Main Page

Publications

Photo Essays

Links

How You Can Help

Russian

HRW Home

Today's scenes of desperate refugees pouring out of Kosovo, thousands by the hour, should come as no surprise. These people are not fleeing NATO's bombs. They're fleeing the troops of Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, and his campaign to murder or forcibly expel the ethnic Albanians from their homeland.

Given Milosevic's history as a serial "ethnic cleanser," it's remarkable that the Clinton administration appears not to have anticipated the tragedy. The U.S. evidently made no plans to stop the war crimes now underway in Kosovo. Reports from Kosovo are still sketchy, but if the atrocities are as serious as some reports suggest, putting an end to them must be the first priority of US policy.

At the same time, the administration appears to have done nothing to prepare for the humanitarian catastrophe of the refugees. Refugee relief agencies had little or no advance warning of the bombing, and are now belatedly scrambling to get operations underway. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has been under 24-hour alert for the last two weeks in case of a Balkans crisis, but officials there expected only 100,000 refugees. Now their planning figures have jumped to 350,000.

The administration needs a short-term and a long-term strategy for dealing with the refugee crisis. In the short-term, an all-out emergency assistance program must be launched, to provide food, shelter, and medicine to the exhausted refugees. At a meeting of major donors yesterday, UNHCR said it had less than a third of the $168 million it needs for the former Yugoslavia and Albania. The U.S. pledged $8.5 million over the weekend -- a paltry sum that must be increased.

It is absolutely critical that refugees be registered on arrival and provided with documentary proof that they came from Yugoslavia. The Serb police have been destroying the IDs, passports, and even car license plates of the ethnic Albanians on the move, obviously to deny them re-entry once the war is over. Logistically, UNHCR and other aid groups may not be able to issue a document to every refugee. But every effort must be made to thwart this despicable tactic in the "ethnic cleansing" campaign.

Finally, investigators for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia should undertake a major effort to document acts of genocide and war crimes for future prosecutions. They should be present among the refugees, taking down testimonies before witnesses slip away.

In the long-term, of course, the refugees need to go home. But people will go back when they feel that their rights will be protected as well as their lives. And the ethnic Albanians are never going to feel secure in the presence of Serbian security forces -- it will take a major international presence to accomplish that.

Yet the "stabilization" troops in Bosnia, although they have managed to establish an uneasy peace, have not been able to persuade many refugees to return to their native villages. The atmosphere of mutual suspicion may take years to dispel, and there's no easy solution to that problem.

Prosecuting and punishing the people who committed the greatest atrocities in Bosnia, and now in Kosovo, must be part of the solution. America's long-term strategy in the Balkans must include a more aggressive posture on indicting and arresting war criminals. If the troops in Bosnia had arrested Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, the top leaders of the Serb offensive who were indicted by the war crimes tribunal, maybe their friend in Belgrade would have gotten the message, too. Milosevic must be made to understand, once and for all, that punishment will follow this crime.

The U.S. must not replicate the 1994 Rwanda disaster, when the West poured money into refugee camps long after the slaughter abated. Caring for refugees is not a substitute for stopping the abuses that prompted their flight in the first place. And vowing to support justice in the future is not a substitute for a real strategy to stop these crimes now.

Fred Abrahams, South Balkans Researcher, Human Rights Watch