Macedonian Media Monitor, May 3, 1999
Slavko Mangovski
REFUGEES FLOOD INTO MACEDONIA. Some 11,000 Kosovars are
waiting to enter Macedonia at the Blace border crossing,
Reuters reported on 3 May. Paula Ghedini, who is a
spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said
the previous day at Cegrane that some 7,000 Kosovars arrived
in Macedonia on 1 May. She added that only 600 Kosovars were
able to proceed to third countries the same day. Ghedini
noted that in various parts of Macedonia, some 80,000
refugees are packed into nine camps designed for only a
fraction of that number. The newly-opened Cegrane camp was
planned for 4,000 people but currently houses 14,000. German
soldiers are working round the clock to put up tents but
cannot keep pace with the influx of new arrivals. Thousands
of refugees at several of the camps sleep on plastic sheets
in the open. Ghedini described sanitary conditions as
"horrendous." More than 90,000 Kosovars are staying with
private families. PM
GEORGIEVSKI: MACEDONIA FACES GRIM CHOICES. Prime Minister
Ljubco Georgievski told "The Daily Telegraph" of 3 May that
"either we will be ruined as a state [by the refugee influx]
or we will have to close our frontiers." He stressed that
"Europe must give us a safety valve" by providing more aid
and by taking greater numbers of refugees. Georgievski
suggested that his country would be unable to accommodate a
possible new wave of refugees of up to 50,000 people.
Georgievski also said that Macedonia might reconsider its
decision not to allow its territory to be used to launch a
land invasion of Serbia, but he stressed it would do so only
if the parliament approved the change and received
"assurances on the aims of such an offensive and the
involvement of other Balkan states." PM
MORE FOREIGN AID FOR MACEDONIA. Georgievski also told "The
Daily Telegraph" of 3 May that he is disappointed that
unnamed European countries, which he said, have taken in
fewer than 1,000 refugees each, criticize his country, which
could soon be home to some 200,000 Kosovars. The London-based
daily suggested that he was referring primarily to the U.K.
Prime Minister Tony Blair is slated to arrive in Macedonia on
3 May. Two days earlier, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin
visited Macedonia and pledged a supplementary aid package for
that country amounting to $26 million. France previously
pledged some $160 million for Macedonia and Albania together.
Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy told Macedonian
officials that Ottawa will provide $24 million for refugee
relief and $6 million in economic assistance. In Bonn on 3
May, Interior Minister Otto Schily said Germany, which is
currently home to 10,000 Kosovar refugees, will take in
another 10,000. PM
MACEDONIA ARRESTS FOUR AS BOMBING SUSPECTS. Macedonian police
arrested four suspects in Kumanovo on 1 May in connection
with a recent grenade attack on a French sentry post (see
"RFE/RL Newsline," 27 April 1999). The suspects had bought
grenades in Yugoslavia and were drunk when the attack took
place, Reuters reported. Kumanovo is a center of Macedonia's
small ethnic Serbian minority. PM
=========================================================
FOCUS-Trains increase refugee flood into Macedonia
04:53 p.m May 03, 1999 Eastern
By Jude Webber
BLACE, Macedonia, May 3 (Reuters) - Macedonia's refugee crisis moved up a
notch on Monday when a series of unexpected train arrivals swamped the main
border crossing with Kosovo, bringing thousands of ethnic Albanians from an
area north of the provincial capital Pristina, aid workers said.
Three trains arrived at the main Blace border crossing into Macedonia in
less than 24 hours, including the first night train since early April,
disgorging refugees at a rate that aid workers could barely handle.
``Three trains in one day is unprecedented. It looks like they are working
overtime to try to clear the area north of Pristina,'' Ron Redmond,
spokesman for U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, told Reuters.
Like the night train which arrived after midnight, Monday night's trainload
came from the area around Podujevo, around 30 km (20 miles) north of
Pristina.
Redmond said the third trainload brought to some 9,000 the number of
refugees to have arrived at Blace during the day. A further 800 were
believed to have crossed at the mountain crossing at Jazince, northwest of
the capital Skopje.
UNHCR official Astrid Van Genderen Stort said a new train arrived on Monday
evening just as the day's flow had been brought under control. ``I was just
entering the border area which we (had) just cleared from today's arrivals
and now it is full again,'' she said.
Aid workers differed on their estimates of how many refugee the new train
held, citing anything from 2,000 to 5,000, underlining the difficulty of
dealing with a seemingly unending flow of human tragedy.
``We expect thousands more throughout the night,'' said Joanna Kotcher of
Mercy Corps International, the aid organisation that runs the vastly
overcrowded holding area beside the Blace checkpoint.
