U.S.-Bound Refugees Insist They’ll Return Home

The first refugees bound for the U.S. left in the dark of early morning today, carrying almost no baggage but sorrow and the loss of what they have left behind.

“I can’t explain my feelings right now,” said Xhavit Korca, 45, who was traveling with his family of five. “I’m very upset. I’m losing my birth land. The minute that Kosovo is free, I will come back.”

Korca and nearly 450 other Kosovo Albanians here were traveling by bus to the Skopje airport to board a Boeing 747, which is scheduled to arrive at Ft. Dix, N.J. this afternoon after a 13-hour flight. They will make up the largest single group of refugees to leave the region since foreign countries began resettlement efforts several weeks ago. About 250 refugees arrived in Canada on Tuesday.

The refugees arriving today will register with U.S. immigration officials, undergo medical examinations and await placement in homes.

The U.S.-bound refugees learned their fate Tuesday when Immigration and Naturalization officials posted the first lists of names here in Brazda, one of the largest refugee camps in the Balkans.

Members of the first group were chosen from among those who have spent the longest time at the camp, which has no showers, hot food or elbow room. Most have no family in the U.S., and nearly all interviewed Tuesday expressed deep regret at leaving this nation that borders their homeland.

Most speak no English. Many are poor. They have never traveled outside Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic, much less traveled more than 4,000 miles to a place they know of only from television.

Gafur Garaliu, 51, said three relatives were killed by Serbs during his flight from Kosovo. He and his 11-member family spent a month in the camp, and he said they simply could take it no longer--a feeling many of his fellow refugees shared during interviews.

The psychological burden of traveling so far away means little, he said, in comparison to what his family has suffered.

“We have no choice,” Garaliu said. “America will be good. But since we left our homeland, nothing is important anymore.”

Garaliu’s planeload of refugees will be followed Saturday by another group: those with family members among the ethnic Albanian communities in the U.S., a State Department official said.

But for U.S. resident Isuf Hajrizi, and many like him who have petitioned in recent weeks to bring their homeless family members to the United States, the anticipation of their relatives’ arrival also is mingled with misgivings.

Ethnic Albanians in the U.S. are troubled that they may be doing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his Serbian nationalists a favor by putting more distance between Kosovo Albanians and their homeland.

“I’m really torn,” said Hajrizi, 39, managing editor of an Albanian-American newspaper called Illyria in New York. He applied Monday to open his home to 32 members of his extended Kosovo family who now are quartered in Albania. “I can’t say no because these are my people. But in a way, I know that if they come here, the chances of them returning are going to become slim.”

Despite their mixed emotions, hundreds of Albanian Americans and ethnic Albanian immigrants across the country have applied to relocate relatives from overcrowded refugee camps and destitute villages in Macedonia and Albania. Many more, who have no family ties but are moved by the plight of the refugees, also have stepped forward.

As the program gears up, many other refugees will travel directly to sponsors’ homes via John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

The United States has promised to take in 20,000 Kosovo Albanian refugees--a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands who have been forced from their homes by Serbian military and paramilitary units since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization began bombing Yugoslavia on March 24.

Spurred by weeks of relentlessly grim news from the Balkans, U.S. families have searched out stranded relatives from Kosovo by all possible means.

Hajrizi found his relatives--who fled Decani, a town in Kosovo--after publicizing an Albanian friend’s phone number on television in Albania. A Brooklyn man said he saw an aunt trudging in a column of refugees shown on CNN. Others have scanned new refugee databases on the Internet.

State Department officials say that since April 21, they have received applications from U.S. families to bring at least 1,800 refugees to the United States.

Many more applications are flowing daily into a network of nongovernmental relief organizations in New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago and other cities with sizable ethnic Albanian populations.

Petitions also have come from smaller Albanian communities in Southern California, including at least two received at an outpost of the International Rescue Committee in Riverside. Omer Heric, 52, a refugee from the recent war in Bosnia-Herzegovina who lives in Palm Desert, said he applied to host five family members who recently fled from Kosovo to Macedonia.

Heric said he gave the refugee aid agency an address for his relatives. But he frets that officials might have trouble finding them. “I worry about everything,” Heric said. “I know how [it] is with them. I was in the same situation.”

Still, U.S. and private relief agency officials say the dire situation in Macedonian and Albanian camps demands swift action.

“The reality is we have to move ahead with incomplete and imperfect information,” said Richard Parkins, director of Episcopal Migration Ministries in New York. “There’s tremendous pressure on the system to move people quickly.”

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Miller reported from Brazda and Anderson from Washington.