Emotional Scars, Deep Hatreds Complicate Task of Aid Charities in Kosovo

A soft-spoken and somber woman in this tiny village in western Kosovo had her life overturned by a massacre this summer that claimed the lives of 19 men — including her husband. The woman, 36, is staying in her father-in-law’s house, dependent now upon her brother-in-law to support her and her two children.

Her 5-year-old daughter is now mute. Psychologists who are treating the family under the auspices of the medical-aid charity Doctors Without Borders believe that the woman, an ethnic Albanian, was raped by Serbian forces and that her daughter witnessed the attack.

Similarly harrowing tales of homelessness, hunger, and psychological and physical trauma are repeated in towns and villages all across this war-ravaged province, where international humanitarian-aid organizations face an enormous challenge in rebuilding not only buildings and bridges but also human lives. Most people require such basic needs as food, clothing, and shelter. Many will need long-term medical and psychological treatment. The economy is prostrate, and public services such as water, electric power, hospitals, and police departments need to be restored.

Yet perhaps the highest — and seemingly insurmountable — hurdle is to convince ethnic Albanians and Serbs that they can live together.

“In our hearts and minds we know that this is all about reconciliation,” says Bernard Kouchner, the administrator for the United Nations Mission in Kosovo. “In our heads, we know real peace will take time.”

About a million Kosovars were forcibly expelled from the province by Yugoslav military, police, and special forces in an attempted “ethnic-cleansing” operation that eventually provoked a military response by NATO forces. So far, an estimated 720,000 Kosovars have returned — often to find little more than rubble.

An inventory of the destruction is still under way, along with an effort to count and identify the dead. Nearly two-thirds of the homes in Kosovo were severely damaged or destroyed, as well as nearly half of the schools, according to preliminary reports by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the United Nations Children’s Fund. Only 7 per cent of farms expect to have a harvest this year.

Although no hospitals were destroyed, most ethnic Albanians have long been fearful of Serbian doctors, and therefore rarely used the state-run health-care system. The clinics they visited instead were largely destroyed, however, so the population must be reintegrated into the state system — which relies on antiquated equipment and clinical practices and requires a thorough overhaul.

The World Bank has estimated that rebuilding Kosovo’s physical infrastructure and reviving its agriculture will cost $2.5-billion. Moreover, the psychological costs, already staggering, are likely to rise unless measures are taken soon. Many of the Kosovars, especially the women and children, say they suffer from sleeplessness, nightmares, depression, and anxiety because of what they witnessed or experienced during the conflict.

“The best mental-health treatment for these people is for the schools to start, the families to be resettled, and homes to be rebuilt,” says Lynne Jones, a child psychologist who works for Child Advocacy International, based in Stoke-on-Trent, England. “How much ongoing help people need is going to depend on how quickly social networks can be re-established.”

Past experience suggests that about 40 per cent of children will display signs of posttraumatic stress, Ms. Jones says, and that about 10 per cent of them are likely to have chronic problems.

The psychological needs of the population are at the forefront of many international-aid programs. For example, Doctors Without Borders plans to train teachers in the areas where it is working to spot signs of trauma in children and to help them cope with their stress. A psychologist for the organization is also enlisting gynecologists in the effort to counsel rape victims.

Concern Worldwide, an Irish charity, is also considering various ways of aiding rape victims. It may try to incorporate men into its program, because disabusing rural Kosovar males of the idea that raped women are defiled is a key factor in persuading the victims, who fear being shunned by their community, to discuss their ordeals.

“It is still difficult to gauge what would be socially appropriate,” says Rona Blackwood, program coordinator at Concern Worldwide’s office in Pec, Kosovo. “At this point we are still trying to build up relationships in the community.”

Housing is another immediate priority. Many Kosovar families are living either with relatives, in the burned-out shells of their former homes, or in the tents that they carried with them from the refugee camps. The emphasis now is on finding people secure shelter before the arrival of winter.

Aid organizations from several countries are hoping to distribute enough tents, plastic sheeting, tools, and other equipment to enable people to insulate at least one room of their homes against frigid weather. But the war left many widows who may not have the skills to fix a room. Where too few men remain in a village to help out, charities will provide technical assistance.

Moreover, the charity Peace Winds Japan plans to reserve for the most vulnerable Kosavars — widows with children, and the elderly — many of the 500 prefabricated homes it is planning to bring to Kosovo.