Some 6,500 were crammed into that area -- around three times its planned
capacity -- and Kotcher said as many as 9,000 could spend the night there.
``We don't have tents for everybody, but it's a warm night...and we have
ample blankets,'' she told Reuters.
New arrivals were being led down a mud path to the camp, where they would
probably sleep on plastic sheeting and some on foam mattresses.
Around half a dozen empty buses were parked at Blace after many of Monday's
arrivals were taken to a still unfinished and already overflowing camp at
Cegrane in the west of the country where up to 17,000 refugees were crammed
in. Asked whether the latest refugees would also be taken there, Redmond
said: ``It's not clear what we are going to do.''
Monday's arrivals -- by far the busiest day since the start of April when as
many as 68,000 people were stranded at the border in horrific conditions
after fleeing what the West says is a Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing --
coincided with a visit by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Macedonia.
Blair toured the biggest camp at Stankovic outside Skopje and saw for
himself the crush at Blace, just a stone's throw from Kosovo, defying advice
from aid workers that he could be an easy target for a Serb sniper if he
went there.
Refugees and aid workers said many of Monday's arrivals had spent weeks in
the Bajgora mountains after heavy fighting in the area and had reached the
capital by tractor. At Pristina station, a couple of hundred men were
separated from the women, the first time that had happened in the capital,
they said.
Those arriving on the first train on Monday ``were in the worst shape I've
seen because we had people that were shot...a lot of war wounded...We had
people shot, hand grenade injuries,'' Kotcher said.
``There were no men at all, only women and children. I know a lot of the
women had been raped,'' she said, citing reports from refugees.
Monday night's arrivals did not appear to follow the same pattern as there
were men among the crowd.
A steady stream of refugees has flowed into Blace over the past week,
stretching Macedonia's nine camps and holding centres way beyond capacity
and raising fears of a disease epidemic. UNHCR has repeatedly called for new
camps to be built.
NATO said on Monday it planned to build camps in Albania for 160,000
refugees, including up to 60,000 from Macedonia.
Macedonia is reluctant to take in many more refugees, fearing it will
destroy its economy and disrupt its own fragile ethnic mix, and prefers to
have the refugees taken to third countries. But airlifts have so far lagged
behind the UNHCR's target of 2,000 refugees a day.
UNHCR said that there were now more than 83,000 refugees crammed into
bursting refugee camps and some 93,000 more living with ethnic kin in
Macedonia. A total of 24,858 refugees have been airlifted out to date.
====================================================
Think-tank blasts NATO strategy in Kosovo
03:02 p.m May 03, 1999 Eastern
By Paul Taylor
LONDON, May 4 (Reuters) - NATO's ``air strikes only'' strategy emboldened
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to defy the West and may prove
inadequate to achieve Western political goals in Kosovo, a leading strategic
think-tank said on Tuesday.
In its annual ``Strategic Survey,'' the respected International Institute
for Strategic Studies said: ``While the operation against Serbia could
clearly damage Serbian military power, the value of air power as an
instrument to force diplomatic compliance was shown to be limited.''
The West's reluctance to send a fighting force on the ground encouraged
Milosevic to adopt ``a hedgehog strategy'': taking air strikes in the hope
NATO would not wish to destroy Serbian assets to the extent that the local
balance of power would shift entirely to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA),
it said.
The Serbian strongman was betting he could survive the air strikes, despite
the damage to his military, and that the West would be unable to ram an
autonomy agreement for Kosovo down his throat.
The London-based institute said that faced with the choice between losing
control over the southern province peacefully through the Rambouillet peace
plan drafted by the international community or by war, ``predictably, he
chose violence.''
``Had diplomats told Milosevic that force would be used to assure Kosovo's
independence, and managed to convince him that the West had both the will
and capacity to do this, he might have preferred the softer diplomatic
outcome offered at Rambouillet,'' it said.
NATO continues to oppose independence for the 1.8 million ethnic Albanians
in Kosovo because of the precedent in changing borders and fears of a domino
effect elsewhere in the Balkans.
``Unless the threat of force is coupled with a promise to deliver a less
attractive political outcome than that promised by diplomacy alone,
dictators will often prefer to play poker with the West's military
machine,'' the IISS said.
The use of air power alone had not induced Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to
allow the return of United Nations arms inspectors to Baghdad, it noted, and
dropping bombs on Yugoslavia would hardly inspire Milosevic to sign the
Rambouillet Accords ``when the facts of war might produce other, more useful
options.''
