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 | PAGE 1, 2
Leka says that Serbian police broke into a warehouse where humanitarian organizations had been storing food, supplies and vehicles and stole six U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights four-wheel drive vehicles, in which they're now driving around Kosovo, confusing Kosovo Albanians, who think when they see the familiar white UNHCR vehicles that it might be desperately needed international humanitarian relief workers inside, rather than killers. He said he's also seen Serbian police and paramilitaries driving around Pristina in two Children's Aid Direct vehicles. That story sends chills down the spines of those familiar with the Bosnian war. In July 1995, Bosnian Serbian forces told thousands of people fleeing the fallen U.N. safe haven of Srebrenica that they were Red Cross humanitarian workers. At that beacon of hope, Bosnian Muslim refugees came out of their hiding places in the forests, and subsequently some 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men were slaughtered in the single worst massacre in Europe since the Holocaust. In a voice so low I had to ask him to repeat it, Leka said he knows what he's going to do in his new life as a refugee. "I am going to run guns for the Kosovo Liberation Army." This is a man who's more accustomed to humanitarian aid work than handling weapons, and one who seems to be adeptly minding the children single-handedly while trying to locate his wife. While most of the Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers have come from Kosovo's rural and village populations, particularly from the central Kosovo farming region called Drenica, Leka is urban professional through and through. But the experience of being helpless to protect one's family in the face of death from Serbian police and paramilitaries seems to have created a resolve in Leka to be prepared to protect his own and support those who are protecting his people. People like Leka say that they ultimately don't trust anybody but the KLA to protect the Kosovars in the future -- not NATO, not the Macedonians, nobody else. He says that NATO has made a mess of the bombing. Watching the crowd of refugees arriving, day and night, old and young, peasants and city dwellers, all reduced to the same basic human needs -- warmth, water, food and shelter -- one begins to feel witness to something like a natural disaster -- a flood or a hurricane or an earthquake. Human beings seem terribly fragile, fully mortal, when their well-being depends on escaping black-masked thugs with police badges and scary firearms, appealing to the mercy of border guards growing hostile to the constantly arriving people and the generosity of distant relatives. Each family, each stray child, is hoping against hope that his or her whole family makes it out, that those left behind will be reunited with them sometime in the future, that the violence will spare them. All have the look of awareness, gained at some point on the long journey out of Kosovo, that life will never be the same. Late in the day, Leka's wife finally made it over the border to Macedonia to join her family.
Laura Rozen is covering the Kosovo crisis from Macedonia for Salon. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here. |
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