BY ANNE HOWIE
SKOPJE, Macedonia - Thousands of Albanians terrorized into
leaving their homeland in Kosova continue to stream across
the border into Macedonia every day. Militant reporters
witnessed some 3,000 coming through one of the border
crossings, in Blace, April 16. Four days later, the
Macedonian government of president Kiro Gligorov closed the
border, saying there is no more space in the camps.
Thousands, however, came over the mountains that day.
Official figures put the number of Kosovar Albanians who have fled here to 136,000 in the last month. Among them, nearly 17,000 have been sent to other countries - mostly Germany and Turkey. Another 360,000 Albanians have crossed Kosova's border into Albania, 70,000 have fled to Montenegro, and 32,000 are in Bosnia. This means that one-third of Kosova's population of 1.8 million Albanians have so far been forced out.
According to accounts from Albanians in the camps where they are held here, a significant number - if not the majority - of the 200,000 Serbs who lived in Kosova have also left. Many because they were afraid for their lives because of the NATO bombings, others because they were opposed to the "ethnic cleansing" campaign under way in Kosova. A few thousand of these Serbs have come to Macedonia, but none are in the refugee camps. They stay with relatives or others who volunteered to put them up.
This human flood, along with the 13,000 NATO troops deployed here, have produced an explosive mix in Macedonia, one of the republics of the former Yugoslavia that declared independence in the early 1990s.
It has a population of 2 million, of whom 23 percent are of Albanian origin, according to government statistics. Albanian organizations say the figure approaches 40 percent. The population also includes significant numbers of Turks, Romanians, Roma gypsies, and others. Gligorov's regime says the Albanians streaming from Kosova threaten to upset the ethnic mix of the republic and is pushing for moving the Kosovars to other countries.
Around 50,000 of the Kosovar Albanians are in camps set up by NATO and the Macedonian government, scattered across hillsides near the border. The rest are housed in the homes of Macedonian Albanians.
While support for the bombings and illusions in the aims of the imperialist forces attacking Yugoslavia are widespread, a significant number Albanians, particularly those now stranded in the camps, are questioning Washington's course.
Conflicting views on NATO assault
Mohammed Thatsi, a fruit store owner in Pristina who had
been in the NATO-run Stankovic camp for 10 days April 16,
gave this answer when asked if the NATO assault would help
the Albanians' struggle for independence: "Right now they are
making everything worse," he said. "Everyone is leaving
Kosova. Little by little only the dogs and the cattle are
left. So there is no struggle for our rights."
"We wanted a solution, a peaceful solution, not a war," said Akija Memisi, a taxi driver from the Glesa village in the Kacanik area. He had just arrived at the Stankovic camp from the border the evening of April 16. "We are against the bombing."
Bujar Xoxha, who worked in the state bank in Pristina, agreed. "Ethnic cleansing started in Kosova nine years ago," he said. "But the NATO bombing has sped it up."
Voglic Ziber, a farmer from the Grlica village near Kacanik, added. "Seselj had said that Albanians would be forced out of Kosova with the first NATO bomb." This is exactly what happened. NATO gave the cover to the paramilitary groups and Belgrade's police to do what they planned for a while. Ziber was referring to Vojislav Seselj, head of the Serbian Radical Party, a rightist group that is part of the coalition government in Belgrade.
A young man from Ferizaj - the Albanian name for Urosevac, a town in Kosova about 20 miles north of Skopje - who asked that his name not be used, said the stated aim of imperialism, to defend Albanians, didn't tally with reality. "It's like in Bosnia, they knew what was happening, and they just watched." He was referring to what the U.S. rulers did during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia.
At the beginning of that war, Washington adopted a policy of watching the murderous bombing of civilian areas by the rival regimes in Yugoslavia and letting the powers in the European Union fuel the conflict through military intervention under the cover of "peacekeeping" missions. Then Washington gave partial promises it would support "peace initiatives" by the EU powers, while doing everything it could to sabotage each one of them. At the same time, the White House prepared its own military intervention. Finally, Washington unfurled its NATO banner in 1994, launching bombing raids that led to the Dayton accords, which paved the way for the NATO invasion and occupation of Bosnia by NATO troops.
Serb soldiers desert Yugoslav army
Interviews with several dozen Albanians held at the camps
paint a picture of how the "ethnic cleansing" is being
carried out. Many of the accounts indicate that a wholesale
emptying of Kosova, village by village, town by town, is
under way.
It's mostly done by Serb paramilitary gangs - the most notorious of them run by Zelco Rasnatovic, known as Arkan, who did much of the same in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 - with the help of Belgrade's police. The conscript army is used very little. There is still much opposition to these kind of brutal operations among regular soldiers. The 40,000- plus troops at the Kosova-Albania border are professional soldiers, we were told, not normal conscripts.
Some Albanians reported desertions of soldiers from Belgrade's army who refused to carry out "ethnic cleansing" orders. Sahabi Ishmali, from the village of Brod, had been in the Neprosteno camp for four days April 19. He described how a group of Yugoslav soldiers from Serbia and Montenegro deserted their unit six days earlier. "There was a big group from Ferizaj, more than 20 soldiers," he said. "They took off their uniforms and went knocking on the doors of Albanian households, asking for civilian clothes. The Albanians helped them." They left with the departing Albanians. A two-hour gun battle ensued between the soldiers who defected and paramilitary squads that spotted them. "They got away, but we don't know what happened to them after that."
