A Strange Mix of Anxiety, Awe at Ft. Dix

By MARK FRITZ

May 22, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

FT. DIX, N.J. —

Maybe it’s the soft bed, spring air, compassionate care and friendly faces. Maybe it’s the food and the music and the soccer and the smiles of a world designed to make her feel wanted, comfortable, even pampered.

She can’t speak the language, doesn’t know the geography, hasn’t grasped the culture, but she knows she can become an American citizen some day. She hasn’t seen her parents in months, but she has seen the first lady, the governor, a brace of bureaucrats and a big-screen TV.

Teuta Hyseni--a 19-year-old ethnic Albanian whisked from the crisis in Kosovo and placed gently into the arms of a people showing an overwhelming, perhaps unsettling, willingness to help them, house them, adopt them, even marry them--is beginning to like this life in America.

Except for one thing. Like virtually all of the 3,000-plus ethnic Albanians being housed in the spruced-up barracks of this army base, she knows somebody who is still hiding, missing or murdered somewhere in Kosovo, or living in the crude camps in neighboring countries.

Authorities have begun resettling refugees here in cities across the country, the next phase of their almost surreal transition from being ethnically cleansed to smothered with affection. There is a very real sense of survivor guilt amid the separation anxiety here, inside the two heavily guarded containment areas that authorities have dubbed “the Village” and “the Hamlet.”

Teuta, like many others, finds herself fantasizing about a future in this country even as she obsesses over the fate of her parents and her brother. The premed student was in Pristina picking up some books when word came that the Serbian purges of ethnic Albanians had reached her town of nearby Hajvaliu. The bus she took wouldn’t go back, and every cabby she stopped just shook his head as she bawled and begged for a ride back home.

Finally, one agreed to try, but three times Serbian gunmen turned him away. Teuta got out and ran, hiding in bushes to avoid police, and reached the home of an uncle in Pristina. Two weeks later, masked men wearing Serbian military uniforms and driving cars with loudspeakers ordered everyone on her uncle’s block to leave. The family left bread baking in the oven and went to the train station, where mobs of ethnic Albanians were herded into boxcars.

Teuta and the others were dumped at the border and ordered to hike to Macedonia. A Serbian soldier snatched her leather satchel, which contained the diary she’d kept since she was a girl. The crowd shivered in the mud and rain outside Blace, huddling under blankets until tents arrived. More refugees came every day. Teuta met every group, looking for familiar faces.

She did this for weeks, until she found out that her uncle’s family would be among the 20,000 refugees that the U.S. agreed to harbor.

She walked off the plane and into her new world May 5. Though the goal is to eventually return the refugees, they have been granted permanent residency.

“The welcome we have received is very unbelievable,” Teuta said as she sat on a picnic table in the Village park one recent afternoon. “If my family was here, I would like to stay here.”

Many agencies say the interest in these folks is unmatched since the fall of South Vietnam spawned oceans of boat people two decades ago. There has been such an outpouring of offers for food, clothing and logo-laden products that Ft. Dix officials asked people last week to stop donating things.

Though most offers are altruistic, some are self-serving. Some people want Kosovo Albanians to work as baby-sitters or housekeepers. Infertile couples are casting nets for orphans to adopt, and at least one lonely heart rang up an agency to ask for a wife.

Theories abound as to why this country is captivated. Heavy television coverage of white people with Western clothing fleeing a European war zone being pummeled by U.S. warplanes raises issues of race, evokes images of World War II, stirs patriotism and comes at a time when American pocketbooks are bulging.

“I haven’t seen anything like this,” said Scott Wasmuth, an official for a New Jersey resettlement agency. “These refugees are coming at the right time, I guess. There is a potential danger of overindulging these people.”

Refugees from countries such as Haiti, Liberia, Indonesia, Angola and Sudan have suffered as much or far worse, yet “Liberians are not on TV,” said Barbara Lonegro of Catholic Community Services of Newark.

“In a way, it is disconcerting to see so much attention to one group,” said William Sage, interim director for immigration and refugees at Church World Service. “When we had Sierra Leoneans come here, it would have been nice to have some high-profile public official here to greet the first ones.”

Refugee groups plan to use the Kosovo crisis as a lobbying tool to pressure the Clinton administration to raise the annual ceiling on refugees from the current 78,000 to the 132,000 it was before he took office, said Berta Romero, refugee director for InterAction, an umbrella organization.

