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Kosovo Chronicles
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Kiki:
The Kiki Family - Refugees from the Kosova crisis.
"...She fell under a tree and there she lay, watching the
leaves flutter above her. She thought it quite a pretty
picture, the leaves trembling as the bullets whizzed through
them. She liked lying there on her backpack watching the
leaves move. Besides, she finally got some rest."
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Refugee's Diary
1: "...if we could just hate them
all" "...The rain started, and
I realized our wool blankets might save our lives.
...It took us three days of the
horrible police checks to get to Albania. Bodies were a
common sight. Stories bucketed down harder than the rain. In
one, a Serbian officer ordered a soldier to shoot a
5-year-old Albanian child. The soldier refused. The officer
screamed the order again. The soldier answered that it would
be better to die himself. The order was repeated and so was
his refusal. The officer shot the soldier, and then the
child. A Serb died for an Albanian!
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Refugee's Diary
2: Refugee Homecoming
"...Nothing can prepare us to
accompany a group of bereaved women to a graveyard following
a war. I had seen the rows of unidentified graves in this
particular cemetery on CNN, so I was ready for that sight.
But nothing prepared me for the pain I saw bulldozing
through the lives of these women. Several were wailing,
which is the cultural norm. The ominous, weeping silence of
a widow hunched over her husband's grave was somehow more
striking."
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Kiki
As the Serbian paramilitaries closed in, Flaka's mother hurriedly
stuffed some things into the backpack Flaka used for school and
fitted it onto her 6-year-old daughter's thin back. Flaka watched the
frenzy around her as she waited to run, saw her father, Muhamet,
shepherd her aged and infirm grandparents into the car. The car
wouldn't start.
Flaka could hear the noise of the guns whenever the grinding under
the car's hood stopped, feel the throbbing panic of the grown-ups as
her father helped his parents struggle out of the car and into
another. Then he was driving off into the mountains, driving fast,
and her mother was urging her and her two sisters to run. With her
two aunts, they fled into the mountains, stumbling and panting as the
noise of the guns came closer.
When the noise grew so loud she couldn't even hear her own labored
breathing, her mother yelled to get down and everyone around her
began falling to the ground. Flaka -- "Flake" in English -- fell,
too. She fell on her back so that her backpack would cushion the
impact. She fell under a tree and there she lay, watching the leaves
flutter above her. She thought it quite a pretty picture, the leaves
trembling as the bullets whizzed through them. She liked lying there
on her backpack watching the leaves move. Besides, she finally got
some rest.
Muhamet Kiki heard the gunfire. He knew the route his wife,
Suzana, three daughters and two sisters had taken, had discussed it
with the women earlier. Driving fast along the rutted road, his
wizened parents bouncing off the sides of the little car, he sped
deeper into the embrace of the mountains. Then he heard the gunfire
and he knew his family was dead, bleeding in the sunshine in a
mountain lea. He thought of turning in that direction, but only
briefly. If the Balkans teach nothing else, they teach survival. He
thought again, of his living, if brittle, parents. He drove on.
Flaka, naturally, never thought to ask why she was alive. If she
had, none of the adults could have produced an explanation. Perhaps
the Serbians came under attack or spotted more enticing prey.
Whatever their reason, they broke off the pursuit of the women. Three
hours after he heard the shots that reported his family's massacre,
he watched them walk into the clearing designated for their reunion.
When they finished weeping for joy, they wept on at the thought of
what would become of them now. In Kosova, escape within the country
was a flight into fantasy and all the tears ran together.
A few days later, it was neither hunger nor thirst that drove them
out of the mountains but the cold spring rain. Unrelenting, it soaked
through them until they could bear no more. They decided to try for
the border, for the dry, warm haven of Muhamet's sister's house in
Skopje, Macedonia, 35 miles away. The first 20 promised Serbian
patrols, land mines and border guards.
The first two they negotiated without incident. At the border, the
guards took Muhamet and his father, Ferat, into a small room and
asked if they had money. They were carrying German marks amounting to
about $2,000. "We didn't try to hide it, we thought it might keep us
alive," Muhamet said. "They took it from us and after that they were
kind of polite. They told us, 'Have a nice trip.'"
With the women and the three girls, they walked the half-mile down
the two-lane road through a mountain pass to the Macedonian border
post. A soldier there asked Muhamet if they had passports. "I told
him we all had passports and he said, 'What country?'
"I said, 'Yugoslavia.'
"He said, 'You can't cross with Yugoslavia passports.'"
