Camp diseases incubate in sun
NATO pilots pray for clear skies for their raids but doctors working with Kosovo's refugees fear that hotter weather will cause the overcrowded camps to be gripped by a serious epidemic.
At Cegrane, the biggest camp in Macedonia, doctors were building wards yesterday where refugees showing signs of contagious disease will be isolated from the sprawl of tents that cover half this hilltop village. Medical staff have already dealt with cases of meningitis and dysentery but prefer not to divulge this for fear of causing panic.
The summer temperature at Cegrane regularly tops 45C and Tim Chen of Médecins sans Frontières said: "This place is an incubator for disease. If cholera or hepatitis A catch hold they could spread like wildfire."
For now, doctors are struggling with less serious contagious diseases, mainly among Cegrane's children. In the past week more than 750 have caught head lice and 250 are suffering from scabies. Those figures are officially described as grossly conservative.
"In truth, we are so run off our feet with the people we see at our clinics we don't know what is truly going on deep inside the camp," Dr Chen said.
Every few minutes stretcherbearers struggle into the clinic with another patient. "Most have just collapsed in the heat and this is just the beginning. What will high summer be like?" Dr Chen said. His eight staff had to deal with 800 people yesterday. "That is a normal day for us," he said.
To stem the outbreak of head lice, parents queued in the midday sun to pay to have their children's heads shaved by barbers from Cegrane who worked without pause.
A local volunteer doctor, Arben Taravari, shows the pathetically few bottles of treatment shampoo he has in his fridge. "We already have serious skin epidemics and the summer heat will make this so much worse. It may be hard for any refugee family to escape being touched by it. What should be easily treatable is made disastrous by the lack of drugs and the difficulty of reaching everyone."
Temperatures inside the tents are hotter than outside but the camp has been built on jagged rock and there is nowhere for refugees to sit in comfort. With more than 37,000 crammed inside the Cegrane camp, the handful of volunteer staff from medical charities cannot even begin to visit tents to check on the condition of the most elderly and frail.
There is no shade and as the camp is built on an old landfill site, engineers are finding it hard to deliver enough clean drinking water. Some of the water is meant only for washing. Children do not know that and drink greedily from taps. To cool off they play in a river heavily polluted with effluent.
By ANTHONY DePALMA
Here, they stroll arm in arm along the dust-choked main street or in the refugee camps, in a sad imitation of the gracious walks they used to take along the cobblestoned streets of their beloved Prizren, a cultured hillside city of ancient mosques and well-cared-for churches that is one of Kosovo's oldest and largest cities.
They abandoned their quiet Prizren neighborhood at different times, and for different reasons. Some left with the angry shouts of Serbian police officers ringing in their ears. Some fled after a brother, or a son, was grabbed out of bed and taken away. Some went not because they were ordered to, but because it was clear that if they remained, they too would become victims of Serbian aggression.
But nearly everyone from the neighborhood left. With each day, they wonder when, and if, they can go home. In the meantime, they work to reassemble parts of the life they led in Bajram Curri, on the city's outskirts.
While it in no way relieves the horror of what they have been through, they have found, in the common act of their survival, some degree of satisfaction and even a measure of triumph over the forces that intended to tear them apart.
Bajram Curri was the kind of place people moved to when they were confident about the future. There it was possible to take hard-earned savings and build a fine, strong house, with enough land to grow leeks and onions and have room for children and dogs to run.
Ismet Hoti loved Bajram Curri, which was named after an Albanian nationalist hero. Several years ago Serbian authorities changed the name to 27th of March, to commemorate the day in 1989 when Slobodan Milosevic stripped Kosovo of the broad autonomy it had enjoyed since 1974. But to ethnic Albanians who lived there, it remained Bajram Curri.
Almost immediately after the NATO bombing campaign began March 24, Hoti said, Serbian forces moved tanks and antiaircraft guns into the big Farmakos pharmaceutical factory about 500 feet away from his house.
The following morning, Hoti -- a music teacher who plays the clarinet -- took his wife and three children in his red Yugo car to the house of a relative in the center of Prizren, where he thought they would be safer. But it was just as bad, and after the police showed up and warned him not to get comfortable, Hoti left Kosovo on April 30.
He and his family now live with an Albanian family, squeezed into a two-room apartment. He arrived without his passport, his identification papers and his clarinet.
Now he can often be found wandering the main street of Kukes, holding the arm of his son Lulezim, 20, and looking for family and friends from Bajram Curri. He wonders what will be left of his home, his school and the cultured life he built for his family in Prizren.
"But at least," he says, shrugging, "I am alive."
Hoti occasionally runs into Masar Shala, who is renting the apartment of an Albanian family for about $420 a month -- a small fortune in poor, rugged northern Albania. Of all the people in Bajram Curri, Shala, 35, may have had the most to fear from the police. For nine years he headed the Council in Defense of Human Rights in Prizren, investigating dozens of acts of violence in the region. In just the previous 10 months, he had recorded 178 killings and the burning of 518 houses. Shala's work angered Serbian authorities. They arrested him twice, and four times the police searched the house where he lived with his parents, two brothers and their families.
