Returned Refugees Camp Out in Kosovo

Like most refugees who fled this war-ravaged city to Albania or Macedonia, Naser Mehmetaj returned to find that his once-handsome two-story house had been torched by Yugoslav forces. Only the orange brick walls remained.

So Mehmetaj pitched a donated tent beside his house. He is camping out with his wife, 70-year-old mother and five children.

Though most of the largely ethnic Albanian refugees who fled Kosovo in the spring have returned to their homeland, many remain consigned to tents; they have simply moved them across the border. Moreover, they have been joined in their predicament by many new tent-dwellers, such as Mehmetaj, who were spared living in the refugee camps because of the generosity of host families in Macedonia and Albania.

So many tents have sprouted beside gutted homes in Kosovo--a southern province of Yugoslavia’s chief republic, Serbia--that the canvas quarters have become a metaphor for the daunting problems that remain for the former refugees. The thrill of being free and home is being replaced by dread of the fast-approaching Balkan winter.

“I can live in a tent for another month or two, but I can’t live in a tent for the freezing winter,” said Mehmetaj, surveying the shells of buildings that are all that remain of his neighborhood. “But if the international community helps us rebuild, we will stay.”

Some help may be on the way: After a tour of Kosovo on Wednesday, World Bank President James Wolfensohn said he would urge his agency to establish an emergency fund not only to rebuild homes and schools but to pay salaries of teachers and other government employees working without pay. His agency will hold an emergency meeting late this month to appropriate money, two months ahead of the date when longer-term reconstruction projects for Kosovo will be considered.

“Fifty million today would be worth more than $500 million a year from now,” Wolfensohn said.

He didn’t specify how much he will request but suggested that from $40 million to $70 million might be in order for the short term. Wolfensohn said the severity of the destruction he had seen indicated full-scale “construction, not reconstruction,” was necessary in many cases.

In the region surrounding the western city of Pec, home to about 457,000 people before the war, about 75% of the free-standing homes are severely damaged or destroyed, according to Italian peacekeepers occupying the area. Throughout the province, at least 55,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed.

The destruction hasn’t stopped most of the former residents from returning home, however: Nearly 700,000 of the more than 850,000 Kosovo refugees who took flight to Macedonia; Albania; Montenegro, the other Yugoslav republic; and elsewhere after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 11-week air war began March 24 have returned since alliance troops moved into Kosovo in mid-June. In addition, hundreds of thousands of displaced people hid in the hills of Kosovo during the conflict.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has distributed about 3,600 tents in the Pec area and about 11,000 throughout the province.

Some of the refugees once housed in Macedonian and Albanian camps simply folded their tents and took them home across the border, with the blessing of relief agencies. Throughout the war, refugees often told reporters that they would go back to Kosovo immediately after the conflict “if we only had a tent.”

Kamber Berisha’s family was one of those. He, his wife and four children, along with his late brother’s wife and two children, shared two tents in an Albanian refugee camp for three months. The same two tents now sit inside their fenced lot, next to their burned-out home near here in the tiny village of Ljubenic, where several dozen men reportedly were massacred by Serbian paramilitary forces in late March. Despite the tragedy that Berisha narrowly escaped, “the kids said all the time, if only we could go home, we would live in a tent and we would eat only bread and water,” said Zyrafete Berisha, his wife.

When the family did go back, the children wept for joy, even though their house was destroyed and they still have nightmares about what occurred in the village. They have no electricity, and their only means of cooking is a wood stove in a shed. But the possible presence of land mines makes trips to the forest for firewood treacherous.

“The good thing is I’m on my land and it’s my house,” Kamber Berisha said. “There’s no place in the world that can match your house, and it’s good to see your friends and neighbors coming home.”

Basim Shala feels the same way. He was evacuated to Belgium during the war and now is living with his sister since his house is burned. “If they give me all Belgium, I’d rather stay in Peje mud,” Shala said, using the Albanian name for Pec, his hometown. “We are all neighbors--there you could die in the middle of the road and no one would care.”

Still, he plans to return to Belgium every month to collect a relief payment of several hundred dollars given to refugees by the Belgian government; no such funds exist for those who weren’t evacuated beyond the Balkans.

The U.N.’s World Food Program has provided meals for returning refugees, and the U.N. refugee agency has handed out tens of thousands of plastic ground sheets, plastic mattresses, blankets and kitchen sets. The refugee agency also is planning to distribute 15,000 winterized tents and stoves to heat them, along with 45,000 cooking stoves.

Now comes the more difficult task of helping returnees winterize one room in each home, where families can spend the months when Kosovo is blanketed by snow and temperatures hover below zero.

The refugee agency is doling out winterizing kits that include plastic to cover the roof, along with nails, tape and floor insulation. In addition, Japan has donated the prefabricated one-room shelters used to house the homeless after the 1995 earthquake in Kobe.

“The challenge is the race against time to get the distribution in place,” said Anders Ronild, a U.N. refugee agency field officer here. Many of the villages in the area are reachable only by grueling drives through the mountains on dirt roads, some of which haven’t been cleared of mines.

Nevertheless, for some left behind in refugee camps, such as Mahmut Ejupi, the relief efforts are not enough for them to live in Kosovo again. All Ejupi owned was destroyed during the war, except his car. And when he went back to Kosovo to survey the damage, Ejupi was so upset that he accidentally crashed the car into a NATO truck.

“I have no hope, no money and nothing to do,” said Ejupi, who felt he had no choice but to return to a camp in Stankovac, Macedonia. “Life is so miserable here.”

The number of refugees living in camps in Macedonia has plummeted from 110,000 at the peak of the refugee crisis to well under 10,000. Mehmetaj, the man who complained of the coming winter, said he too has nothing but that he couldn’t remain in Albania any longer.

“Being a refugee is very hard, even when you’re sheltered by a rich family like we were,” he said. “I wanted to go back and breathe the air of my homeland again.”

If Mehmetaj can get his house repaired, he will return the generosity he was shown as a refugee. Like the majority of refugees who fled to Albania, he was taken in by a family he had never met before. The six-member host family treated the eight members of Mehmetaj’s family just like kin, even giving them food and household goods for their return to Kosovo. “I went with no money, and he received my family and we felt like we were living in our home. I will never forget his generosity,” Mehmetaj said.

“My house has seven rooms--if I can fix it, three or four families can live here. I would invite every family to come here.”

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Reitman reported from Pec and Tamaki from Stankovac.