The survey attributed earlier failures to settle the Kosovo question partly
to Western short-sightedness, reacting to each crisis in former Yugoslavia
as it flared without adopting a broader approach to stabilising the region,
and partly to the reluctance of the United States to commit ground troops.
In a world with a peerless United States as the only one global superpower,
a rapidly rusting Russia and a still inchoate Europe, ``regional conflict
will remain configured by the presence or absence of an American will to
intervene,'' it said.
In Kosovo, Washington long gave Milosevic the impression that it was not
prepared to dispatch troops to impose peace.
A U.S. decision to sub-contract to private security firms its contribution
to the Kosovo Verification Mission deployed last year under the aegis of the
Organisation for Security and Cooperation reinforced that impression, the
IISS said.
Despite the war over Kosovo and the resulting increased threat to the
stability of neighbouring Macedonia and Albania, the ``Strategic Survey''
noted a series of positive developments in southeastern Europe.
It cited political reform and the avoidance of ethnic strife in Romania and
Bulgaria, the containment of Greek-Turkish rivalry and a widespread
willingness to subordinate nationalism to the goal of integrating into
European institutions.
However, it said the West must recognise that Milosevic ``and the other
dictators who have risen from the ashes of Yugoslavia by playing on
nationalist feelings and economic frustration'' are part of the problem, not
a stepping stone to a solution, and that any deal with them was bound to
fail.
While the Balkans would not return to their turn-of-the-century role as
``Europe's powder-keg...the region could revert to its traditional role as
Europe's periphery, a zone which is theoretically part of the continent,
almost ready to integrate but, somehow, still not making it.''
============================================================================
========
Britain pledges more refugee aid to Macedonia
By Associated Press, 05/03/99 15:36
BRAZDA, Macedonia (AP) - Britain will double its aid for Kosovo refugees in
Macedonia and will not be swayed from efforts to ''defeat the policies of
ethnic cleansing,'' the British prime minister promised Monday.
During a visit to Macedonia's largest refugee camp, Tony Blair said Britain
would increase its refugee aid contributions to $64 million, and take in
more ethnic Albanians fleeing the southern Yugoslav province. He did not
name a specific number of refugees.
Blair also insisted that Britain will not back off its ''commitment of
defeating the policy of ethnic cleansing.''
''This is not the battle for NATO. This is not a battle for territory,'' he
said during a stop in a camp of about 35,000 people about six miles north of
the capital, Skopje. ''This is a battle for humanity. It is a just cause
that is a rightful cause.''
Blair's visit was seen as a part of NATO's efforts to avoid any discord
between the Western alliance and Macedonia's coalition government, which is
under pressure from the refugee onslaught and groups opposed to NATO's
growing presence in the country.
Overwhelmed with a refugee tide that shows no signs of abating, Macedonia
has appealed for greater Western assistance to ease the burden.
More than 170,000 refugees are presently in Macedonia, according to U.N.
officials. But the Macedonian government claims the figure has surpassed
210,000 - about a tenth of the population of the entire country.
Many members of Macedonia's Slavic majority fear the refugee influx could
upset the country's demographic balance. Ethnic Albanians made up about a
third of the population before the arrival of the Kosovo refugees.
Macedonia is also a key point in the Western military buildup in the region.
About 15,000 NATO troops are stationed in this tiny Balkan nation. It could
be a crucial staging area in the event of ground intervention in Kosovo.
Blair planned to hold talks with Macedonia's prime minister, Ljubco
Georgievski, and President Kiro Gligorov.
He was later to travel to Romania, where he was expected to underline his
commitment to security in the troubled Balkans
============================================================================
=======
FOCUS-Albania to take 60,000 refugees from Macedonia
11:33 a.m. May 03, 1999 Eastern
By Rolf Soderlind
TIRANA, May 3 (Reuters) - NATO said on Monday it planned to build camps for
another 160,000 Kosovo refugees, including up to 60,000 displaced ethnic
Albanians from neighbouring Macedonia.
British Lieutenant-General John Reith, commander of the NATO Albania Force
for Humanitarian Assistance (AFOR), said he was looking for sites in Albania
where Kosovo refugees from Macedonia could be put.
``I am estimating at the moment...but we are looking to see if we can build
camps for about 60,000,'' Reith told a news conference.
``But if we do not need to fill those with people from Macedonia, clearly we
will fill them with people coming to Albania from other directions.''
Some 400,000 refugees, driven out by Serb forces, have crossed into Albania
since NATO started air strikes against Yugoslavia in March.
