Baker’s Bread Helps Abate Hunger

Every day, Islam Musliu watches CNN and sees loaves of bread handed to tens of thousands of refugees.

And every day, the ethnic Albanian baker despairs at the sight.

It is his bread on the trucks. And it is his people with their arms outstretched.

“It’s not a good feeling,” Musliu said Sunday of his reaction to these images. “I’m supposed to be making bread. I’m not supposed to be feeding suffering people.”

As thousands of ethnic Albanians continue to flee south to Macedonia from neighboring Kosovo, Musliu is one of the scores of people involved in providing a daily ration of about one loaf of bread for every two refugees--a small miracle repeated up to 30,000 times a day.

The process begins in wheat fields in Spain, the United States, Bulgaria or Turkey, continues as flour sacks cross the Aegean Sea and winds up at Musliu’s modern bakery, within sight of the refugee camps that have sprung up adjacent to this capital.

Bread is a staple of the Albanian diet. Most families eat it with every meal. So when the refugees began flooding into Macedonia and Albania in the days after the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia began on March 24, refugee workers made finding adequate supplies of bread a priority.

World Food Program, the U.N. food organization, went into action first, sending cargo ships loaded with flour--much of it from the U.S.--into the Greek port of Salonika. Within a day of the first refugees’ arrival, the U.N. agency was delivering about 6,000 loaves for them.

As the Kosovars kept coming, the need increased. Bill Hart, a Canadian who works with the agency, made a deal with Musliu and another local bakery. The U.N. could pay them with surplus flour as long as they provided the labor and other materials to make the bread.

Musliu, who had been voluntarily bringing bread in the first days of the crisis, readily agreed.

For one thing, his factory sits on the road to the Blace border zone, the scene of such misery in the early days of the crisis, when refugees poured into a narrow valley that could offer them neither food nor shelter.

“I have a moral obligation to every human being, whoever he is, no matter what the nationality,” he said, adding that he would have helped Serbs if they had been in a similar position.

Musliu, who supplies about 30% of the bread needed by the refugees, now runs his factory 24 hours a day and has doubled his pre-crisis production. He has also hired an extra shift of 10 people solely to make bread for the camps.

On a more personal level, he has opened up houses he owns to accommodate about 35 refugees--strangers to him until the crisis.

On Sunday, Musliu walked through his factory, redolent with the smell of fresh-baked bread. Looking like ghosts, flour-covered workers darted about, filling a huge mixer with flour, water and yeast. Musliu rejected a suggestion that he was doing anything special.

“Compared with what the refugees are going through, it’s nothing,” he said as brown loaves rolled past on a conveyor belt.

From Musliu’s factory, U.N. and refugee workers immediately load the bread into waiting vans and deliver it to the camps, each of which has placed a specific order the day before.

Although it was common in the first days of the crisis for refugees to surround one of the trucks, the camps have by now established individual systems to distribute the loaves. In the larger camps, refugees wait up to four hours in lines as long as a quarter of a mile.

But in Blace, a smaller camp that was the first stop Sunday, the bread is delivered to each tent by either an aid worker or a designated refugee. Action Against Hunger, the New York-based group in charge of food distribution at Blace, says the system avoids the dangers posed by a jostling crowd of people.

On Sunday, first on the list at the Blace camp was Ilmi Bedrolli, a 35-year-old factory worker who squatted on a muddy foam mattress in his tent hard against the rushing Lepenac River.

For a month and a half, Bedrolli, his wife and four children slept in Kosovo with their clothes on, prepared to flee in case of a nighttime Serbian attack. When the homes in a nearby village began to burn Saturday, they decided to evacuate by train.

As the rest of his family tore chunks out of Musliu’s still-warm bread, Bedrolli said he was grateful for something to eat.

“This is what we need,” he said. “We can’t ask for more.”

*

Many charities are accepting contributions to help refugees from Kosovo. The list may be found at https://www.latimes.com/kosovoaid.