Kosovo Crisis Bedevils Aid Efforts

Charities are stretched to the limit in chaotic struggle to help refugees

Arsim Osmani, an ethnic-Albanian exile from the war in Kosovo, gazed past acres of white tents

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in this camp full of worn and weary refugees and appraised the relief efforts being mounted by many of the world’s largest humanitarian organizations.

“They’re trying, but it’s difficult,” Mr. Osmani said impatiently. “Maybe they aren’t organized that much, I don’t know, but people are suffering.”

Mr. Osmani’s assessment underscores both the immense challenges and dire consequences that charities face in trying to bring aid and comfort to the more than half-million Albanian refugees who have fled Kosovo in the wake of war with Serbia.

Mr. Osmani’s evaluation of the relief efforts may seem unduly harsh. After all, he and a significant portion of his fellow refugees have found basic food, shelter, and medical care at this and other relief camps in Macedonia and Albania. But in other respects, he is right. The relief effort has indeed seemed confused and chaotic as charities have scrambled to overcome a bedeviling array of logistical hurdles that have been placed there by forces largely out of their control. As the crisis moves toward its second month, the financial, political, and organizational challenges facing relief groups keep mounting, and refugees continue to pour over the borders of Kosovo.

Even veteran relief officials who have worked in Rwanda, Somalia, and other pockets of desperation describe the Balkan theater as among the most difficult they have seen. “It’s been incredibly frustrating,” one relief official concluded at the close of a day spent trying to marshal supplies at tent camps near the Kosovo border.

While frustration indeed fills the air here, some observers wonder whether relief organizations should have been better prepared to deal with the Balkan emergency. With months of military and diplomatic posturing preceding Serbia’s assault on the Kosovo Albanians and the air attacks by NATO, some observers have argued that charities should have seen the exodus coming.

But charity officials say that even with tensions rising for months in the former Yugoslavia, the refugee crisis unfolded with extraordinary speed and potency, overwhelming their available resources.

Chris Thomas, a seasoned Red Cross relief worker here, said the sight of refugees pouring into the Macedonian border region was “incredible.”

“One day I looked out and there were 20,000,” he said as he stood on a road adjacent to a squalid border encampment where Kosovars waited for entry into Macedonia. “The next day it was 60,000.”

Before the war began, many charities were concentrating their efforts on Kosovo, where they sought to help ethnic Albanians besieged by Serbian militia and Serb refugees from the recently ended war in Bosnia. But supplies that were earmarked for Kosovo have done little good here in Macedonia and Albania. Many items that were on order for use in Kosovo were held up by customs officials in Belgrade as tensions with NATO mounted, some charity officials say.

And once the violence escalated in Kosovo and refugees began fleeing, many charities had to close their offices in haste and leave goods behind. Among the items that the International Rescue Committee lost, according to David Porter, its logistics coordinator: $500,000 in medicine.

Some critics have argued that no matter how serious the logistical challenges of the Kosovo crisis, relief organizations should have had more supplies in place in Macedonia and Albania to deal with the huge population displacement that is unfolding now. But charity officials say that being prepared for such an eventuality wasn’t as easy as it might seem.

For one thing, they say, the magnitude of the Kosovo exodus has been off the charts. “On this scale, we didn’t have the supplies in country to handle this,” said Gerald Anderson, former head of the Belgrade office of the Red Cross and now head of the organization’s Macedonia office. “I don’t think anybody did.”

Adds Mr. Porter of the International Rescue Committee: “Yesterday we needed 200 pit latrines. Today I learned we need 3,000.”

What’s more, some charity officials complain that NATO and other government authorities gave them no warning of what was to come — or how it might affect relief operations. “I thought they could have planned it better,” Mr. Porter said of the NATO allies. “It was bloody obvious” to NATO “that this was going to happen.”

The need to maintain credibility with donors also made it hard for charities to obtain enough cash to buy relief supplies in advance. “You can’t raise money for something that hasn’t happened yet,” said Mr. Porter. “It’s very difficult to convince people it’s going to happen. It’s hard enough getting funds for the problems we already had in Kosovo.”