But while Albanians have welcomed their brethren from Kosovo with open
arms -- more than 260,000 refugees are being housed by Albanian families --
the influx into Macedonia could disturb that nation's own delicate ethnic
mix.
``We are looking at what is available now to see if we could move a certain
number of refugees almost immediately'' from Macedonia, Reith said.
``It would be a limited number but at least a gesture of intent for the
Macedonian government to show that the Albanian government is willing to
take people.''
Macedonia, which now has more than 170,000 refugees from Kosovo, has
repeatedly warned that its economy is struggling with the constant flow of
displaced ethnic Albanians.
``Clearly we will also be asking the Macedonian government to have a degree
of patience while we build these camps because we do not have the space to
take these people for the moment,'' Reith said.
``In the meantime we will built camps as fast as we can.''
While figures were only estimates, Reith said NATO was building sites for
100,000 more refugees in addition to accommodating up to 60,000 from
Macedonia.
One site under consideration for refugees from Macedonia was the
southeastern Albanian town of Korce, where NATO is building a camp for 9,000
displaced persons.
Reith said he now had 7,000 troops in AFOR, whose tasks include improving
the flow of aid into the country from Tirana airport and the port of Durres
in addition to building camps.
Tirana airport -- which originally only took eight flights a day -- now had
peaks of 80 flights daily, he said.
NATO soldiers were also going to improve pot-holed roads leading from the
airport to Tirana and the often single-lane road from the northern town of
Kukes, where most refugees were coming across from Kosovo.
============================================================================
=
FOCUS-Macedonia faces refugee crisis as Blair visits
10:11 a.m. May 03, 1999 Eastern
By Jeremy Gaunt
BLACE, Macedonia, May 3 (Reuters)- A surprise night train from Kosovo pushed
Macedonia's refugee crisis to the brink on Monday as some 11,000 ethnic
Albanians, many of them women and children, backed up at the main border
crossing and camps across the country overflowed.
The U.N.'s refugee agency UNHCR said 2,000 people had arrived during the
night, adding to the 5,000 who were already camped out in a temporary
holding centre at the Blace checkpoint between Macedonia and Kosovo.
Morning brought a second train and a number of buses to add 4,000 more to
the crowd shortly before British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived for a
visit to Macedonia.
He was due to meet British soldiers and get a first-hand assessment of the
refugee crisis.
``We had the first train since the big crisis weekend,'' UNHCR spokeswoman
Paula Ghedini told Reuters, referring to the start of April when as many as
68,000 people were stranded at the border in horrific conditions after
fleeing what the West says is a Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
A couple of thousand of the bedraggled new arrivals, most way overdressed
for the sweltering heat, streamed across the checkpoint and down a mud path
to the Blace holding camp.
``We are seeing a lot of people who are passing out from the heat,'' Ghedini
said.
She said aid groups would try to move as many as possible of the refugees to
Cegrane, a new but already overflowing camp in western Macedonia where
thousands have had to sleep with blankets and sleeping bags on plastic
sheeting.
``We will put them at Cegrane, which is still being built, and many will
have to sleep in the open again,'' Ghedini said. ``What we've seen is that
in three days (Cegrane's population) has gone up to 17,000,'' she added.
At least 12 buses, each crammed with 80 to 100 people, were seen leaving the
border area and seven empty buses were waiting to take more refugees away.
Earlier, the buses blocked the way for water trucks trying to fill up two
large yellow tanks beside the road which supply water to the Blace holding
camp. ``If that water runs out, there will be a riot,'' one aid worker said.
Ghedini said several of hundred refugees had also crossed at Jazince, a
mountainous crossing northwest of Skopje on Monday.
The night train had come from the Kosovo capital Pristina and most people on
board had come from around the northern Kosovo town of Podujevo. They had
spent weeks in the Bajgora mountains after heavy fighting in the area and
many had reached the capital by tractor.
At Pristina station, a couple of hundred men were separated from the
women -- the first time that had happened in the capital, refugees and aid
workers said. Some 70 percent of people aboard the train were women and
children.
One mother said she had walked from Podujevo to Pristina in a journey that
took seven hours because of a long line of tractors.
Another woman from the village of Bradas clutched a five-week-old baby boy
who had been born in the mountains. She said Kosovo Liberation Army
guerrillas had given it the name Flakron, which means ``shining metal.''
A steady stream of refugees has flowed into Blace over the past week,
stretching Macedonia's nine camps and holding centres way beyond capacity
and raising fears of a disease epidemic. UNHCR has repeatedly called for new
camps to be built.
