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The World Has Failed the Kosovo Refugees By Rachael Reilly 04/09/99 "We were in our houses. It was Sunday. At 5 a.m. we heard a big blast, and saw flames from a distant part of the village. We all went out of our houses. People came running up to us and said `leave -- save yourselves -- they are shooting people, you must flee.' We had a tractor, we drove to the border, 45 of us on the tractor. As we passed through the village, there were Serb policemen in the center. They said: `Go, leave, go to Albania, don't return.' They were wearing green camouflage uniforms. At the border, they took our documents, passports, ID cards. They ripped them up. There are no people left in the village." -- Testimony of a 50-year-old female refugee from what was once a 2,000-family village near Prizren, Kosovo, given to a Human Rights Watch representative in Albania. Half a million Kosovo Albanian refugees were brutalized by the Serb military as they were forced to leave their homes in circumstances often as tragic as the one above. As if that isn't bad enough, however, they're now being mistreated a second time by the governments of the international community -- with their belated and fumbling response to the ongoing refugee crisis. Until last Tuesday, for example, some 65,000 refugees were trapped for days in a muddy "no-man's land" at Blace, just inside Macedonia on the border with Kosovo. They had no shelter, humanitarian relief, or medical assistance. That night, they were forcibly cleared by the Macedonian authorities. Passports, blankets and clothing found at the empty site indicate that the refugees were removed in haste, probably by force. The families were not registered prior to their departure, no efforts were made to allow family groups to board buses together, and no proper records were kept to facilitate family reunification. Our representative in Skopje, Macedonia reports that 10,000 refugees remain unaccounted for. On Wednesday, the borders of both Macedonia and Albania, the two primary exit points from Kosovo, were shut to Kosovar refugees fleeing Serb atrocities. The main border crossing into Albania at Morini was closed Wednesday by Yugoslav authorities. Meanwhile, on the Macedonian side, a Human Rights Watch researcher interviewing refugees in that country awoke Wednesday morning to find that the thousands of refugees who had been massing at the border to escape Kosovo had simply disappeared. International monitors subsequently received phone calls from refugees who said that Serbs had driven them back to the Kosovo capital, Pristina. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the number of people fleeing the carnage in Kosovo had totaled more than 620,000 by Wednesday, though, of course, the numbers do not tell the individual human stories of families forcibly separated, of people stripped of their rights, homes, possessions and dignity. Our researchers on the Macedonian and Albanian borders have heard heart-breaking testimony from refugees who were forced out, or fled, from burning villages and farms. The 20th Century should have taught us to anticipate refugee emergencies on this scale. At a minimum, given Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's bloody history, it was certainly possible to have predicted the humanitarian crisis that has unfolded in one of Europe's poorest regions. Yet the U.S. and NATO did little to alert relief agencies or prepare Kosovo's neighbors for the tremendous volume of desperate refugees escaping ethnic cleansing. Airlifts of relief supplies should have started as soon as the bombing did and convoys of vehicles should have been ready to transport fleeing refugees. From the beginning of the crisis, relief efforts in Albania and Macedonia have been severely hampered. Access for humanitarian agencies is restricted by the authorities and bureaucratic delays have interfered with delivery of emergency assistance. International relief staff were not given access to the "no-man's land" where thousands of refugees were held, and UNHCR has not been given a full mandate by Macedonia to process, register and care for the refugees. The refugees are exhausted and traumatized from their ordeal, and already there are fears of an imminent outbreak of meningitis. Only one foreign relief agency has been permitted to provide medical services in the border area, and a medical facility run by the International Medical Corps was recently shut down by the government. A major mistake that may later prevent refugees from returning home is the fact that they were not registered as they fled Kosovo. According to our interviews, Albanian border authorities only asked the drivers of tractors and other vehicles how many people were with them, making a rough tally of the inflow. Identification papers, license plates, and passports were often systematically stripped from refugees as they crossed the border; there are now nearly 300,000 people in Albania with no documentation, and no way of proving who they are or that they are bona fide refugees. The loss of documentation and property will pose long-term difficulties for refugees trying to show proof of identity and place of origin. Furthermore, the majority of refugees arriving in neighboring countries are women and children. There are reports that some refugee women were subjected to rape and sexual violence in Kosovo. These reports must be investigated and survivors of rape and sexual violence should be provided with appropriate medical and psycho-social assistance. In the coming days and weeks, refugees must not be held in a state of legal limbo. All those fleeing Kosovo have a valid fear of persecution and should be considered as bona fide refugees under the 1951 Refugee Convention. Full refugee protection under international refugee law should be provided to all evacuated refugees. Much remains unclear about what precisely has happened to the half-million refugees fleeing Kosovo. But what is clear is that the international community has failed them. This is not the first time we have seen a refugee emergency of massive proportions. The Vietnamese, Haitian and Rwandan refugees crises were also exacerbated by mishandling and the failure to provide adequate protection. Perhaps most worrying is that the U.S. and the international community seem incapable of learning from past mistakes. Which can mean only that they will be repeated.
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