TRANSCRIPT: USAID CHIEF ON HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE TO KOSOVO

Says refugees suffer severe psychological trauma  

Washington -- Kosovar Albanian refugees who have fled to Albania and Macedonia are suffering from the most severe psychological trauma that U.S. disaster relief officials have ever seen, says Brian Atwood, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

 "Many of them have seen male members of their family executed before their eyes," Atwood said in an April 8 briefing. "One particular traumatic story involved a nine-year-old boy who saw his three brothers executed and then his own home set afire with his two-year-old sister in it. He tried to rescue her but was himself wounded in the process and could not rescue her in the end."

 Atwood says there is an urgent need for trauma counselors to help the Kosovar refugees.

 Atwood said that NATO engineers plan to build a landing strip for mammoth C-130 cargo planes to bring food to the starving refugees in Albania and Macedonia and that immunization programs are getting under way.

 Explanation of initials used in transcript:
 
UNHCR: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees  

NGO: non-governmental organization 

OSCE: Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
 
Following is a transcript of Atwood's remarks:
 
"The Humanitarian Response to the Kosovo Crisis"

 Briefing by USAID Administrator Brian Atwood

 April 8, 1999

 Washington
 
Let me make a few general statements about the situation on the border separating Kosovo from Macedonia and Albania. The situation changes about hour on the hour. I had an opportunity to speak directly to the people we have in the field this morning, including the deputy director of the office of foreign disaster assistance of USAID. He's a person who has been engaged in disaster relief for most of his 30-year career. He has an interesting perspective.

 He said to me this morning that he has never seen such traumatized refugees in his career including those coming out of Rwanda. This are people who have seen their families killed, who have been herded toward the borders and deported by force from Kosovo, people who are breaking into tears or staring blankly into the air, clearly having a real problem with psychological trauma.

 One of his main recommendations is that we need desperately to get a lot of trauma counselors into this region. He told me stories of both adults and children who cross the border in Albania and burst into tears, not so much from relief but because they had just gone through the most humiliating experience of their lives having had all their personal papers taken from them so that their own identities are erased and their belief is that perhaps this means that they'll never go home or that they'll never see their property again.

 Many of them have seen male members of their family executed before their eyes. One particular traumatic story involved a nine-year-old boy who saw his three brothers executed and then his own home set afire with his two-year-old sister in it. He tried to rescue her but was himself wounded in the process and could not rescue her in the end. You can of course imagine the psychological trauma that someone like that goes through.

 We have had some very cynical pronouncements by Mr. Milosevic's government lately, suggesting the possibility that non-governmental organizations could go into Kosovo where clearly there is a major humanitarian disaster occurring. Most of those organizations are well aware that the people who were targeted in Kosovo by this wave of Serbian troops were the non-governmental organizations. They cite over and over again that the Mother Theresa Society in particular was targeted. It operated out of Pristina and that region, that most of the people that worked for the Mother Theresa Society were killed. We have had people that escaped who have told us horrendous stories about the people who were working with the European OSCE and other stories as well indicating that NGOs themselves were the targets of these Serbian onslaughts.

 No one can believe that it is possible to work in Kosovo without having a security force present there. We are working very hard to deal with people who are in deteriorating health at this point, in particular in northern Albania where the weather is very damp and very cold. We see serious respiratory problems that we're trying to deal with. Diarrheal problems, especially for children. By the way, children can die of diarrheal problems if they don't get treated.

 We have seen four cases of measles. We're very concerned about this because the incubation period for measles is about two weeks, and we may see very quickly this disease spreading in the camps. The World Health Organization has been consulted and we are planning to do a massive immunization program. Perhaps as many as 100,000 children will be immunized against measles in the next week.

 The issue for us is not the availability of food in the region. The issue is transport and getting it into the area where the food is needed. Approximately 125 tons of food will be needed to feed these 140,000 refugees in the Kukic area, which is the area about 30 kilometers from the Albanian border in the north. That's the number that still remains there. Approximately 150,000 others have come farther south in Albania and are either scattered widely or have been taken in by Albanians.

