'Oh, my Kosovo'

Lutheran, The, Jun 1999 by Miller, David L

Lutherans assist refugees who hunger for home

Every morning Arta Kelemendi, 15, wakes to a nightmare, and something inside her says, "Draw it. Show the world what you see." And she does.

The nightmare began when Serb forces in Kosovo cleared Kelemendi's hometown, Pristina, of ethnic Albanians. Her home for now is the Radusa refugee camp of 1,500, which sits on the lower slope of a northern Macedonia mountain. The camp is about a mile south of the Kosovo border, which is marked only by mines and occasional Serbian patrols.

Today rain has transformed Radusa into a sea of slippery, red mud. A raw wind whips down from the snowcapped peaks of Kosovo, and Kelemendi shivers. It's impossible to know if her shivers are caused by the chill or the scenes on her pad.

In one sketch, children reach over the wire that confines them inside Radusa. Smoke rises over their homes in Kosovo as thunder shakes the heavens. Their towns are black from burning. On the bottom it says, "Oh, my Kosovo," as a girl in the foreground weeps. "Is that you?" she's asked.

"Sometimes," Kelemendi says, showing a drawing of a hand pushing against a charred stone wall. "We are in jail here," she adds. "We can't go away from here, and we can't go home.

"Every day I draw how we liveand how we want to live. I want to live normally, to go home and continue school. I want to speak my language and not see policemen who will beat us and kill the children. I don't understand this killing. All I want is to live in peace and freedom."

Kelemendi's words and sketches exquisitely capture the reality and hope of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians who were expelled by Serbian forces.

"Ethnic cleansing" is what this is called. But these words are far too antiseptic. The refugees tell the same story: Masked police enter their home, threaten them or their children with guns or knives and demand their valuables. The police seize official papers and passports and give them 10 min. utes to gather what they can and flee before their homes are rifled or burned.

Some are forced into buses or trains and dumped near the Macedonian border. Others walk, spending two or three weeks hiding in the forest with little food and only the clothes on their backs.

The variations on this story chill the blood. Refugees tell of ducking gunshots from rooftops as they ran in terror. "One girl by me wa shot as we ran," says Hysen Cznaueri who was a chef in Pristina.

Others describe trudging along rail road tracks surrounded by mines. Some say men from their group were taken into the woods-only some returned.

Gjezide Gjoshi was marched in a line down a Pristina street and loaded onto a train. There she witnessed the agony and ugliness of pregnant women miscarrying in packed train cars. Gjoshi fled with her niece, Cumiturije Bajraktari, who carried her 4-day-old daughter.

Bajraktari's husband and 2-year-old daughter are "in the forest," she says as she nurses her baby. "She cries every night," says a voice from across the room. Not the baby. The mother.

Feeding the multitude

Bajraktari and her baby live with nine other refugees at a home in Morane, a village of 1,000 near Skopje, which has taken in 98 refugees. Nearly half of the 180,000 who fled to Macedonia were placed in the homes of ethnic Albanians, who make up about 25 percent of the nation's 2 million population.

About 40,000 of those in private homes receive food and health supplies through the relief agency Action by Churches Together. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Lutheran World Relief and the Lutheran World Federation are ACT members.

ACT works through the Macedonia Center for International Cooperation, which operates the Radusa camp and provides water and sanitation systems for two others. The center also operates a phone line that refugees can use to seek missing family members.

MCIC's food and health resources are distributed throughout Macedonia by the Mother Teresa Association and El Hilal, an Islamic-based charitable group. At the end of April, MCIC began a three month home feeding program, which will distribute 51,000 food parcels to refugee host families, 2,000 food and hygiene parcels for babies and 16,000 food parcels to "social cases" in Macedonia.

Many families couldn't host refugees without help because of the country's 40 percent unemployment rate. The Serbian war put another 40,000 out of work because factories closed and agricultural markets dried up. Serbia had been the No. 1 market for Macedonian products.

In Albania, ACT works through Diakonia-Agape, an Orthodox church organization that operates a refugee camp, a home feeding program and offers health and counseling services.

Going home? The No. 1 question among refugees is, "When can we go home?"

"As soon as possible we will return," says Blerim Shala whose relatives live with a family in Morane. "I want to go to my home-not to Canada, not to Germany, not to the United States," says Shala, who owned a car wash in Pristina.

This conviction is almost universally held, as is the refugees' assessment of what must happen for them to return. "Would you live with people who kill your family?" Shala asks. "There can be no Serbian police and no Kosovo Liberation Army in our homeland. There must be an international force. We must be safe and free ... to go back and rebuild our home. We will sleep, and the police will not come in the night.