A small group of Serbian paramilitaries nearby began laughing. The
Macedonian and his fellow soldiers began laughing. Muhamet's youngest
daughter, Rreza (Sunbeam), 2 1/2, began to cry. He silenced her
quickly, ruthlessly, with a hand across her mouth. He had heard
stories of Serbians quieting crying babies by stomping them to
death.
As Muhamet turned and began walking back toward the Serbian side,
he spotted a group of four United Nations observers in the no man's
land between the border posts. He approached one and asked him to
place a call on his cellular phone to Muhamet's sister in Skopje. The
man took down the number and called, but received no answer. "I knew
then we were finished," said Muhamet. "We began walking toward the
train station and I was waiting for someone to call us out. They
would take us away and it would be over."
But they walked and no one called. They boarded a train and rode
the 15 miles back to their village, Ferrazaj, for want of any other
idea. Disembarking there, they walked home without seeing a single
Serbian. The entire population of 18,000 ethnic Albanians had fled as
they had. The Serbians found no reason to keep close scrutiny in a
deserted town.
Back in their whitewashed house 200 yards down a dirt lane off the
main road, the Kiki family buttoned up. The Serbians had been there,
destroying some furniture but doing no damage to the dwelling. They
had left undisturbed the cache of food and water in the basement. "So
we had food," said Muhamet, "but we couldn't eat. We couldn't sleep."
They remained in the basement, the nine of them, for five days.
Hearing a radio report that the Macedonians had opened the border,
they set out again.
With NATO forces closing in and the conflict in its closing days,
the Serbians at the border allowed them to pass. The Macedonians
refused. When Muhamet looked around, he saw the same U.N. observer
who had tried to help earlier. As he approached him, the man pulled
out the slip of paper he had saved and began to call the number. He
handed over the phone and Muhamet heard his sister's voice from
Skopje. She promised to cover the 15 miles to the border as fast as
she could. It turned out she made one call before leaving home.
When she arrived, the border guards refused her pleas to let her
family cross, but moments later her husband's brother, an officer in
the Macedonian army, arrived in uniform. The Kikis, all nine of them,
walked into Macedonia and breathed deep and free.
On a sparkling afternoon in late summer, Muhamet sat on the back
patio of his neat white home, near the giant rose bush that climbs
one wall, and told his story as Suzana served coffee to his guests. A
computer technician, he said in good English that he had lost the
money he planned to use to open his own shop but that he and his
family were among the lucky ones. He nodded at Flaka and Rreza, who
played nearby. Flaka, with her dark bangs, still likes to flop on her
back under a tree and watch the leaves move. Rreza, the little one,
trembles when she sees a uniform and she has a stutter now that
wasn't there before. Already, they know much about life in the
Balkans. Muhamet smiled a survivor's smile. You keep plunging ahead
with the ones who are breathing.
Refugee's Diary
1: " . . . if we could just hate them all."
Writer's note: Understanding is often the
first step toward a solution. I have tried to compile here an
"average" refugee story taken from tens of conversations with
homeless people who recently had a house like you. These situations
sound extreme; actually, I made this story less brutal than the norm
to avoid the appearance of overstatement. With one exception, I
haven't mentioned the countless stories of macabre murders because
they don't promote understanding. Illogical hatred, not race or
religion, caused this war.
By Von Golder
They came in the middle of the night. We had
been huddled for five days in our basement, trying not to dwell on
the stories of so many people shot outside their homes by Serbian
paramilitaries. Fear seized us when they broke down the door, and our
oldest son and my husband made a desperate lunge up through the
basement window. Men are often shot and burned in the house. We women
huddled against the wall like mice in front of a cat. Orders were
shouted at us in Serbian but they were almost drowned out by the
roaring in my ears and the screaming of the children. As in a
nightmare, my body was paralyzed against a backdrop of countless
stories of murdered children and raped women. "We shoot anyone not
out of the house in five minutes!" one of them yelled. Their leader
glanced at his watch and walked out.
In the chilling vacuum created by their
departure, my mother's instinct crowded out the paralysis. I spat out
orders, breaking the fear of my older daughter and my son's wife:
"Soni, the jewelry! Shqipe, the money! NOW!!" I threw clothing and
bread all in the same bag, grabbing something else I will forever be
grateful for: two blankets and a coat for each of us, all the while
screaming at Soni and Shqipe to grab the baby and run. I shoved a bag
in our 12-year-old son's arms and froze for an instant in the middle
of the room holding those blankets, knowing I was forgetting
everything. I saw the "policeman" outside look at his watch while his
sidekicks fingered their submachine guns. I ran.