 The road to Kukic from Tirana is deteriorating rapidly. We've had one serious accident on that road. A worker was very seriously hurt in a car accident this morning. Parts of the road are beginning to wash away. It is a mountainous road that has a lot of switchbacks on it. We therefore have started a helicopter convoy to Kukic. We have had engineers from NATO there studying the possibility of putting down an airstrip so that C-130's could fly into Kukic directly. That ultimately is the answer because 125 tons of food is a lot and right now helicopters can carry perhaps 15 or 20 tons each. It is not an easy thing to do by helicopter so we're hoping that the C-130's will be able to land soon.

 In Macedonia, the situation is much improved from the days of the no-man's zone. People are now encamped, but there continues to be a good deal of pressure to relocate people from Macedonia. Several thousand have gone to Turkey and some to Germany and others to other parts of Europe. People are looking now at the possibility of constructing a major camp on the Albanian-Macedonian border on the Albanian side. Clearly, that all has to be looked at very carefully and we have to work very closely with not only with UNHCR but also with all of the NGO's that would be expected to service people at such a camp.

 The situation on the borders is beginning to stabilize. There's a long way to go. It'll take us at least two weeks before we probably will be able to come before you and say that we have won the battle against disease and exposure and that we have no longer any fear that people will die. Approximately 35 people have died that were in the care of the international community thus far, but the situation is getting better on a daily basis, particularly with the involvement of NATO and with a lot of very good and very courageous relief workers.

 This man I talked to this morning who has all of this experience told me that he has never seen such traumatized refugees and he has never seen so many sick relief workers. These people are working 18 hours a day and they themselves are exposed to the dampness and the cold and many of them have very serious respiratory problems themselves, so we obviously need to get more people into this area to spell them. We are sending a lot of materials. I will be going up to Dover, Delaware tomorrow with the First Lady where we're sending more military transport planes with thousands of humanitarian daily rations.

 I'll be able to pass this around to you. This is a humanitarian daily ration. This has enough food to feed a person for a single day. You need approximately 125,000 of these everyday in northern Albania to give you some idea of the scope of the work that needs to be done here. This has food. It is not the kind of food that you would buy in a gourmet restaurant. It is vegetarian because of religious concerns. It is not very tasty, but it at least keeps you alive.

 This is a massive effort but the effort is well under way, and, especially with NATO involved with their engineers and transport aircraft and communications facilities, we're going to be getting ahead of this problem.

 The problem that we have that is far greater than the problem we have on the border is the problem inside Kosovo. We have no idea how badly people are being treated, how many people are dying of starvation or exposure, how many people are without shelter because their homes have been burned. We can only imagine the worst, based on the stories that have been told to us.

 The people that are coming out are being interviewed by the war crimes tribunal. The stories that they are telling are horrendous, and they are naming names. Yesterday, I believe, the State Department made a number of those names public. Clearly, the tribunal is interested in this situation. They (the Serbians) must be aware that the international community is watching what is happening.

 We have no more refugees coming out at this point because they're being stopped from coming out. Approximately 20,000 on the Macedonian border and 20,000 on the Albanian border have been taken away. We know not where, presumably back to their villages. Our fear is that they are being used as human shields at this point. I know that Mr. Milosevic is announcing that he has an agreement with Mr. (Ibrahim) Rugova, (the Kosovar Albanian leader), for a settlement. There is no agreement that is acceptable to us other than an agreement that an international security force will go into Kosovo to protect the people of that country so that they can return.

 A final word. We're not only in this business to save lives. We're doing that now, but the goal of the international community outside in the refugee camps that will be set up will be to prepare people to go home, wherever they may be, whether they are in Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro or in Germany, France, Great Britain or the United States. Our job will be to prepare people to go home healthy so that they can help to rebuild their own country.