Finally, charity officials say that it is not practical to stockpile huge amounts of relief supplies in preparation for a potential emergency. Food can spoil and supplies can be looted — especially when they lie unguarded in impoverished regions that are prone to civil unrest, the officials point out.

Oxfam Great Britain last year began storing water-purification equipment and other supplies in Albania in anticipation of a surge of refugees from Kosovo, said Christopher Stalker, Oxfam’s communications officer. But last fall the cache was looted, he said. “What wasn’t taken was destroyed,” he added.

Stockpiling relief supplies can pose other problems besides theft, Mr. Stalker also noted. The presence of huge stores of food and other goods can give an unintended green light to an aggressor nation to terrorize and expel a persecuted minority. “To set up refugee camps or have too much stock in place can almost implicitly condone people being moved across borders,” Mr. Stalker said.

Now, as relief agencies struggle to meet the swelling need, they are working around the clock to order and deliver supplies to the camps. The challenges are formidable.

Mr. Porter, for example, is having the International Rescue Committee’s pit latrines made locally, in Macedonia. He has had to procure wood, nails, tools, and other items, then hire workers. “We’re getting all the carpenters we can find,” he declared during a break one recent morning. After the latrines are made, they must be trucked to the refugee camps and set up. The total bill, Mr. Porter estimated: $300,000.

Other charities are mobilizing in similar fashion. The Red Cross, for example, is bringing in 100,000 hygiene kits from the United States and recently received an order of 20,000 Bulgarian-made blankets.

At Catholic Relief Services in Skopje, consultant Bob Kidd, a veteran U.S. foreign-service employee, has been busy working out a borrowing arrangement with the charity’s office in Sofia, Bulgaria, for more than 3,000 metric tons of wheat flour.

As they rush to meet the refugees’ burgeoning needs, relief groups have had to face a thicket of bureaucratic and logistical obstacles that often have complicated their job.

Among those obstacles, some charity officials have said privately, has been the Macedonian government. In the early days of the crisis, the Skopje airport was shut down, and authorities blocked charities from bringing relief supplies into the republic. Medicine, blankets, tents, and other items sat at the airport for days, unavailable to the refugees who needed them.

“It was very frustrating,” a worker with Médecins Sans Frontières, a medical-relief charity also known as Doctors Without Borders, said one morning as he rushed along a pathway in a camp at Brazde, Macedonia.

Oxfam flew in water and sanitation equipment only to have it sit in a transit shed at the Skopje airport for 77 hours, said Mr. Stalker. Meanwhile, he said, “people were gasping for water 15 miles north.”

The reason for the Macedonian government’s resistance is a matter of speculation. Some observers believe supplies could have been blocked because a charity wasn’t registered with the government or the proper paperwork wasn’t on file to allow incoming goods to be exempt from import duties. Others think Macedonian authorities, worried about damage to their already fragile economy from the onslaught of refugees, wanted to make the situation appear as dire as possible so that other nations would feel compelled to take the Kosovo burden off their hands. Still others speculate that longstanding ethnic tensions between the Macedonians and Albanians may have led Macedonian authorities to make things tough for the refugees by slowing the supply pipeline.

That last theory appeared to gain credence in the opening days of the refugee emergency as thousands of exhausted Albanians languished in the mud and filth of a makeshift border encampment at Brace, Macedonia, as militia with guard dogs and automatic weapons kept the refugees in line. The Macedonian authorities allowed few relief workers into the camp and kept out monitors from the United Nations. El Hilal, a Muslim humanitarian organization in Macedonia, brought food and other goods that had been supplied by Catholic Relief Services and other sources into the camp using slow-moving tractor carts as refugees waited in the stench-filled air.

Despite what many observers regard as resistance from the Macedonian government, however, charity officials are reluctant to criticize the local authorities here for fear of making the situation worse. And some observers point out that the Macedonians have legitimate concerns. The thousands of refugees coming into their country threaten to destabilize the economy and upset the delicate ethnic and political order.

