A L S O+T O D A Y
Covering Kosovo like Monica Captives face trial
T A B L E+T A L K The new Ms.: Feminism redefined or glossy new packaging of the same old? Elaborate in the Politics area of Table Talk
R E C E N T L Y Arm the KLA? Limp Willy? "Pec is burning! Where are the ground troops?" Humanitarian enclave? Beginner's guide to the Balkans - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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Shades of Srebrenica
BY LAURA ROZEN | SKOPJE, Macedonia -- Town by town, village by village, they come. Thursday, it was Pristina's turn, as more than 3,000 residents of the Kosovo capital arrived by train at the Macedonian border and were herded into buses to take up new lives as refugees. Hundreds more snaked up the road in a long queue on the Serbian side of the Macedonian border, their winter coats dots of color in a swarm of humanity once more on the run from the brutality of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Begrudgingly, blue-uniformed Macedonian border guards let them in, treating each arrival to an individual long question-and-answer session at their blue glass-and-plastic border patrol booths, as if the thousands of people fleeing their homes were somehow suspected of some unspecified crime, rather than the victims of one -- genocide. Relatives of the new arrivals wait for them anxiously a few hundred meters in from the border, and trade information with other newly arrived refugees to locate missing friends and family members. An ethnic Albanian man from Skopje said he currently has 20 Kosovar relatives in his small apartment in the Macedonian capital, and he's prepared, if he has to, to take in more. Like him, hundreds of Macedonian Albanians have opened their modest homes to their refugee relatives, who have no idea whether they will return to Kosovo. Leka, a man who arrived from Pristina Wednesday, his face gaunt, his eyes watching his two little children playing on top of a hill near the border, scanned the crowd of arrivals from Pristina tensely, searching through the sea of familiar and unfamiliar faces for that of his wife. Macedonian police barked orders at the crowd, some of the women fainting with exhaustion, others crying from unknown traumas, still others anxious to be left alone, to move along from whatever horrors and grief they had left behind. Leka, in a sweater and jeans, looks and sounds to be from Pristina's well-educated middle-class community of professionals, many of whom have fled the city in recent days. Since the Kosovo conflict began last March, he's worked for a U.S. humanitarian aid organization. In good English he tells me that he personally saw three people killed on the street the day he left, including one woman more than 70 years old. He says the Serbian police are all wearing black face masks in Kosovo now, adding to the terror that is fueling this exodus. He says he had to pay Serbian police 200 deutsche marks to get out of the country (he has 3,000 more DM in his pants pockets, to help other family members get over the border), and that police confiscated one of his cars.
N E X T+P A G E+| Stolen United Nations vehicles fool desperate Kosovars - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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