Bujar Xoxha described how paramilitary soldiers started to empty his neighborhood in Pristina. "Two or three days after the NATO bombing started, they first came for money. Then they started pushing people out, rounding up groups and leading us to the train station." Others described tanks being parked in the streets and residents being given less than half an hour to get out. When villagers would flee to surrounding hills, their houses would often be burned. The population of entire villages was forced to flee across the border in that fashion.
Most Albanians at the camps said the local Serbs, often their neighbors, were initially telling them to stay and not be frightened by the rightists. No one realized at the beginning the level of organization of these gangs and the degree of their collaboration with state authorities. They come to places like Pristina, which has many mixed neighborhoods, with a detailed list of who lives in each apartment building and who is married to whom, being careful not to expel Serbs along with Albanians. The few that are in mixed marriages, like a video-game-store owner who asked to remain anonymous, were simply pressured to go, as all houses and apartments around them progressively emptied and they became scared as the gangsters ransacked nearby apartments. But then most Serbs realized they are powerless in front of the heavily armed gangs, given the absence of revolutionary leadership, and decided to leave themselves.
Shahe Rusti, a nurse from Pristina, explained she used to work with Serb staff and patients. "We had no problem. The people are not guilty, only the politicians."
Conditions in the camps are generally dismal, especially when rain turns the ground to mud and the tents flood. Despite reports in the U.S. and British press that the conditions in Macedonian-run camps are substantially worse than in the NATO camps, the actual differences in supplies, organization, and general conditions of life are insignificant. NATO-run Stankovic is the largest, housing up to 40,000 Albanians. It has no hot water for showers or facilities for cooking hot food. The camp is surrounded by high fencing, guarded by armed soldiers. People in the camps can only go out if they can get papers to prove they have relatives living in Macedonia. Communication with relatives elsewhere is made practically impossible by the lack of telephones. "It's a natural prison," said Hajrez Ruski, a teacher in the unofficial Albanian school system in Ferizaj.
Opposition to NATO deployment
Among Macedonians, the imperialist attack on Yugoslavia
and the deployment of NATO troops here is widely opposed.
Nearly 4,000 people gathered in Skopje's main square April 17
for a protest and concert against the bombing. "NATO Out Of
Macedonia," "NATO: New American Terrorist Organization" were
among the popular slogans. While there were no anti-Albanian
signs to be seen, toward the end a couple of clusters of
drunken young men began chanting racist slogans.
"NATO is not interested in the Albanian people, they don't care about them," said a Macedonian who asked that his name not be used. "I don't have a good opinion of Milosevic. But you can only remove him with democracy, because bombing allows him to unite all of Serbia."
Two French soldiers of the NATO force here were injured when residents of the Kuceviste village, 10 miles north of Skopje, stoned a passing convoy of NATO vehicles April 20. The French troops had to abandon one of the vehicles, which the villagers then set on fire.
It is the pressure of this widespread opposition to the bombings that has led the Macedonian government to reject the request of NATO to use Macedonia as a dispatch point for a possible ground invasion of Kosova.
`We're displaced, not refugees'
According to Refet Elmazi, deputy minister of defense in
Skopje, one of the few Albanians in the Macedonian
government, there is no problem with most Albanians from
Kosova staying in Macedonia. "We are interested in the
deportees being close to Kosova," he said. "Don't spread them
all over Europe as this helps ethnic cleansing."
Most Albanians interviewed by Militant reporters in the camps say they want to return to Kosova and don't like being described as refugees. "We want to go back. We're displaced by force, not refugees," said Bujar Hoxha.
Since there is no immediate prospect of that happening, however, many Kosovar Albanians in the camps say they prefer to go to another country, especially if they can return to humane living conditions.
Albanians living in Macedonia have gone out of their way to house as many as they can from Kosova. A professor of English at the University of Tetovo, an unofficial institution organized by the Albanian community, has 27 Kosovar Albanians in her house. This is done consciously to counter the efforts by the Gligorov regime to send as many of the displaced Kosovars as possible to other countries.
The town of Tetovo is in the north west of Macedonia, and its population is 90 percent Albanian. It has been the center of the fight for the rights of Albanians in Macedonia. There is a constant traffic of army vehicles on the roads, the main concentration of NATO forces situated nearby. Most Albanians interviewed in Tetovo said the large presence of troops in the town was welcome. "They make us feel safe," said Elida Merseli, a 17-year-old high-school student. This view is not universal, however.
Students in Tetovo reported a rise in incidents of harassment of Albanians in Macedonia. These tensions, however, are practically nonexistent among workers. That was the case with young workers in a toy shop in Skopje. Three are Albanian, three Macedonian. The boss is Croatian.
"We enjoy working together. We talk a lot. Sometimes we disagree, sometimes we agree, but we discuss," said Muharem Aziri who is Albanian. Ibru Stafa, who is also Albanian, said he supports the NATO bombings. Goran Stofianovski, who is Macedonian, replied, "The United States comes as a `democratic' country, but what about the situation of Blacks in the U.S.? This is the same as they did to the Native Americans. And Britain hasn't solved the situation in Ireland. They should settle these things at home first."
Asked about self-determination for Kosova, Stafa replied, "Yes, we want independence." Stofianovski added that "if Kosova was a Yugoslav republic, and all the refugees returned, it would be OK. Until it is a republic, there will be no peace. But I can't say what another country should do."
After speculation as to the result of the forthcoming Manchester United football match, Stafa added, "Look, I'm Muslim, he [Stafianovski] is Orthodox. But we've all been working together and going out together for 10 years. It's impossible for us to kill each other."