Kosovo Refugees Take Perilous Trek to Freedom Across Adriatic

Ekrem Salay rose from his cot at the refugee shelter here to demonstrate how he, his wife and four small children survived their escape from Serbia’s beleaguered Kosovo province.

Hoisting 4-year-old Hatigie onto one shoulder and 15-month-old Sanie onto the other, the ethnic Albanian simulated his forced plunge from a rubber speedboat into icy, waist-deep water off southeastern Italy’s coast two nights after Christmas.

While trudging ashore, Salay recalled, he made sure that 10-year-old Silvana was keeping pace with her head above water and that his wife, Zemirta, was holding on to 2-month-old Sinan.

“The smugglers made us jump off near the shore and then sped away,” said the 28-year-old mechanic, still unsettled by the memory. “We couldn’t see much, so we just kept walking to shallower water.”

Cold, wet, dark landings have become an all-too-common rite of passage for tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians fleeing the conflict between Kosovo’s separatist guerrillas and the Yugoslav army. Getting safely ashore is just one more ordeal of a journey that doesn’t get much easier beyond the war zone.

Fighting that began in February has driven at least 200,000 people--one-tenth of Kosovo’s population--from their homes. Despite a shaky 3-month-old cease-fire, most of the refugees remain in temporary shelters in the province in Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic. Others have moved overland to neighboring Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the other Yugoslav republic, Montenegro.

A growing number of refugees from Kosovo are joining others who entrust their lives to unscrupulous scafisti--sea smugglers who make a fortune ferrying undocumented migrants from the Balkans, Middle East and Asia across the Adriatic from Albanian ports to southern Italy, the favored gateway to the West.

Many landing here from Kosovo say they decided to take the risk after giving up hope for an early end to the conflict or after finding Albania too crime-ridden and inhospitable. Some waited months for relatives in Switzerland or Germany--the migrants’ most common destinations--to send money for the scafisti, who charge up to $1,000 per passenger.

According to the United Nations, 81,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo have asked for political asylum in Western Europe since the fighting began--most of them after arriving in or passing through Italy. Hundreds landed during a post-Christmas rush over unusually calm winter seas.

Italy grants Kosovo war refugees short-term aid and visitors’ permits while they apply for asylum. It is not so lenient on others, including Albanians from Albania, who migrate here for economic reasons. Many are caught and sent home.

But because the scafisti belong to Albania-based crime gangs, the crossing is perilous. They pack migrants from Kosovo and elsewhere into the same rubber boats and often throw in bales of marijuana or hashish for smuggling into Italy.

When Italian police boats race after them, the scafisti sometimes escape by throwing children into the water to divert pursuers into rescue efforts, as they did during a passage in October. Even when they see no police, the smugglers play it safe: They stop short of the coast and force their passengers to wade ashore.

In an incident in October, two speeding boats plying the waters between Albania and Italy collided, killing five adults and a 6-month-old baby from Kosovo.

Many survive the crossing only to learn that they’ve been swindled. Salay, the Kosovo mechanic, sold his tractor and two cows to help pay what he thought was his family’s passage from Kosovo to Germany. He was told to wait in the dark on the Italian coast for a truck that never came.

“We must have laws to protect the path of these people,” said Father Cesare Lodeserto, the Roman Catholic priest who runs the Regina Pacis refugee shelter here, Italy’s busiest. “If a man must leave his country because of war, why should he have to pay criminals?”