Brutality in Kosovo Turns Many Charity Relief Workers Into Refugees

Once they were the caregivers. Now they are part of the great Balkan diaspora.

Among the tens of thousands of refugees who have fled from Kosovo in recent days are scores of ethnic-Albanian charity employees who worked for Catholic Relief Services,

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Oxfam, and other groups inside the embattled province. The charities, which provided aid to Kosovars and to Serb refugees of the recent war in Bosnia, pulled out as the fighting and atrocities in Kosovo heated up.

Now, as the charities continue their relief work from bases here in the Macedonian capital and in Albania, their ethnic-Albanian employees who also fled Kosovo find themselves living a double life. They are aid workers, but they are refugees too. Like the people they seek to help, the charity workers have experienced loss, fear, rootlessness, and stark images of their fellow citizens brutalized or murdered — sensations that they say give them a heightened understanding of the importance of their mission.

“Once you have tried living as a refugee, you have a new feeling for those people,” said Ariand Alaj, an Albanian-Muslim technical assistant for Oxfam Great Britain who fled from Pristina, the Kosovo capital.

“When we were working back in Kosovo, we were trying hard to help people, but now it will feel much different.”

Some Kosovo relief workers remain in harm’s way. Of 30 Oxfam Great Britain staff members in Pristina, for example, four people had been missing for days, and three more workers were still in Pristina.

CARE, meanwhile, reported that two of its relief workers were missing from a border checkpoint for nine days before they turned up as captives of Yugoslavian authorities who accused one of the men of spying. And a Red Cross official in Skopje said, “We’re very concerned about the fate of our local staff” in Pristina. “There are several people we have not heard from.”

Other displaced charity workers have, like Mr. Alaj, found a safe haven in Macedonia but carry the memories of what they witnessed in Kosovo.

Mr. Alaj, who married his fiancee five minutes before escaping Pristina by car, said he saw Kosovars beaten by Serbs and pulled from buses and forced to do manual labor.

Merita Barileva, 33, another Oxfam worker from Pristina, fled by car with her husband and two young sons, made it past a checkpoint where members of the Serb police force pointed a rifle at her husband, then waited for hours at the Macedonia border before making it to safety.

Besa, a 29-year-old Catholic Relief Services worker in Pristina who asks that her last name not be published, said she used old family X-rays to trick the Macedonian guards at a filthy border camp into thinking that a relative was sick. The guards let her family move to a camp inside Macedonia that offered shelter under better conditions.

Sitting in the sun outside Catholic Relief Service’s offices in Skopje, Besa spoke of having no home and an uncertain future away from her charity job in Kosovo. “It’s very hard,” she said. “You have a house, a life, you don’t need anything, and suddenly you are a refugee.”

Shpend Selimi, 34, another Catholic Relief Services worker from Pristina, said he was lucky to escape by car with his wife and baby daughter as Serb militia closed in on his neighborhood. Police and paramilitary units were going from street to street, demanding cash and jewelry from the Kosovars and beating those who resisted, Mr. Selimi said. “People had 10 minutes to leave, and they were told not to close their doors. We got out with a small bag — just elementary things.”

As he stood near the Kosovo border in a dusty distribution area stacked with water jugs, diapers, food, and other relief supplies, Mr. Selimi, 34, remembered the words of the Serb militia as they drove him and his neighbors from Pristina: “You’ve been asking for Albania, so go to Albania. This is Serbia. Now get the hell out.”

While such experiences may give the ethnic-Albanian charity employees valuable insights into the plight of their fellow refugees, the relief workers sometimes are handicapped by bitter memories and personal losses from the war in Kosovo. “We need to work at full capacity, and occasionally some of our people hear about friends or family, and the emotional crisis can take an hour or two to sort out,” Christopher Stalker, Oxfam Great Britain’s communications officer, said wearily after a day-long visit to several refugee camps near here.

Among those who lost touch with loved ones was Ardian Zogu, a 26-year-old Albanian Muslim who has worked as a driver and interpreter for Oxfam.

“I don’t know where my parents are,” Mr. Zogu said quietly one evening in Oxfam’s temporary headquarters in a rented flat in Skopje.

Mr. Zogu said his mother, father, and 14-year-old sister remained behind in Kosovo when he and his three other sisters, brother-in-law, and 4-year-old niece fled Pristina.

Once out of the capital, Mr. Zogu and his relatives encountered searing tableaus of the war — destroyed homes, burning villages, and the worst scene: a man shot to death, his corpse burned from the waist up and his legs eaten away by dogs. “That,” Mr. Zogu said ruefully, “was in the Albanian part of town.”

Before getting back to Oxfam, Mr. Zogu spent time in a refugee camp, where he helped a Greek medical-relief team. In that job, he said, he saw refugees who had been shot, a woman who was wounded by grenade fire, and a mother seeking help for her 21-year-old daughter who had been raped.

It is the memory of his parents back in Kosovo, however, that pulls at Mr. Zogu the hardest.

“I’m just hoping I will see them one day,” he said softly. “Just hoping.”