>OK, so the war finally ended after much death and destruction. Since June
>1999, we *do* have troops on the gound. 50,000 heavily armed NATO soldiers
>with robust rules of engagement, unified chain of command, etc., etc. --
>they run the province like a fiefdom. Almost immediately upon their entry,
>ethnic cleansing begins again, this time against anyone who is not ethnic
>Albanian -- Serbs, Roma, Muslim Slavs, Turks. Corpses of Roma children are
>found in ditches; widowed Serbian grandmothers are gunned down in their own
>apartments. 200,000 non-Albanians are driven out of the province.
***** Pittsburgh Post-Gazette January 22, 2001, Monday, SOONER EDITION SECTION: WORLD, Pg. A-1, WORLD VIEW HEADLINE: SERBIAN TOWN SUNK BY WEIGHT OF WAR REFUGEES BYLINE: JOAN MCQUEENEY MITRIC, SPECIAL TO THE POST-GAZETTE DATELINE: KURSUMLIJA, Yugoslavia --
The train stops in Kursumlija, and once you reach this border town in southern Serbia, there is no easy exit.
Before the NATO bombing campaign of 1999, travelers reaching Kursumlija could veer east to Bulgaria or west across Kosovo to vacation spots on the Adriatic coast.
Now Kosovo is ruled by the United Nations, and the province is cut off from the rest of Serbia. So Kursumlija is no longer a transit hub; it is a dead end, infamous for its poverty and its refugees, who account for more than one-third of the town's 20,000 inhabitants.
"Even before the war, the economy here was in ruins," said Slavic Parlic, a social worker who helps run a new program for homeless Roma, also known as Gypsies, which is funded by the U.N. and operated by the Italian Consortium for Solidarity. "Now Kursumlija is the poorest town in Serbia."
More than 70 percent of the residents receive social assistance -- at least a monthly package of cooking oil, sugar and flour, or a small monetary stipend to pay for medicine and heating oil.
Kursumlija is host to several generations of refugees, thanks to a decade of Balkan wars. Some of the first NATO bombs hit a shelter housing people who had fled Serbia's 1992 war with Croatia. "Today, children who were run out of Kosovo play on the graves of those earlier refugees without even realizing it," Parlic said.
Kursumlija was hit repeatedly during the 78-day NATO campaign, but that did not stop desperate Serbs and Roma -- and even some Albanians -- from streaming there in search of shelter and safety.
At the end of Kosovo war, some members of Kosovo's Albanian majority took revenge on Serbs for the violence they had suffered under Serb rule. The Roma were allied with the Serbs, so they also suffered retribution. Some 7,000 people pushed out by Albanian militants found their way to Kursumlija, including 4,000 Roma, who are now enduring their second winter in desperate conditions.
Refugees from Kosovo started "spontaneous settlements" under bridges and in old workers' barracks "because they thought in a border town like Kursumlija their chances of going home were better," said Dr. Sladjen Petrovic, who runs a health clinic for Roma families in the town's only movie theater.
But it is unlikely people like Lipa Berisa, a father of three, will return to Kosovo any time soon -- despite the triumph of moderate local candidates in recent elections. Berisa, 53, visited his village, Obilic, not long ago. Accompanied by peacekeeping troops, he found the town's 300 Roma homes destroyed by fire, along with seven Serb-owned houses. He claims the only residences remaining were those of three very old Serbian neighbors.
"This was the first time I dared go back to see my village,"said Berisa, who lost his wife to an errant NATO bomb. "The soldiers who took me said they were sorry they could not protect my home."
About 140 of the Roma in Kursumlija are spending the winter in an unfinished sports stadium. The roofless, concrete bunker is a maze of hastily constructed family warrens, each separated from the next by blankets and rugs strung over ropes. Heat comes from donated woodstoves, many of which leak and are not vented outside. Goats and chickens share living quarters with young children and elders.
In one room, a young mother pulls the last of six glistening loaves of bread from the oven. Tears from the smoke crease her cheeks. In another, proud occupants point to the blankets overhead that serve as their ceiling. They lowered the blankets to shrink the room so they could burn less wood for heat.