 Thank you very much

Question: Does the United States plan to take in any more refugees?
 
 

Response: We have made a commitment to take up to 20,000 refugees. That will be done on a voluntary basis. We have made available the facility that we have which has handled refugees in the past at Guantanamo Bay (in Cuba). Right now, we're preparing that to receive refugees. We understand that that is not an ideal solution to the problem. In fact, most people including the refugees themselves would prefer to stay in the region. We offered to bring in 20,000 along with other European countries that have been willing to take in another 100,000 to break a deadlock with the government of Macedonia so that we can get people out of that no-man's land and into camps. They're in camps now and in transit camps and it remains to be seen how many of them will wish to go that far away to Guantanamo.

 Question: What are the preparations for trying war crimes at the international criminal court?

 Response: We are actively trying to negotiate. We (the United States) actually are the country that took the lead in trying to set up an international tribunal. We have some concerns about the language and the extent of the jurisdiction of that tribunal, but we do have a war crimes tribunal that has appropriate authority to handle this particular situation. They are very active. They have sent people down to the refugee camps to interview people. We have had Ambassador David Schieffer there both in the Hague and in the region helping to coordinate our activities and to help them get the information they need.

 Question: In the African press, there has been criticism of the United States that it didn't respond in the same manner to the crisis in Sierra Leone as it did in the Balkans. Would you care to address that?

 Response: I would address by simply saying that we should do more. We have done a great deal on a humanitarian level to respond to the crisis in Sierra Leone for example. A good deal more than has gained any publicity, that's for sure. But this situation is somewhat different. The Sierra Leone situation evolved over time and it was difficult to know how we would use our diplomacy to try to resolve the crisis. In the case of Kosovo, we've been directly engaged because of Bosnia and all of the problems in the Balkans in trying to bring about a peace agreement. We could have stood by and watched as Milosevic amassed his troops to go into Kosovo as he was doing at the end of March or we could have reacted and punished him for doing it, and we did the latter, and I think I would have had a hard time answering questions if we had sat back and watched him cleanse Kosovo in the way that he has without the NATO forces responding. I'm not denying that we should do more in Sierra Leone. We are doing a great deal. It doesn't get a lot of attention, but it's a little more difficult issue, a less clear issue in terms of how we would have used diplomatic resources to try to help bring about a resolution to the problem.

 Question: Could you talk about the preparations to bring the refugees to Guantanamo? Will refugees be brought to the United States?

 Response: Right now, we wanted to move as quickly as we could without a lot of legal questions being raised about temporary versus permanent status for these individuals. The fastest thing we could have done was to make Guantanamo available. The military is now in the process of preparing Guantanamo to receive refugees in a way that we would all want them to be received. We hear the criticism that this is a military base. They're going to feel that they're confined. We want them to feel that they're guests of the United States. We also want them to understand that this is a very temporary solution. The possibility that if this goes on for any length of time that people would be invited to come to the United States as refugees is still very much on the table. No one is saying that this is being ruled out, but at this stage we made an announcement so that we could put our 20,000 commitment on the table quickly, break the deadlock in Macedonia and show to the other European nations that we were going to do our part. It remains to be seen what further steps would be taken in that regard and what further steps would be necessary.

 Question: What steps have been taken to coordinate the efforts of this relief organizations to avoid overlap of work and human and material resources? Is there any special coordinating body?

 Response: This is always the most difficult issue. The best way to coordinate this kind of activity is in the field and, in this case, we have both militaries from the 19 NATO countries as well as a lot of government bilateral aid agencies and a lot of non-governmental organizations. We had daily meetings in the field in Tirana and also in Macedonia to talk to the NGOs that are engaged. It does no good to duplicate efforts and certainly does no good to work on the basis of information that is inaccurate. We all focus on UNHCR as the authority in terms of the numbers of refugees. We all focus now on NATO as the logistics coordinator for this effort.

 (end transcript)