Source: http://www.usia.gov/regional/eur/balkans/kosovo/99041504.htm
Accessed 17 April 1999

15 April 1999

KOSOVO REFUGEES DESCRIBE ATROCITIES  

By Anita Santos
USIA Staff Writer

 Washington -- The first two refugees from Kosovo to arrive in the United States reported eye witness accounts of the atrocities Serbian forces are inflicting upon ethnic Albanians in Yugoslavia. During an April 15 news conference in Washington, D.C., the two female refugees emphasized the trauma ethnic cleansing is causing for Kosovar children.

 Aferdita Kelmendi, a journalist and director of Radio-TV 21 in Pristina, and Vjosa Dobruna, a pediatrician and trauma care specialist, have met with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committe's Subcommittee on Immigration, and will meet later in the week with Secretary of State Madeline Albright to discuss the situation of ethnic Albanian Kosovars and call for more urgent action by NATO forces.

 Kelmendi says the current conflict between Serbs and Kosovars has developed slowly over the last decade. She explained that in her generation, ethnic Albanians and Serbs were brought up together, without prejudice against one another. However, the situation started changing some years ago, when schools became segregated, and Serbs started discriminating against ethnic Albanian children.

 Albanian children in Kosovo began "living in an apartheid situation, having a parallel life. There were no TV, no books in their own language. They did not have space to play with other children," Kelmendi told an audience April 15.

 "Ten years of apartheid traumatized the children of Kosovo," Dobruna added. Years of propaganda by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his subordinates have shaped the minds and attitudes of Serbs against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, she said. "But as long as we manage to save the lives of the children, then we can think of healing the trauma," Dobruna said.

 "The idea that attacks on civilians began only after NATO began bombing is untrue," Dobruna said on her testimony before the Senate subcommittee April 14. In recent years, many Albanian Kosovars have been forced to live in the mountains and in the bushes to escape Serbian persecution. "Everybody has been feeling powerless," the physician said.

 The cases of ethnic cleansing were growing very rapidly in the months before the NATO attack began, Dobruma reported. "NATO bombs did not force me from my home. Serbian forces did. I am grateful for the NATO bombs." However, she believes that more than bombs will be necessary to stop Milosevic and asked for "ground help" from NATO forces.

 According to Dobruna, "the intention of every single person who was deported was to go back. There is nothing like home." She said immigration to Europe and the United States is not the answer for deportees from Kosovo and called for special protection for the thousands still inside the province.

 Both women told the Senate panel that "refugees" is not the most appropriate word to describe the people who have left Kosovo. "We are deportees," Dobruna explained. "We have been forced to leave our homes; we did not choose this. We did not run, even though conditions there were very bad. We stayed until we were forced out. So I ask you to please refer to us as deportees, not refugees."

 Dobruna and Kelmendi told the story of their harrowing escape from Kosovo to an audience that included many teenagers from Children's Express media organization, which was sponsoring the April 15 conference. Dobruna said she had to change apartments six times in six days while she was still in Pristina because she believed she was on a list of targeted ethnic Albanians. During her escape from Kosovo, Dobruna saw train after train crowded with old people, very young children, and pregnant women separated from other family members.

 Kelmendi said her family, along with two other families, only survived their flight to the border between Kosovo and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia because they had money to pay armed men who stopped their cars several times. Once in the line to cross to Macedonia, the families waited for three days with no food and little water inside the cars. After the third day, they abandoned the car and walked to the border, where they entered a field that has come to be known as a "no-man's land."

 Kelmendi described the conditions there as simply horrible. "There was only huddled people, some of whom where very sick and some of whom were dying," she said. Kelmendi's family stayed there for seven hours and by coincidence met Dobruna. Dobruna knew a physician from Doctors of the World who was there trying to help the sick people, and who helped them to pass through the Macedonian police barrier. Speaking in the Macedonian language, Kelmendi lied, and convinced the border guards she was a doctor. They allowed her and her family to pass, leaving thousands behind in "no-man's land."