I hurried past our car, and it didn't even
occur to me that there was no way to take it. They set fire to the
house while we stood in the street. Only later did I understand why
they no longer felt the need to plunder things like our TV. One
paramilitary man was leering at Shqipe, and my heart stopped. In our
culture, rape causes shame that is never erased. Rooted in place like
a post, I watched him reach for her, only to grab the gold necklaces
we had given her when she married into our household. He walked off
examining his new treasure, and my heart started making up for lost
time. We were herded toward a road that would eventually lead to
Albania. When my husband, Muhamet, appeared walking beside us, sobs
erupted. That was when the questions about my eldest son's
whereabouts began to haunt me. All Muhamet could say was that they
had been separated in the frantic dash for survival.
We soon discovered ourselves walking in a
crowd of others just like us, heading west toward the Albanian
border. Several things became clear within a few hours. We felt
stupid we hadn't taken water or diapers or more food or our car or .
. . I tried to stop thinking about it and make do with what we did
have. The blankets seemed superfluous, but Muhamet found a string to
tie them onto my back so they became easier to carry.
Every couple of hours "policemen" would stop
us with one command: "Money!" We understood that if we didn't give
them at least 100 German marks, we would be shot then and there.
Muhamet complained once and was knocked to the ground. Relief flooded
my heart when he didn't respond by cursing the policeman. Every adult
began wondering what would happen when we ran out of money. Many
thousands were walking in front and behind us, and soon we learned
that the "five- minute" order was standard procedure. Thirst began to
overcome our fear. I screamed at Artan, our youngest son, when I
caught him drinking out of a mud puddle. Soni wisely picked up an
empty plastic bottle for when we did find water. We spent the day
walking by ghost villages of charred houses, a few still smoldering.
In the evening, a huge crowd ahead announced a water spigot, and we
learned a new reality of refugee existence: There are hundreds of
other people who desperately need the same thing you do. By 3 a.m. we
had all gotten enough to drink and were fortified for tomorrow with
our precious bottle. It's amazing how trash can become a
treasure.
The rain started, and I realized our wool
blankets might save our lives.
It took us three days of the horrible police
checks to get to Albania. Bodies were a common sight. Stories
bucketed down harder than the rain. In one, a Serbian officer ordered
a soldier to shoot a 5-year-old Albanian child. The soldier refused.
The officer screamed the order again. The soldier answered that it
would be better to die himself. The order was repeated and so was his
refusal. The officer shot the soldier, and then the child. A Serb
died for an Albanian! Almost every family has at least one story
about how some Albanians were protected at some point by Serbs.
Muhamet said it would be a whole lot easier if we could just hate
them all.
There was one strange comfort to our days:
the hum of NATO jets. One day, they bombed paramilitaries somewhere
in front of us. For an instant, it only increased our terror, but not
for long. Who would ever have believed I would be so grateful for a
bomb that almost hit me?
On the third day, I fainted. A
tractor-trailer driver mercifully took us on to the border. There was
one last moment of terror as we faced a final police "kontroll" and
all our identification papers were taken. We had been lucky to have
the money to make it, and we still had 500 marks hidden in our
clothing. As we finally left the guards behind and moved across the
border, we felt like deer who had escaped a snare. We were still
alive. I realized later that the world was watching weeping refugees
cross the border, probably never understanding the reason for the
tears. We had lost everything and didn't know if we'd ever see our
homes or family again, and crossing the border somehow added finality
to these new realities.
Shqipe's baby was in bad shape. His horrible
crying had been replaced by an even more horrible silence in the last
half-day. But there was someone at the border who was there just to
treat babies! Again the sobs welled up, this time because of kindness
shown to us. We felt so dirty and ragged, hardly worthy of the warm
words of welcome and baby formula given to us.
Now our enemy was the cold. Before us
stretched a camp of 150,000 people. Every one needed water, a
bathroom and food. It was a night of violent wind and rain. The snow
on the mountains almost reached down to our level. We found a place
downwind of a large apartment building and huddled as close together
as possible in our filthy, precious blankets. We kept the baby tucked
between us and thought about the warm, two-story house that had been
ours only a week before. Somehow at dawn, even though it was still
raining, we felt like we had made it, merely by surviving the night.
We were past the point of shivering and so very cold, but Muhamet
managed to get food. He wrestled for it as it was thrown out of the
United Nations trucks. A businessman who had spent his life earning
his family's provision, he felt demeaned fighting for something as
simple as food. But he fought.