Other organizations are renovating public buildings to create housing. Not only does that afford shelter to homeless people, but it also spurs the local economy by giving business to Kosovar workers and suppliers, says Brenda Peuch, field manager at the Irish charity Goal. Her group is also planning to buy tractor tires for distribution to farmers. Distributors will receive a small commission for stocking the tires; the farmers, in turn, will receive vouchers to buy them so that they can resume working their fields.

“In everything we do we try to have an eye toward economic development,” says Ms. Peuch.

Few charities have started to deal with long-term economic issues. That task will be enormous, since many factories and businesses were destroyed, and most of the jobs had been held by Serbs. Many ethnic Albanians were fired en masse in 1991, and were relying on remittances from their relatives living abroad.

Tensions between ethnic Albanians and Serbs long predate the recent violence in Kosovo. A hatred so intense seems unlikely to soften anytime soon, especially given the Balkan tendency to cling to the past rather than look to the future. Many young people witnessed the deaths of relatives and friends, so the tales of terror will be repeated for generations.

“All the Serbs should be killed,” says 18-year old Lumturije Shala. “They shouldn’t live here anymore. We don’t want them,” declares Ms. Shala, who says she watched her 13-year-old sister die after Serbian forces pushed 18 people into one room in their home and opened fire. The bullet casings remain on the floor as a tribute to her sister and the two neighbors who also died in the room.

That hatred appears to be more powerful than the tanks and guns that NATO forces use to patrol the streets to maintain order. A special United Nations police force is also being dispatched to Kosovo. And a panel of nine judges — including representatives from the ethnic Albanian, Serbian, and Turkish communities — has been selected so that legal procedures can begin.

But those steps are not sufficient to make non-Albanians feel secure. An estimated 70,000 to 100,000 Serbs, Roma (formerly called Gypsies), and Turks have fled the province, fearing reprisals from ethnic Albanians. Indeed, some Serbs and Roma have been killed or kidnapped, or have had their homes torched or looted, since most Serbian forces retreated from the province.

Some aid groups hope to promote reconciliation but concede that they have no idea how they should approach such a daunting task.

“It is not so easy to create a project,” says Eva Murtas, a volunteer for Associazione Papa Giovanni, an Italian charity based in Rimini. “It is not so mechanical. We don’t pretend that we can teach anyone the answers. We just want to help, be their friends.”

Ms. Blackwood of the Irish group Concern says her charity would also like to promote some sort of broader social healing, but at this point she is still preoccupied with internal political questions, such as how the hiring of Serbs would affect her ethnic Albanian employees. Many humanitarian organizations in Kosovo are grappling with the same dilemma: Most Kosovars who require aid are ethnic Albanian, but the Serbs who need help would undoubtedly rather receive it from fellow Serbs.

“I don’t want to put my [ethnic Albanian] staff at any emotional or physical risk,” says Ms. Blackwood. “But I should be targeting Serbian people too.”

Charity officials say that having people work together across ethnic lines is a way to begin reconciliation. And it is important, they add, that Serbs see that not all of the aid and the well-paying jobs are reserved for ethnic Albanians.

“We don’t want to be part of creating an apartheid system here,” says Steven Rifkin, program director for Save the Children in the United Kingdom.

Most of the humanitarian effort under way in Kosovo is still focused on meeting immediate basic needs, however, which is proving to be difficult enough to do. Many of the more than 100 aid organizations now working in Kosovo also operated here before the violence. But many of them had their offices, records, computers, and cars stolen or destroyed during the bombing. Those groups had to bring new equipment with them when they re-entered the province.

Although delivery of items such as food, clothes, household goods, and reconstruction supplies has been slow and spotty — partly because donors were reluctant to stockpile them in advance — it is improving daily as shipping routes are re-established, warehouses are replenished, and NATO troops remove land mines from major roads.

Indeed, the whole relief operation is easier with the United Nations in control. Previously, trucks bringing aid would be stalled at the border for months by the Yugoslav government, which often also denied visas to international staff members.

Some homegrown charities are proving to be indispensable in helping villagers. One local organization, the Mother Teresa Society, has compiled detailed information about aid beneficiaries and has built a distribution network that many international groups have been using for years to deliver aid. The organization has been slow in re-establishing itself, since many of its volunteers were forced to leave Kosovo. But they are slowly coming back and returning to work.

The lack of a local civil authority also complicates aid operations. The towns have self-appointed mayors; as the United Nations sets up local authorities, however, charities may find that they will be negotiating with completely different people altogether.

“We are not paying any rent on our warehouse,” says Francesca M. Cerchia, program manager at Intersos, an Italian charity. “We would if we knew who to pay it to. But we have to go ahead. We will deal with the authorities later.”