"Better to be killed by the Serbs" Salon Fwd.

[Gar Lipow]

>From Salon magazine:(for those who think NATO is
the lesser evil, the "bleeding heart"
alternative.)

salon.com News April 6, 1999
URL:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/04/06/demick
"Better to be killed by the Serbs" 

NATO had spy photos of miles of refugees fleeing
Kosovo a week ago. Why weren't we prepared for the
disaster at the border? 
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Barbara Demick
The refreshments were carefully laid out on a
banquet table in Skopje's Continental Hotel. It
was Friday morning and the U.N. High Commissioner
for Refugees had summoned the diplomatic corps of
Macedonia to a brunch meeting to discuss the
emerging refugee crisis. Twelve miles away, in
Blace, the main border crossing from Kosovo into
Macedonia, there was little evidence of such
careful preparation.

Alongside the railroad tracks that lead from
Pristina runs a broad, green valley. Spilled into
that valley Friday were more people than I'd ever
seen in my life, a mass gathering to rival the
most extravagant David O. Selznick epic. There
were 50,000 Kosovo refugees, maybe 65,000 or more
-- too many for anybody to count -- and that
didn't include a column snaking back 20 miles from
inside Kosovo, all waiting to cross.

At least at first, the refugees were giddy with
relief to be in Macedonia. Most had been robbed,
shelled, shot at by snipers and half-starved by
the Serbs before being rounded up in trains and
trucks, then dumped ignominiously in the field at
Blace. But as the sun slunk behind the mountains
-- the darkening sky exuding a steady drizzle,
temperatures slipping into the 40s -- the horror
of their circumstances began to sink in. Panic
swept through the crowd. They pushed over one
another to grab woolen blankets tossed from a
cardboard box. But without tents, without even
plastic sheeting, the blankets would soon turn
soggy. Food rations consisted of bread and water,
and not enough of either. The refugees scrounged
the ground for used plastic bottles to fill from a
water tanker, turning to a none-too-clean stream
next to the tracks when the tanker ran dry. They
sheepishly looked for clumps of trees behind which
they could relieve themselves, but with Macedonian
soldiers wielding batons to cordon them into the
valley, the call of nature overpowered decorum. By
Saturday, the valley was filled with human
excrement.

Endeavoring to maintain order, the Macedonian
soldiers wanted to keep the journalists out of the
valley. So I watched from above with my
24-year-old translator, Alban, a university
student who had escaped Pristina himself two weeks
earlier. The refugees in this field of horrors had
come mostly from Pristina. Horrified, Alban
scanned this writhing sea of human misery for
familiar faces.

"I know these people. I used to see them in the
cafes. I can't explain to you. They used to wear
nice clothes. They looked cool. I can't recognize
people now. It is night and day," he struggled to
tell me.

It is a terrible thing to be a refugee, forced out
of one's home at gunpoint with no money or
belongings. It is quite another level of horror to
be dumped into a field of mud and shit and left to
forage like an animal for food and warmth. Where
were the tents? Where was the plastic sheeting?
Where was the food? Where were the portable
toilets? Where was the evidence that NATO, which
says it anticipated the mass displacement of
Kosovars that would begin with the bombing, had
prepared for this predictable humanitarian crisis?

"We are overwhelmed," pleaded Paula Ghedina, the
UNHCR's spokeswoman in Skopje. "The mechanisms
were set up for 2,000 to 3,000 people a day. We
were taken aback by the numbers."

But although it is possible that nobody imagined
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic would have
the chutzpah to empty out Pristina, a city of
350,000, so quickly, his campaign did not occur
without warning. By March 26, two days after the
NATO airstrikes were launched, NATO had reports
that tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians had
been kicked out of their homes in north and
central Kosovo. On March 31, spy satellites
detected up a column of refugees eight miles long
being marched out of Pristina. How could anyone
then claim to be surprised when those miles of
refugees poured over the border on the weekend?

More plausible is a cynical, not-for-attribution
explanation offered by another UNHCR official: 

"People have to see these images on television
before anybody cares. We did anticipate that up to
1 million people would come across the borders.
But if we had said a few weeks ago, we need $2
billion and all these C-130s (transport planes) we
would have been laughed at ... It is not until
people start dying that the world pays
attention."In Blace, 11 people died on Friday
night, another 14 on Saturday night. On Sunday,
NATO spokesman Jamie Shea announced that the
alliance was "mobilizing itself and mobilizing its
member nations" to help the refugees.

But the mobilization is still inadequate to meet
the need. As of midday Monday, the first refugees
-- some 90 lucky souls -- were scheduled to fly
out of Skopje on a Norwegian C-130. No other
flights had been scheduled.

"NATO gives the impression that all these tens of
thousands of people are winging their way to
safety to all these wonderfully welcoming
countries. That is simply not true. It will take
an enormous amount of time," said the UNHCR
official. "For NATO, until this weekend, the
humanitarian crisis wasn't on the radar screen."

Macedonia may be one of Europe's lesser known
countries, but it is hardly the end of the earth.
Skopje has a McDonald's, as well as ATM machines
where you can withdraw cash from your U.S. bank
account. There is an international airport, with
direct flights from Vienna and Zurich, only about
30 minutes' drive from the field of horrors in
Blace. The United States and most European
countries have ambassadors posted here. The utter
lack of humanitarian preparedness is not explained
by Macedonia's remoteness, or its poverty. Skopje
has dozens of aid agencies, but sadly, most of the
supplies NATO and the United States had provided
are stuck in Belgrade, where they are useless in
helping those fleeing Kosovo.

But there are military implications of the lack of
preparedness, too. NATO sent 12,000 troops to
Macedonia well in advance to prepare for
implementing the Rambouillet peace agreement
inside Kosovo. Little thought was given to the
alternative outcome, however: What would happen if
that deal was nixed, and the Serbs launched a
massive campaign of "ethnic cleansing."

The worst-case scenario was so awful that nobody
wanted to think it through. But it came true, and
the lack of readiness has placed U.S. and NATO
forces, not just Kosovar refugees, at risk.

Consider the plight of Sgts. Christopher Stone and
Andrew Ramirez and Spec. Steven Gonzales, captured
last week by the Serbs on a routine patrol mission
at the Yugoslav-Macedonia border. The Americans
had been trained and equipped for a hitherto
deadly dull U.N. peacekeeping mission, where it
was considered an eventful day if a Humvee ran
into a cow. Did nobody realize how the NATO
airstrikes would raise the temperatures at the
border?

On the ground in Macedonia, there is plenty of
grumbling in the upper ranks of the NATO military
about the lack of planning and resolve towards the
Kosovo problem. Says one commander, NATO had a
choice of doing nothing about Kosovo, or going to
war against Yugoslavia. "What they'd done instead
is thrash around in the middle, looking for the
low risk, high payoff solution. And this is what
they get," he said.
Another military man suggests NATO is stumbling
because it has failed to acknowledge what by now
should be patently obvious: We are in a state of
war with Yugoslavia.

"It looks like a duck, it walks like a duck. It is
a war, only nobody dares say so," he said.

After we returned to Skopje, Alban, my translator,
borrowed my satellite telephone to call his
parents, still hiding in out in Pristina in a rare
house with a working telephone.

"Don't come out," he told them, describing the
horror in Blace. "Better to be killed by the Serbs
than that." 

salon.com | April 6, 1999

-- 
Gar W. Lipow
815 Dundee RD NW
Olympia, WA 98502