For more than 15 months, the Kursumlija stadium shelter had no toilets or proper containers for garbage. "When we told the U.N. workers about a hepatitis outbreak here in October 1999," Parlic said, "they suggested we dig a hole in the center of the place and use it for garbage. They said 'that is how we do it in Africa,' forgetting that this sports center is right in the middle of an established town."
Two toilets finally arrived in late September.
When refugee centers become eye sores, they threaten to erode the willingness of local residents to put up with them, Parlic said.
"You have to understand that Kursumlija residents would like to have a more educated, less desperate population base here. Instead, anyone with half a chance at a job elsewhere has left. What remains is an overwhelming load of poor families falling on a collapsed economy."
On the other side of town four large Orthodox Roma families, some 57 people, live under a bridge on the banks of the Toplica River in two large tents. One disabled man pivots in his wheelchair, his range of motion hemmed in by the river on one side and a ditch on the other. The tents are not weatherized so the quest for firewood is a constant, preoccupying worry.
The sound of axes hitting and splitting wood punctuates the air. Cords the length of football fields line the roads into Kursumlija. A shirtless cafe owner bumps wheelbarrows full of precariously-stacked logs across his cobbled courtyard and dumps them by the kitchen stove while patrons sip coffee.
Inside the town's 250-seat movie theater the proprietor shows a visitor a colossal tin-drum stove by the stage. This winter the theater is hosting a children's arts program and health clinic run by the Italian consortium, but in a place where a wheelbarrow full of wood goes for $ 15, heating the theater "is a major, major challenge," said Martina Iannizzotto, the consortium's country coordinator.
The refugees in Kursumlija are but a sliver of the more than 650,000 displaced persons seeking safety, shelter or economic support who have come to Serbia since 1991 as a series of destructive, fratricidal wars split what used to be Yugoslavia.
Five years after the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord that ended the war in Bosnia and nearly two years after the end of Kosovo war, the vast majority of these refugees still have no access to the courts, no property rights and no valid citizenship.
When the first waves of refugees arrived from Croatia -- some 300,000 by August 1995 -- many were taken in by relatives or sympathetic strangers. Some were housed in empty hotels or barracks built for workers during the Tito era.
But after 10 years of economic sanctions and war, Serbia's economy is in tatters. The average monthly salary hovers around $ 40, there are rolling blackouts, and half the workers are employed illegally in the black market economy.
In a fight for their own survival, many Serbs have had to evict people they once befriended. "The absorption capacity of this country is absolutely stretched to the maximum," said Maki Shinohara, spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Yugoslavia's new president, Vojislav Kostunica, must find a way to house, feed and employ these hundreds of thousands of homeless persons even as his fledgling government faces certain financial and social upheaval after years of corruption and ineptitude by his predecessor, Slobodan Milosevic.
Kostunica must also find a way to convince Croatia to take back the tens of thousands of Serbs who want to return to farms or apartments there.
This will not be easy. Croatia's economy also is in a tailspin, and everyday life there is more expensive than in Serbia, where prices have been held artificially low.
"There are no jobs there anymore, and the Croatians have taken the only homes that weren't bombed or burned," said Nikola Zutic, who lives in northeast Serbia in a two-room hovel given him by a good-hearted landlord in 1996.
This past July, Zutic, 42, went home to Knin in Croatia to see if he could make a go of it on the farm where he used to live with his wife, Ana, her parents and their daughter, Jelena. Part of a U.N.-sponsored effort to repatriate refugees, Zutic called it quits after a month.
He said the Croatian government gives returning war refugees about $ 40 a month for each family member, but that the stipend ends after six months. Zutic said a loaf of bread costs six to 10 times as much in Croatia as in Serbia.
"Realistically, I would need a tractor and a few acres to call my own to start over." Zutic said his tractor was stolen as the family fled to Serbia.
While the Zutic family's situation is nowhere near as grim as that of refugees in towns ringing Kosovo, the U.N. and other aid agencies predict a long, difficult winter for everyone in Serbia.
Shinohara said the southern third of Serbia is the "crisis point" because of its poverty and joblessness, but that shortages exist all over Yugoslavia.
Joan McQueeney Mitric is a freelance journalist based in New Kensington, Md. *****
Yoshie