Refugee agencies have been falling over themselves for a piece of the action, competing for contracts and publicity. Refugee aid is a tough sell in this country, and humanitarian groups see Kosovo as a way to expand donor lists.

The biggest agencies gather weekly for a highly ritualized meeting in Manhattan where they divide and barter caseloads and countries, and the Kosovo refugees are coveted currency.

Some agency officials complained privately when the first planeload of refugees with relatives in this country contained mainly cases belonging to the International Rescue Committee.

An IRC official had been part of a U.S. government delegation that screened that first batch of refugees, and one official of a competing agency felt IRC used its access to corner the market on that heavily publicized reunion flight.

Kay Bellor, the IRC refugees director who traveled to Macedonia to make preliminary arrangements for that flight, said 80 of the 102 people aboard were IRC cases but said it wasn’t an attempt grab the limelight. IRC wasn’t waving any banners at the airport when the refugees arrived, she said, as some other agencies were.

Competition is common in the business, Romero said, and because the resettlement happened so quickly, “you see the best of people and the worst of people coming out. But the program is working.”

Most refugees at Ft. Dix, who are without relatives in this country, will eventually be housed in apartments and looked after by churches and local social service agencies. Only 47 have been resettled as of Friday.

The atmosphere here is a blend of festive chatter, squealing children and budding friendships mixed with the quiet exchange of terrible tales of rape, robbery and murder. Though there is clearly a growing fondness for this country, many of the uprooted remain numb to their surroundings.

Venera Shala is depressed, withdrawn, unable to enjoy the concerts and volleyball games. Her family fled Kosovo after her father peeked into a neighbor’s window after a night of shouting and shooting. He counted 14 bodies.

“This place is very beautiful, but I don’t like it at all,” said Shala, 22. “No matter what you guys do for us, we are not happy. It’s like being a parasite.”

“She’ll change,” interjected Xhafer Meta, a New Jersey resident and former ethnic Albanian activist who fled Kosovo in 1986. “I know. I felt the same when I came here,” said Meta, a volunteer interpreter at the camp. “But these people will get used to life here.”

As they mingle among and befriend the newcomers, many interpreters see earlier images of themselves. Bashkim Tolaj was a political activist in Kosovo who was jailed 17 times and beaten even more. He won political asylum in 1988.

Tolaj, legal assistant for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, and his family have taken an interest in Teuta because of her openly plaintive yearning for a mentor. “She said, ‘I need a father, a brother, a friend,’ ” he said.

Last week, he found his role lightened a bit. Equipped with $50 given to each refugee, Teuta walked into the Village’s newly opened convenience store and browsed through the junk food, disposable cameras and stuffed Snoopys wearing fighter pilot regalia. Something caught her eye: an $8 prepaid phone card.

She began calling numbers in Pristina, punching in 37 digits worth of access codes and exchanges each time. One time she heard shooting when somebody picked up the phone. She called another number, and a man answered. Teuta asked if he knew where her father was.

“He’s right here,” the man said.

Her father came on. Both he and Teuta screamed deliriously, then began crying. Her mother was fine, her father said, though her brother was missing. The family was holed up in a place with other ethnic Albanians, hoping to get a large enough group to flee the country. Only small groups are systematically killed, he told her.

“Where are you?” he asked his daughter.

“The USA!” she said.

Her father was flabbergasted. “Where?” he asked.

“Fort Dix,” she said. “I think New Jersey.”

Seven minutes later, the card ran out and the line went dead. She ran to tell Bashkim Tolaj that her parents were alive--alive!--and the two ran off to buy another card.

Teuta has started a new diary. A tiny bit of fog has begun to lift on her future, and a plan is taking some shape: Learn English, get an apartment, get a job, get a green card, go to medical school. Get her parents to New Jersey.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Resettlement of Refugees

The U.S. government has offered to take in as many as 20,000 refugees from camps in Macedonia. Of the 4,198 Kosovo refugees now in the United States, 693 have been placed in homes. Here is where the current Kosovo refugees are living:

Awaiting processing (Ft. Dix): 3,505

Arizona: 11

California*: 65

Connecticut: 11

Florida: 50

Idaho: 6

Illinois: 20

Kentucky: 14

Michigan: 26

New Jersey; 81

New York: 290

North Carolina: 19