In the rush following the Shalas' decision to leave on March 28, Shala's father, who is blind, left behind the dominoes he enjoyed playing. He now often sits in the apartment all day doing nothing but smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Shala could not take his younger son's tiny bicycle, and now the boy, Butrint, cries for it every day.
The family did bring a few photos, and when they flip through the scenes of happier days -- one showing Butrint atop a big red tractor, the kind of image that has come to convey the Kosovo Albanians' exile -- they all fall silent.
Because of his work with the human rights group, Shala was the person to whom many neighbors looked for guidance. More than a dozen families left when he did. Shala's uncle, Mustafe Hoti, took nothing, thinking he would only be gone a few days. In Kukes he wears the same jacket every day.
One neighbor, Amrush Zogaj, a retired textile worker, said he was so upset at fleeing that he forgot to change his old shoes for the new ones he had put next to his door. The broken-down shoes now sit at the entrance to the tent at the Irish camp in Kukes where Zogaj lives. There he eats canned meat and bean soup whose only saving grace, he says, is that they are always in short supply. But his wife still prepares for him the sweet Turkish coffee he had in Bajram Curri, and, after eating, when he lights a cigarette and sips his coffee, he sometimes thinks about the antique two-string lyre he used to play when he sang at weddings. He will not sing now, not without the lyre. But he says he can hear the music in his head. "Let NATO hit the Serbs hard," he says, "again and again." He counts the days until he can return to Prizren.
As for Hajrush Xhema, on his right forearm he has a tattoo with the letters JNA, which stood for the Yugoslav army that was the precursor to the forces now clearing Kosovo. He was proud to have served in that army, he said, and to have lived in Belgrade during the time that Tito, the Communist strongman, held Yugoslavia together.
But after Milosevic took power in Serbia in 1987, Xhema returned to Kosovo. He bought land adjacent to Shala's and built a large house of concrete blocks. Xhema, 39, worked in the Bajram Curri market selling fruit and vegetables. After Serbian troops shot up the market on March 28, he and his family took a bus to the village of Plava, where he was born, feeling it might be safer there because many of the people, though Muslim, spoke Serbian, as he does.
But two days after he arrived in Plava, paramilitary forces began shelling a nearby village. On April 1, he loaded a tractor with blankets and headed for Albania. He abandoned almost everything he owned, but he only regrets having left behind a framed photograph of himself as a teen-age wrestler.
"The washing machine and the television I can buy again," Xhema said. "If the house is burned, I can build it again. But the photograph I can't replace. Many times I've thought of going back to Kosovo just to get this picture."
He often prowls the streets of Kukes now, distraught that he has lost his home and ashamed that he, a man who has worked hard since boyhood, now has no work. He often walks with another neighbor, a former professor, and they tell each other tales of life in Kosovo. But they never forget they are in Kukes.
"This is nothing like Prizren," Xhema said one morning. "I'm hoping every day that we can go back. Even if it means living in a tent because the house is destroyed, we want to be able to go back."
Agim Krasniqi, 29, also lived near the pharmaceutical plant in Bajram Curri. On March 27 -- the same day commemorated in the neighborhood's hated Serbian name -- Krasniqi packed one bag of extra clothing and, with his wife, walked away from his house. He went to stay with an uncle in the center of Prizren. There he lived as though in prison, eating watery soup, hiding in the attic, sleeping in his clothes, going out only for a half-hour a day.
The fear of being taken off by the army was always present. One day it was Krasniqi's cousin, Fadil, who was grabbed, at 7 in the morning, in his pajamas. He has not been seen since.
On May 1, Krasniqi and his wife boarded a bus for Albania. For now they are staying in a large beige tent in a refugee camp here run by the government of the United Arab Emirates, which provides plenty of food but expects the children to attend classes in the mosque every day.
The tent is too hot, and the smell of overtaxed outhouses nearby too offensive. But he is happy here because he lives with his uncle and his uncle's family, and occasionally goes to visit his brother, who has a tent down the dusty road at the Irish camp. Some days Krasniqi walks several rows over to the tent of a past and present neighbor, Ali Krasniqi (no relation), a jovial 29-year-old who was a pizza maker in Prizren. He remained in an increasingly desperate Bajram Curri longer than almost anyone else.
"There were tanks in between all the houses and police living inside many of the places where people had already left," Ali Krasniqi said. "I passed by Masar Shala's house one day and saw soldiers digging defensive trenches in the front yard."
When he left Bajram Curri on April 30, only a handful of old people -- including his own mother and father, who refused to leave -- still lived in the 300 houses there.
"The rest of the houses were empty," he said. "All that was left was dogs, cows, and Serbs."
In the Arab camp, he regularly runs into people from Bajram Curri who pine for the past. He left behind everything, but when Krasniqi or any other neighbor from Prizren comes to his tent, he insists on showing Prizren hospitality.
They sit on thin cushions on the floor, the way they would have in Bajram Curri. They have Turkish coffee with enough sugar to make the spoon stand straight up. They toss each other cigarettes and hold a lighter for each other. Then, for a while more, they remember.
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