Macedonia is reluctant to take in many more refugees, fearing it will
destroy its economy and disrupt the country's own fragile ethnic mix, and
prefers to have the refugees taken to third countries. But airlifts have so
far lagged behind the UNHCR's target of 2,000 refugees a day.
Germany, which has already taken more Kosovo refugees than any other
country, said it would be willing to double the number to 20,000.
NATO sources in Skopje said the alliance was in discussions with Albania to
build a new camp in that country and that some of Macedonia's refugees might
go there.
UNHCR said that there were now more than 83,000 refugees crammed into
bursting refugee camps and some 93,000 more living with ethnic kin in
Macedonia. A total of 24,858 refugees have been airlifted out to date.
=================================================================
Life is one long queue for refugees in Macedonia
07:32 a.m. May 03, 1999 Eastern
By Elisaveta Konstantinova
STANKOVIC, Macedonia, May 3 (Reuters) - Time stands still in Macedonia's
Stankovic camp where Kosovan refugees have little to do, except queue -- for
water, food, washing, latrines and to apply for temporary asylum abroad.
Conditions in Stankovic, located near the capital Skopje, resemble those of
camps in parts of Africa, overstretched aid officials as they scramble to
cope with the flood of people still pouring over the border into Macedonia.
The arrivals have swelled this camp, Macedonia's biggest, to the size of a
fair-sized Balkan town, with 53,000 people crammed into small tents with no
electricity and scant sanitation.
They are the relatively lucky ones. Lack of space has forced many to sleep
rough, in temperatures which plummet overnight after sweltering highs in the
day.
Many of the faces in Stankovic can be seen on the streets of any European
city. They include nurses, teachers, clerks and car mechanics -- and all
have a horror story to tell.
``My house has burned down. I have a family of 18 and I have no place to go
back to,'' 43-year-old Caohi Musa, whose village near Gniljane was shelled
by Serbian troops, told Reuters.
Like thousands of others, Suzanna Nazifi, a 22-year-old school teacher from
Pristina, fled by train.
``Police took over our house when a bomb hit the police headquarters in
Pristina four weeks ago. We had 10 minutes to pack and go...Everything I own
is left there. I do not know what happened to my books, my
souvenirs...everything,'' she said.
``We will go back when all this is over,'' she said. ``We did not want to
leave, our life is there,'' said Suzanna's mother Fahir, a nurse.
A spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) Ron Redmond explained that
the first step of any programme to return the refugees to Kosovo was to set
up a registration database of where they had come from.
But many people had their identification papers seized before leaving
Kosovo, which would hamper the process.
For now though, the UNHCR's priority is to accommodate the thousands of
refugees, some of whom are to be airlifted to western nations in a bid to
relieve the overflowing camps.
The UNHCR originally wanted the refugees to stay as close to home as
possible, but the sheer scale of the problem, and the fears of disease and
ethnic tensions this brings, has forced the agency to urge western nations
to airlift people out.
Some 20,000 are due to be airlifted to the United States, another 10,000 in
Germany while more than 30,000 have already been airlifted to France, Norway
and Turkey.
==========================================================================
Macedonia says it fears unrest over economic woes
09:07 p.m May 02, 1999 Eastern
LONDON, May 3 (Reuters) - Macedonian Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski was
quoted on Monday as expressing fears of civil unrest if the West failed to
ease his country's economic woes resulting from the Kosovo crisis.
Georgievski told Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper in an interview that he
was concerned Western aid might not be sufficient.
``We will see what emerges from (this month's) donors' summit in Paris, but
we certainly need substantial compensation,'' he said.
The Daily Telegraph said Georgievski signalled a marginal softening of his
country's stance on whether its territory could be used for a ground
offensive into Kosovo.
It quoted him as reaffirming policy that Macedonia would not serve as a
launching pad for an invasion, but adding that any NATO request for a change
of heart would be put to parliament -- subject to assurances on the aims of
such an offensive and the involvement of other Balkan states.
Georgievski expressed frustration at Western criticism of Macedonia's
handling of the influx of refugees from Kosovo.
``Despite doing more than any other state in Europe, we constantly get
criticism instead of praise,'' he said.
``Now we have 200,000 (refugees) and again we're reproached. We have nine
camps, their occupants amount to 10 percent of our population and we are
criticised by countries that have not even taken 1,000.''
===========================================================
Macedonia says it fears unrest over economic woes
09:07 p.m May 02, 1999 Eastern
LONDON, May 3 (Reuters) - Macedonian Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski was
quoted on Monday as expressing fears of civil unrest if the West failed to
ease his country's economic woes resulting from the Kosovo crisis.
