Kosovo Clashes Raise Fears in Refugee Camps

The breakdown of Kosovo peace talks and intensified fighting along the Albanian-Yugoslav border have increased concern among humanitarian aid organizations about the safety of the more than 100,000 refugees still camped here.

Heavy NATO bombing and Serbian shelling Monday near the Morine border crossing--as well as reports of shelling along Macedonia’s border with Kosovo--raised fears among international aid workers that the brinkmanship could spill over the border into Kukes.

“For us, there has never been a period of greater danger,” said Stephen Green, head of the World Food Program in Kukes. “The Serbs are bitter and humiliated, and they are sitting behind a howitzer in a gun emplacement. The random shelling around Krume in the last few days tells me the decision about loosing off a shell is made at a very low level.”

More than 1,000 refugees were evacuated from Krume, about seven miles north of here, and from surrounding villages Sunday and Monday after one person was killed and six others were wounded in shelling there.

Several NATO bombs also fell on the Albanian side of the Morine border crossing last week, although no one was injured in those blasts.

“There is clearly a military situation here that is worrying,” said Ariane Quentier, a spokeswoman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Kukes. “The fighting has gotten closer. It is not in Albania yet, but there is an increased presence of the KLA. . . . It is not safe for the refugees.”

Aid workers said that they have begun to see some roadblocks put up by the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army on dirt roads around Krume and that the guerrillas have been searching for new recruits in the refugee camps. In particular, they said, the KLA has been seeking doctors and medical technicians in the last two weeks, since a rebel offensive began across the border in the Mt. Pastric area.

“It’s not really recruitment--it’s more of a draft,” said one aid worker.

Aid agencies already have moved about 380,000 ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo to safer ground in southern Albania, but at least 100,000 have resisted going for a variety of reasons. Some are tired of moving and want to be close to the border to return home as soon as possible; others want to be near sons and husbands who are fighting with the KLA; still others are hoping they will find family members left behind in Kosovo.

Refugees continue to cross the border at the rate of about 100 to 200 a day, most of them men who had been held prisoner by the Serbs. Still dressed in the winter clothes they had on when they went into hiding after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign began March 24, many have said they had been moving from village to village until they were caught, interrogated, beaten and released.

Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian civilians are still inside Kosovo, many in hiding or displaced from their homes. Humanitarian aid agencies say they have never known when to expect another big influx here.

The on-again, off-again deal with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to end the Kosovo conflict has left the aid agencies trying to prepare for both prolonged war and sudden peace.

They are drafting plans to evacuate refugees from Kukes in the event the town becomes a war zone and to prepare camps for a long winter, while at the same time they are bracing for the possibility that a peace deal could provoke thousands of refugees in the south to suddenly pick up and head north again.

“If there is peace, we will have a large influx from the south. We will be feeding people here and at the same time distributing repatriation packages as they leave to go to Kosovo,” said Green of the World Food Program.

“If it is clear, on the other hand, there is going to be war, there will be a continued effort to move people south and to get them out of harm’s way,” he said.

The World Food Program is not betting either way. While hoping and planning for peace, it has dug underground bunkers in its compound in Kukes and will soon move its warehouse and logistics center to a NATO base outside town, which it deems safer.

In the event a peace deal can be reached and NATO troops enter Kosovo, relief agencies hope the refugees will wait to go home at least until peacekeepers have been able to clear mines, booby-traps and unexploded bombs. The humanitarian aid workers would like to assess damage in the province and resettle the internally displaced Kosovars before the refugees cross back over the border. But they might find they do not have time to do so.

“Many refugees are hoping to go back in a few weeks’ time,” said UNICEF spokesman Marc Vagara. “They say, ‘It doesn’t matter if we have to live in tents, we’re living in tents anyway.’ They know the villages are mined and the wells are polluted with dead animals. They still hope to go home.”