We heard about some evangelical Christians
who were providing diapers and four bottles of warm milk a day for
babies. When we arrived at their distribution center, we discovered
they were the same people who had met us at the border. At that
point, we didn't even try to understand how it was that "Christians"
had burned us out of our home, and now Christians were saving our
Muslim baby's life. We felt so grateful for something so
small.
That night, the rain began again and we
became desperate, not believing we could survive another night like
the previous one. Muhamet left to try again to find shelter. At last,
he came back with the only solution: an overnight taxi ride to Tirana
where they said conditions were better and we could spend the night
out of the cold. The catch? It would cost 250 marks, half of our
remaining money. We paid.
By morning, our taxi driver dumped us at a
place called the Sports Palace, where 3,000 people were sleeping on
the floor. But it was under a roof and they fed everyone three times
a day and had milk for the baby. I finally felt like we would
live.
We spent that first day soaking in food and
sleeping on blankets on the hard floor. Blaring pain constantly
announced so many bones in my body that I hadn't even known existed
before. By nightfall, Muhamet managed to get two foam pads from the
Red Cross. Again, gratitude crowded out the hatred for the Serbs for
a while, but now we had begun to hear even more of the countless
stories of murder and rape. I wondered if all these accounts were
fully true, but didn't dare ask because people would get
angry.
Muhamet left early the next morning to try
to find a place where we could stay as a family under one roof. So
did hundreds of others. He came back that night empty-handed, except
he had changed some money and bought juice for the children. I had
spent the day growing increasingly tired of Soni's complaining, my
own pain and Artan's disobedience. We had argued bitterly. The baby
had diarrhea.
That night, I lay in the middle of those
hundreds of people, listening to the babies crying, the murmur of
bitter conversation and the sound of someone being sick. No one even
felt sorry for us because we were only one family among thousands,
and many stories were far worse than ours. I tried not to think about
the women who had watched their husbands murdered or the other
mothers who didn't know where their children were. I desperately
wanted to sleep, but it seemed like my whole being was being attacked
by rapid-fire questions: "Why is this happening?" "How could God
allow this?" "Where oh where is my son? Will I ever see him again?"
"Why does Soni have to be such a cry-baby?" "How much of my home
burned? Will we ever go back?" "Will we be able to get revenge on the
Serbs?" "Will we ever find a place for our family?" "What difference
does our story make among hundreds of thousands of others?" "Is there
a future?" "Does God even care?"
Her answer was a roaring silence.
Refugee's
Diary 2: Refugee Homecoming
By Von Golder
Writer's note: My story, ". . . if we could
just hate them all," was written to help people everywhere understand
what was really happening behind the images they were seeing from
Kosova in those days on every newscast. The story ended with the
refugee family in a sports hall, surrounded by hundreds of others who
also had no future. As long as we live, however, we must face a
future. Eventually, the bombing stopped and ceasefires took effect.
These dear people are now returning to their homes and families, or
what is left of them. This is a factual chronicle of what we
discovered as we began to take our friends back to Kosova.
We had driven 10 hours over a horrific road
snaking endlessly through Albanian mountains while children and
adults fought a losing battle with carsickness. The last 200 yards,
it turned out, made the rest insignificant. Our van crawled past
ghosts of homes and pulled up next to the charred remains of Haxhi
and Rabi's house. It was better off than the rest. Half of the roof
remained. The other houses had only walls left, but no roof. And as
is true all over Kosova, in each a brick chimney stood tall over the
rubble, like a frightened scarecrow guarding what is left.
As we stepped out of the van, Haxhi took my
arm, led me over to his basement and began to tell a story I was to
hear in numerous variations over the next few days. Back in Albania,
they had said things like, "Our house was burned down," or "My
husband was killed." Now every family seemed compelled to share their
own story while leading us to the various spots it had unfolded.
Since they never cried in the telling, I often fought my own battle
to keep back tears. These stories are now the music of life in
Kosova, and it is a pounding requiem of pain.
Haxhi led me to a little couch beside the
house. It appeared someone had spilled a bucket of wood stain on it.
It was blood. "My uncle died here," he said. He pointed to a spot a
few yards away. "That's where they shot him. He was so shocked when
my nephew was wounded he just wandered out in the yard. I guess he
didn't care anymore."
Haxhi showed me the place in their basement
where they had holed up for five days, trapped by the snipers on the
hill above them and the terrors around them. He led me through the
burned rubble and up concrete stairs littered with broken roof tiles.
"Here's where my cousin was shot the first time, through this window.
