Hosts With Little to Give Take From Refugees

In two small, dank rooms without cooking facilities or running water, Musa Qoqaj and 44 relatives sleep cheek-to-shoulder each night on a cold concrete floor with only dreams and memories to distract them from their plight.

The once-prosperous baker and his extended family pay more than $250 a month for their place of refuge--a princely sum in impoverished Albania and an example of the exhausted generosity of a nation hosting more than 400,000 refugees from a richer land.

Albania has been hailed by Western countries for sheltering the majority of those expelled from besieged Kosovo, but that praise is proving too little to stoke the sympathies of Albanians who have nothing left to give. Increasingly, those with space to offer are demanding payment.

More than half the refugees waiting in Albania for peace to return to their homeland are living in private homes as opposed to the teeming refugee camps, but the network of food, clothing and medical aid has failed to stretch to those staying with host families.

The army of international aid agencies working in Albania has plans afoot to help the private hosts and thus encourage them to keep the Kosovars in their homes, but the care packages and monthly payments of about $10 per guest have yet to become a reality.

Some of the hosts have had to turn out their Kosovars because they simply couldn’t afford to keep them longer.

“I have done as much as I can, but I don’t have enough money to buy food for so many extra people,” Mimosa Shehu, an unemployed mother of two, said of the 12 women and children she brought to downtown Tirana’s Piscina refugee camp last week after five weeks at her three-room apartment.

As she held hands with 28-year-old Hamida Kulici, one of her former house guests, it was apparent that the women were parting under economic duress while remaining close friends.

The atmosphere is less sanguine in some crowded households, where Kosovo refugees grudgingly pay for their squalid urban shelters for fear of being forced to move to more remote camps or survive in the open.

The Qoqaj family, which spent a month living in an unused billiard parlor in Kukes before arriving in Tirana two weeks ago, has been offered a tent at a camp run by the Greek Orthodox Church just northeast of here but fears the soaring temperatures of summer will be even more of a danger to the family’s health than overcrowding.

“I have a weak heart and couldn’t bear the heat,” said the family matriarch, Revija Qoqaj, 66. “We are better off here, as long as our landlord doesn’t raise the rent.”

Like most arriving from Kosovo, the Qoqajs were robbed of their cash and valuables by the Serbian gunmen who forced them out, leaving them penniless in a country overwhelmed by the influx. With no hope that any of the 11 adults will find jobs in Albania, where unemployment afflicts at least a third of the population, the Qoqajs depend on occasional handouts wired to them by Revija’s two sons, who work in Germany.

“We had a good life in Kosovo-- much better than anyone here has ever seen,” said Nibe Qoqaj, another of Revija’s four sons and former owner of a pizzeria.

Fading hospitality among the poorer Albanians is coupled with growing resentment among the less fortunate hosts that the world has rushed to aid the Kosovars while the native population here continues to do without. That atmosphere has engendered widespread theft and corruption that is depriving the Kosovo refugees of much of the aid coming in to help them.

“They are stealing everything from us. Last night they even took our shoes!” 27-year-old Arbnesha Qekaj lamented, lifting her flounced skirts to reveal bare feet. She and two dozen family members who have been camped under a plastic awning stretched between their two flatbed trucks in Kukes have had to wire relatives in Switzerland for money to pay for the food donated by international aid agencies but confiscated by local authorities and sold to the refugees on the black market.

“Maybe it would have been better to be killed by the Serbs than by our fellow Albanians,” muttered Merita Sefaj, a young expectant mother from Prizren, when told by a potential Tirana landlord that it would cost her $300 a month to stay in his one-room apartment.

Albana Hoti, another young Kosovo woman, searching for a Tirana apartment for her parents and brother, said she has been told by numerous property owners that all hosted refugees are being charged now, with the going rate for a two-room dwelling in the capital’s center running about $500 a month.

In the rural communities where refugees are being sheltered in fenced tent cities, aid agencies such as the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees have despaired of deterring theft from the exhausted emigres as they arrive at their places of refuge.

At the Morine border post near Kukes in Albania’s north, hundreds of shoeless, rag-clad Albanian children line the road followed by the arriving refugees, grabbing at the blankets, tarpaulins and boxes of food given the Kosovars by aid workers staffing the border.

“We probably lose 15-20% of the relief at that border crossing,” said Ray Wilkinson, a U.N. refugee agency spokesman in Kukes. “Many of the locals are poorer than the refugees coming in, and they think they are entitled to their own cut of what’s coming in.”

At the recently opened Camp Hope in Fier, built under U.S. government contract and run by 75 Marines and CARE International, aid workers say they are aware of the dangers of making life more comfortable for the Kosovars than the surrounding community.

“It is always important in a refugee setting not to raise the standard of living higher than on the outside,” said Chris Sykes, camp coordinator. “What we want to do is identify ways we can create liaisons between the refugees and the community, like offering jobs for local people so they get some economic benefit from having 20,000 newcomers in their midst.”

At a camp in Tirana, Ahmet Demaj moved his wife and five children into one-half of a prefabricated container house last week only to discover that the water heater had been removed when only the security guards had access to the key.

“They told us we can get one installed right away for 20,000 leks,” Demaj fumed, citing a sum worth about $150.