Georgievski told Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper in an interview that he
was concerned Western aid might not be sufficient.
``We will see what emerges from (this month's) donors' summit in Paris, but
we certainly need substantial compensation,'' he said.
The Daily Telegraph said Georgievski signalled a marginal softening of his
country's stance on whether its territory could be used for a ground
offensive into Kosovo.
It quoted him as reaffirming policy that Macedonia would not serve as a
launching pad for an invasion, but adding that any NATO request for a change
of heart would be put to parliament -- subject to assurances on the aims of
such an offensive and the involvement of other Balkan states.
Georgievski expressed frustration at Western criticism of Macedonia's
handling of the influx of refugees from Kosovo.
``Despite doing more than any other state in Europe, we constantly get
criticism instead of praise,'' he said.
``Now we have 200,000 (refugees) and again we're reproached. We have nine
camps, their occupants amount to 10 percent of our population and we are
criticised by countries that have not even taken 1,000.''
==================================================================
Blair Says Kosovo War ''Just,'' Offers Aid
Reuters
03-MAY-99
STANKOVIC, Macedonia - British Prime Minister Tony Blair tells ethnic
Albanian refugees in Macedonia the West will do everything it can to get
them back home to Kosovo and that the war against ethnic cleansing was
"just."
Striding into Macedonia's largest refugee camp to chants of "Tony, Tony"
from young refugees gathered to meet him, Blair said Britain was doubling
its aid to the poor Balkan country to help it cope with the massive influx
from Kosovo.
"We will do everything we can to make sure that these people, these innocent
people, are allowed to go back to Kosovo, to their homes, their towns, their
villages," he told reporters after meeting a group of refugees in their
tents.
But he kept his strongest words to reiterate Britain's and NATO's intention
to stop what he said was Yugoslavia's "appalling policy of ethnic cleansing
and racial genocide."
"That commitment is total," he said. "This is not a battle for NATO. This is
not a battle for territory. It is a battle for humanity. It is a just
cause."
He later told reporters at Blace, a border post within a stone's throw of
Kosovo, "We must redouble our commitment to these people. We began this
action because we refuse to allow a policy of ethnic cleansing and racial
genocide to be carried out and succeed here ... on the doorstep of the
European Union."
Blair, the leading hawk in NATO's six-week-old campaign of air strikes
against Yugoslavia, was on a half-day whistle-stop tour to the frontline
state, seeking to shore up the coun air strikes against Yugoslavia, was on a
half-day whistle-stop tour to the frontline state, seeking to shore up the
coun try's support for NATO as it creaks under the strain of housing nearly
200,000 refugees.
"We must give all the help that we can to the Macedonian government in this
difficult situation," he said. "We are doubling the amount of British aid
that we will give from 20 to 40 million pounds ($32 million to $64
million)."
He told reporters after meeting Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski that
Britain was also pledging more bilateral aid, although he did not give a
figure.
He praised Macedonia's efforts to build a multi-ethnic democracy,
contrasting it with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's "dictatorship
that in the end will be defeated."
Blair, whose aides had struggled to keep reporters contained as he entered
the camp, was mobbed by refugees who greeted him with delight. Wearing an
open-neck blue shirt in the stifling heat, Blair shared high-fives and
handshakes with refugees and aid workers.
He sat with his wife Cherie in the tent of 22-year-old teacher Suzanna
Snizifi from Pristina and asked her about her journey to Stankovic.
"I couldn't believe when they told me that Tony Blair would visit my tent,"
she told Reuters. "We are so grateful for everything they (the West) are
doing for us."
She said she told Blair that her family had been forced by police to leave
their home after a bomb had hit the next door police station and been given
10 minutes to get out.
"He told us that he wishes us all to reunite in a happy and free Kosovo,"
she said.
============================================================
Trains Increase Refugee Flood into Macedonia
Reuters
03-MAY-99
BLACE, Macedonia (Reuters) - Macedonia's refugee crisis swelled Monday when
a series of unexpected train arrivals swamped the main border crossing with
Kosovo, bringing thousands of ethnic Albanians from an area north of the
provincial capital Pristina, aid workers said.
Three trains arrived at the main Blace border crossing into Macedonia in
less than 24 hours, including the first night train since early April. The
trains disgorged refugees at a rate that aid workers could barely handle.
"Three trains in one day is unprecedented. It looks like they are working
overtime to try to clear the area north of Pristina," Ron Redmond, spokesman
for U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, told Reuters. He said the three trains
totaled about 9,000 refugees.