That's his blood right there. The bullet completely broke his leg
right here." Haxhi pointed at his thigh. "That happened in the
morning, and that afternoon another bullet went through his calf and
lodged in the heel of his other foot while we were carrying him on a
stretcher." What sounded to me in the retelling like a plot twist in
a remote war story was for them another searing stab of the terror of
those days.
Haxhi buried his uncle out in the shed that
night. It was the only place he could work while hidden from snipers'
sights. He showed me the grave.
As their desperation to flee swelled, they
plotted to escape into the hills on foot. The roads were filled with
Serb patrols. But what about Haxhi's cousin, wounded in both legs?
After five days of hiding in the basement as the paramilitaries
burned and looted nearby houses, they saw a long column of refugees
snaking through town, heading for the border. In that moment, they
reached a decision to pile into the car and try to merge into the
column. Making it unseen, they drove away from the home in which they
had raised their three children, wondering if they would ever see it
again.
And much more they could not know. They
didn't know that within 300 yards of their house they would find 110
bodies, cremated in the furnaces of the local factory. The Serbs had
tried to cover the evidence of their massacres by cremating their
friends and neighbors, 50 bodies in one furnace and 60 in
another.
We left Haxhi and Rabi there, finally home,
but unable to explore their yard because of mines.
In contrast, the
next few hours of our trip would be filled with unforgettable joy. At
our next stop, in the town of Gjakovë, we were privileged to
become part of a tearful family reunion. Two brothers who had become
our close friends while refugees, Ibrahim and Besim, walked with
their wives and five children into their home, which had remained
undamaged, to find their parents doing fine. Not only that, their
other two brothers with their wives and children had made it back
too! They wept and laughed as they hugged, relieved to find everyone
still alive.
I will never forget the youngest of the children,
16-month-old Samed, toddling around the home they had fled three
months earlier, grinning from ear to ear. We had gotten to know these
families well in Tirana, and the transformation of the children was
especially striking. They ran in and out, laughing and shouting out a
joy I had never seen in them before. It was a rare privilege to watch
the weight of war drop off their little shoulders. They had come
home.
Besim and Ibrahim's elderly father had
declared he would stay and die on his doorstep rather than go into
refugee exile, so their mother had stayed, too. Their house was the
only one I was to visit in Kosova that wasn't looted or burned. Their
extended family, however, hadn't fared so well. Because we had a van,
we were asked to take a group of women cousins to the graveyard the
next morning. The requiem of pain was always playing in the
background of the conversation the night before, but now it returned
full blast.
An aunt had died three days before, probably
from the double curse of mourning and hatred. After the NATO
bombardment and Serb reign of terror began, this family's
neighborhood was visited frequently by paramilitaries who suspected
them of abetting the KLA soldiers hiding in the hills just above
town. On the second visit, a paramilitary who spoke Albanian grabbed
a 5-year-old boy. Sticking a knife in the child's ear, the man asked
if any of the "men with the caps" (KLA soldiers) had come to their
house. Serbian soldiers had come, so the boy said "yes," thinking the
man was referring to them. That mistaken answer resulted in his own
father's torture and execution.
He was an unruly child. I feared he felt
responsible for his father's death.
Nothing can prepare us to accompany a group
of bereaved women to a graveyard following a war. I had seen the rows
of unidentified graves in this particular cemetery on CNN, so I was
ready for that sight. But nothing prepared me for the pain I saw
bulldozing through the lives of these women. Several were wailing,
which is the cultural norm. The ominous, weeping silence of a widow
hunched over her husband's grave was somehow more
striking.
Like other families, these women seemed
compelled to take us to the places where the father was caught and
then executed, and relate the story leading up to it. Another man had
previously been executed in their backyard shed. They still weren't
sure who he was. It was then that I realized that there are so many
of these stories, each unique, yet somehow all the same.
The next family we visited hid out in the
basement while their house was burned, but managed to stop most of
the flames after they knew the paramilitaries were gone. Their
neighbor had run but was caught and executed in their backyard while
they stayed hidden. Another next-door neighbor was shot in the
street. Their partially burned house was later looted by "policemen"
with a truck because the family had stored the inventory for their
plumbing store in the basement.
The stories would fill a university library.
Telling and retelling them might have informational and therapuetic
value, but the time has arrived to begin to move on, to move back in.
We have bought a truck with funds donated in the U.S. and have sent a
team from Albania to start cleaning up the rubble, to transport
materials, to begin rebuilding. And we have begun a "widow project"
to reach out to those who are hurting most, the bereaved wives and
their children. We are taking funds to them to survive on, talking to
the children, listening to their stories and weeping with the
families. May their stories not end here, but begin anew.
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