“It’s a tough issue for Macedonia,” Christopher R. Hill, the U.S. ambassador to Macedonia and the American mediator in the failed Rambouillet peace talks with Serbia, said in an interview at the Brazde refugee camp. The influx of refugees has “shaken the foundations” of Macedonia, Mr. Hill said. Referring to the tiny nation’s handling of the refugee crisis, he said, “There’s no purpose in Monday-morning quarterbacking.”

Besides dealing with government-imposed hurdles, charities also have had to face the economic realities of supply and demand and the pressures of ethnic loyalties in a region where nationalism runs strong.

As demand for everything from sponges to rubber gloves to eight-ton trucks escalates by the day, some local suppliers see a bonanza in the making. Many want charities to pay cash — not easy when bank accounts must be opened quickly and money moved from England, France, or the United States. And some local suppliers are forcing charities to bid against each other to get access to needed supplies, according to some relief officials.

One logistics expert said that prices for one item were twice what they were in Kosovo before the war began. Asked if the Macedonians were engaging in price gouging, he replied, “Of course. The Macedonians don’t like the Albanians anyway.”

On the other hand, Albanian business owners, in a show of sympathy for their exiled kinsmen, are supplying some relief goods at little or no profit.

If bureaucratic, economic, and ethnic obstacles have slowed aid efforts here, say many charity officials, so too has the very agency that is charged with coordinating global humanitarian relief: the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

While they are reluctant to criticize the commissioner publicly, numerous relief officials complained privately that the international agency was slow and ineffective, especially in the early days of the Kosovo crisis.

In particular, they said, the agency was too timid in demanding access to the Blace border encampment to insure proper treatment of the weary refugees there, was slow to start registration procedures to keep refugee families from being separated, and did a poor job of organizing the massive tent camps here at Stenkovac, at Brazde, and in other locales.

“They have not been as coordinated and anticipatory as I might expect of the best-resourced refugee-relief organization in the world,” one relief official said. “There’s been a lack of coordination,” said another.

Added Ruud Huurman, a spokesman in Amsterdam for Medecins Sans Frontieres, “We think the U.N.H.C.R. probably misjudged the signs that this could develop in Macedonia and that it acted quite slowly to adjust to the reality.”

U.N. refugee officials defend their handling of the Kosovo crisis, citing finite resources and the rapid, large-scale nature of the emergency. Kris Janowski, a U.N.H.C.R. spokesman, said he thinks the agency’s performance was “quite good” considering the “extremely difficult logistical circumstances.”

As the Kosovo crisis continues to play out in coming weeks, charity, government, diplomatic, and military officials are likely to be asking hard questions about how the emergency was handled.

Should the U.N. have been better prepared? Are government and private aid groups doing enough to insure that the economies of Macedonia and Albania are not destabilized by what could well be the biggest migration of displaced people in European history?

And what of the role of NATO as both deliverer of bombs to Serbian targets and distributor of food, tents, and medical care to the beleaguered refugees? Some charity officials worry that if they appear to be working too closely with NATO, their Yugoslav charity partners back in Belgrade or Pristina could suffer reprisals.

Finally, what about the future of the exiled Albanian refugees — the young men who crowd against the barbed-wire fences, the women who stoically hang their families’ laundry on the tent tops to dry, the infants who wail in dingy medical tents?

Few charity officials here are preoccupied with the question of refugee resettlement yet. Immediate needs are more pressing. But already, they say they expect the crisis to persist for years. They note that in Bosnia, many refugees from the war there have not yet returned home, years after being forced to flee.

To ward off economic destabilization in Macedonia and Albania, relief groups will need to help not only the refugees, but also the host families who take them in and other permanent residents who have been affected by the crisis.

“It’s not over,” Mr. Anderson of the Red Cross said of the Kosovo refugee drama. “It’s just beginning.”