 19, five days before the first NATO bombs fell on Yugoslavia.

Rascanin didn’t know it, but Gajtani is a 19-year-old woman living in Tent C286 in the Brazda refugee camp, about 50 miles to the south and across the border in Macedonia. She cries every day.

She knows the name of baby #1127 in Rascanin’s registry. He is Kushtrim, her son, who was born two months premature, at 4 pounds, 6 ounces, on March 19.

Two weeks after Gajtani gave birth to Kushtrim, Serbian paramilitary forces came to the family’s home in Pristina, Kosovo’s provincial capital, and ordered them to leave immediately.

Gajtani begged them to let her collect her baby first, but they told her they didn’t care about the infant.

Like thousands of other ethnic Albanians in the city, Gajtani and her husband, Hyzri, had to join a column of people walking solemnly to the rail station, where they were loaded onto trains and deported.

When they reached the border, Hyzri wanted to turn around and go back to Pristina for Kushtrim, their firstborn. But his wife talked him out of it.

“I didn’t let him because the road was full of police,” she said in an interview at the Brazda camp.

Gajtani reported the missing baby to the International Committee of the Red Cross two weeks ago, but each time she has checked with the group at her camp, she’s been told they have no information.

Along with all but a few Greek relief agencies, the Red Cross evacuated its staff from Kosovo, so the first news Gajtani heard of her baby came from a foreign journalist.

The couple have registered to go to Germany, Austria or Sweden, but they worry that if they leave the Brazda camp, it will be even more difficult for them to be reunited with their son.

As Kushtrim grows older, he also gets closer to being declared officially abandoned and then, when he is too old for the maternity ward, sent off to an orphanage.

Kushtrim has put on the weight he needed to get out of an incubator--and then some--and now he sleeps and eats with the rest of the babies under the care of Rascanin and her nurses.

She has heard reports coming from outside Kosovo that claim the Pristina hospital staff has mistreated ethnic Albanian patients or kicked them out altogether, and she can’t just shrug them off as war propaganda.

“It hurts me very much when I hear this,” she said. “I’m trying to be a professional every single moment.

“God is watching all this, including those who report on this unprofessionally and those of us who are doing our jobs professionally.”

Each night, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s bombers usually attack targets in and around Pristina, the nurses carry the babies down to an underground bomb shelter.

They make enough warm milk for the night and keep the babies as close together as they can, because the shelter is cold, and then carry them all back up to the ward after sunrise.

NATO’s daytime bombing in the vicinity of the capital has increased over the last couple of days, so the risk and the tension are constant.

After a bomb blast just outside Pristina, people on the second floor of one hospital building could feel the entire structure shaking Saturday, and the windows rattled.

That’s a regular event, and it’s not very healthy for babies, especially in a maternity ward with large windows that shatter easily, Rascanin said.

“It’s awful,” she said. “Children are screaming, and there are detonations here, and then over there, so we don’t know where to take them.”

In the ward where 22 civilian bombing victims are recovering from shrapnel wounds to arms and legs, all but one of the patients are ethnic Albanians. Six of them are from one family.

Sehrija Vojvoda lies in one bed, breast-feeding her 6-month-old baby, Rilidona, while her children Albert, 3, Bedzet, 5, Mentor, 13, and Valdeta, 15, lie nearby recovering from arm and leg wounds.

Her son Sefcet, 7, is all alone with severe internal injuries in a room on another floor. His mother says the family members were all injured soon after they heard planes above their Srbica home about 10 a.m. on April 15.

“We went out to see what was happening, and suddenly a bomb fell on our house,” she said through an ethnic Albanian nurse who acted as a translator. “There were 11 dead and 25 wounded.”

Saturday afternoon, the hospital took in two more Kosovo Albanian children who were injured after finding a yellow canister with numbers on it in the field by their family’s farm in Doganovic, about 30 miles south of Pristina.

To boys tending cows, it looked like something fun to play with. But it was an unexploded bomblet, one of several that fell from a cluster bomb. It went off in the children’s faces.

Five of them died, all from one family, and by 4 o’clock--just 4 1/2 hours later--the Koxha children were buried in a grassy cemetery by a small brook near the village.

Their names were written in blue ink on wooden stakes: Edon, 3, Fisnik, 9, Osman, 13, Burim, 14, and Valdet, 15.

A small pool of coagulating blood marked the spot where the bomblet blew up, tearing a hole in the ground about 3 feet long and a couple of inches deep and throwing the yellow canister about 30 yards.

Just an hour after the cluster bomblet exploded, something fell from the sky over the ethnic Albanian village of Velika Dobranja, about 12 miles south of Pristina.

It smashed two small holes through the red tile roof of one house, shot shrapnel into another and destroyed a farmer’s tractor in the neighbor’s yard.

The shrapnel also killed Orta Lugici, age 6. His distraught uncle Mehmet Lugici, 36, brought two other children to Pristina’s hospital, where one was listed in critical condition Saturday night.

“Please, God, let this war end,” the boy’s uncle said.

It was also a busy Saturday in the maternity ward’s delivery room, where three children were born. One of the babies was a Serb, the other two ethnic Albanians.

Watson reported from Pristina and Shogren from Skopje, Macedonia.

All of Paul Watson’s dispatches from Kosovo are available on The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/dispatch.