Refugees and aid workers said many of Monday's arrivals spent weeks in the
Bajgora mountains after heavy fighting in the area and reached the capital
by tractor.
Those arriving on the first train "were in the worst shape I've seen because
we had people that were shot ... a lot of war wounded ... We had people
shot, hand grenade injuries," Joanna Kotcher of the aid group, Mercy Corps
International. "There were no men at all, only women and children. I know a
lot of the women had been raped," she said, citing reports from refugees.
Aid workers expected more arrivals overnight.
Some 6,500 were crammed into a holding area next to the Blace checkpoint --
triple its planned capacity. "We don't have tents for everybody, but it's a
warm night ... and we have ample blankets," she told Reuters.
New arrivals were led down a mud path to the camp, where they would probably
sleep on plastic sheets or foam mattresses.
Monday's arrivals -- by far the busiest day since the start of April when as
many as 68,000 people were stranded at the border in horrific conditions
after fleeing what the West call a Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing --
coincided with a visit by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Macedonia.
Blair toured the biggest camp at Stankovic outside Skopje and saw for
himself the crush at Blace, just a stone's throw from Kosovo. He defied
advice from aid workers that he could be an easy target for a Serb sniper if
he went there.
A steady stream of refugees has flowed into Blace over the past week,
stretching Macedonia's nine camps and holding centers way beyond capacity
and raising fears of a disease epidemic.
UNHCR has repeatedly called for new camps to be built. NATO said Monday it
planned to build camps in Albania for 160,000 refugees, including up to
60,000 from Macedonia
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Macedonia's Nowhere Land
In Refugee Camps, No Place to Go, Nothing to Do
By R. Jeffrey Smith and Anne Swardson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 3, 1999; Page A01
BRAZDA, Macedonia-Five weeks after thousands of Kosovo Albanians began
arriving here in a quest for safety and shelter, daily life in Macedonia's
largest refugee camp has settled into a numbing routine of boredom and
despair.
A visitor approaching the unsmiling Macedonian guards at the front gate is
met first by the sharp odors emitted by hundreds of overflowing latrines and
as many as 28,000 refugees who have not bathed in a month.
Inside the overcrowded camp, built in a few hours on farmland as a temporary
holding site for thousands of Kosovo Albanians, all the defects of an
unplanned city are instantly on display. Lice are commonplace, rodents make
nightly visits to the garbage areas, and everything that might make living
comfortable seems to be missing or in extremely short supply.
Thousands of tents, aligned in hundreds of rows, stretch as far as the eye
can see down the flat landscape, all fenced in by seven-foot-high chicken
wire. Waiting in line often occupies much of the refugees' day. People begin
lining up at 4 a.m. for the daily ration of food, which is distributed at 8
a.m. It can take hours to make an outside call on one of the six cellular
phones available.
Other lines form at the medical tents and at the tables where people
register to be transported to refugee camps being established in other
countries. Small children in ragged clothes line up to try to kick a soccer
ball through a cardboard goal.
A handful of shops sell plastic sandals, green onions and cans of
Coca-Cola -- all at prices that few refugees can afford. Most refugees are
penniless, their money taken from them by Yugoslav troops, Serbian police or
paramilitary units as they fled their homes and headed for Kosovo's southern
border.
Mathematicians, doctors, engineers, shopkeepers, salesmen, lawyers, students
and housewives wake up each day to an existence that provides no opportunity
for expression, creativity or individuality. Every day has the same low
point -- making do with a ration of sardines or canned tuna -- and the same
high point, the 6 p.m. posting of a list of those who will be leaving for a
third country.
"It is an art to stop thinking here, and a problem to think too much," said
Mufail Limani, 40, a writer. "There is no object for thinking, nothing
concrete. Just some illusions, some hope, some fictional things."
After five weeks in a virtual prison with no knowledge of how long their
sentences will last, everyone at the camp "has lost perspective," said
Selman Llap, 50, a coffee salesman from the Kosovo capital, Pristina, who
spends his afternoons seated with 60 other men on a thin edge of concrete
that juts out from the sole permanent structure here, a blue metal shed
surrounded by mud. "They don't know about their future. Just pay attention
to their faces. No one is laughing."
The Brazda camp was erected by NATO troops and then turned over to the U.N.
High Commissioner for Refugees and Catholic Relief Services. Its population
is more than five times what aid workers say is the optimal size for
efficient, humane housing of refugees; its density is three times what
international standards specify.
Instead of a temporary transit camp, it has become the only home that its
residents are likely to know during the summer -- and perhaps autumn and
winter. Only a small fraction are being airlifted elsewhere, with their
places in tents refilled each day -- and then some -- by thousands of new
arrivals.
[More than 25,000 refugees have been flown out of the seven refugee camps in
Macedonia over the past two weeks, but Kosovo Albanians keep arriving at a
greater rate -- most expelled from the province by Serb-led Yugoslav forces,
all fearing for their lives. On Sunday, more than 5,000 crossed the border,
swelling the total in Macedonia to 185,000, according to the U.N. refugee
agency.]
The overcrowding at the camps is sowing tensions that have already provoked
scuffles in food lines and at tables where refugees can register for
third-country transfers. U.N. relief officials have been trying for weeks to
open new camps, but Macedonian officials have moved slowly, and those now in
the works are not large enough to accommodate the overflow. Worried
officials at the World Health Organization anticipate outbreaks of hepatitis
and tuberculosis and have stepped up testing.
No one at the Brazda camp has any privacy. Ismet Zeka, 48, a high school
teacher from the Kosovo town of Gnjilane, says he tries to sleep each
evening atop a thin slab of foam on the floor of a tent shared by 60 other
refugees from 11 families. Twenty-five are children, and at least a few cry
each night. "At night, it's very cold, and during the day it's very hot,"
Zeka said. "We need more food for the children. You cannot even get close to
the toilets for the terrible smell."
His wife Zana, also a high school teacher, said she no longer has the
willpower to leave the tent during the day. "When I go out, I get so
depressed and worried. . . . I cannot see all this misery," she said. "Every
day we have new information from someone new who comes from Gnjilane. But we
don't have any optimistic news. The only hope we have is that NATO will
increase the bombing" and bring the conflict to an end.
A few weeks ago, when the camp's population was half what it is now, French,
Italian and British soldiers helped distribute food throughout the day to
anyone who wanted it. Now food is given each morning to those bearing a
green card that entitles the holder to rations. This morning, Xhevat Musliu,
33, waited with his sister to collect the following to feed 11 people in his
family for the day: 11 bananas, one jar of baby food, eight cans of
sardines, three wheels of cheese, three liters of milk, three liters of
fruit juice and 11 large loaves of bread.
The diet of canned fish has been the same for weeks now, thanks to what can
only be considered excessive generosity by one or more relief organizations
in Norway. "I will never eat sardines again," Musliu said, imagining the day
when he leaves the camp. Many refugees say they spend scarce money to buy
local green onions, which add some diversity to their diet.
At a tent where the International Catholic Migration Commission offers free
telephone calls to those desperate to reconnect with distant or separated
relatives, the wait is two hours. At that, callers get only three minutes'
phone time, whether or not the party they are calling is home. If they want
to try again, they have to go to the end of the line. The wait for water at
one of the camp's two distribution stations -- only one is open at a time --
can also be hours.
There is very little soap, said Shah Vitia, 27, and women must share a few
plastic tubs for washing clothes or their babies. There was one tub for each
when Vitia arrived here a month ago, but now there is less of everything,
she said. "I am so embarrassed when I meet people from outside," said Ali
Maqedonci, 38. "We live like dogs."
One place where there is almost no line is the latrines. There are portable
toilets, but refugees say they have not been emptied. This is not true, said
Paula Ghedini, a spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency. The toilets are
emptied, she said; they just fill up again too quickly.
Whereas a desirable standard would be to have one toilet for every 10
people, Brazda and other camps often have one per 100 people. This includes
makeshift latrines, or stalls made of tarpaulin wrapped around posts. Many
people find a spot elsewhere.
"In my apartment, I had two bathrooms; I can't believe I am in this
position," said Enver Byrrniku, 44, who was the manager of a sales company
in his home town of Kacanik, near the border. He is here with his wife, four
daughters and mother.
Near a bulletin board at the Brazda camp where posters list the names of
families missing children and children missing families, a crowd gathers
quickly when passersby hear a resident complaining about their daily rigors.
"There is not enough medicine. I cannot go out and buy the medicines my
mother needs for her heart condition," said one man. "We don't even have
minimal conditions for living."
Rexhep Krasniqi, 47, an electrical engineer from Pristina wearing a Los
Angeles Raiders cap to shield his face from the sun, pushed through the
throng to voice a common suspicion that only those with connections to
powerful people or those who still have money are being evacuated.
Ghedini said there is little the refugee agency can do to improve
conditions, because Macedonia is poor and the government here is reluctant
to open any new camps. "We are trying to avoid having people who are
traumatized put into these overcrowded camps," she said. "Emotionally, it's
a huge trauma."
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