The New York Times

Wednesday, March 31, 1999

Will We Fail Kosovo's Refugees?

By FRED ABRAHAMS

(Fred Abrahams is the Kosovo researcher at Human Rights Watch)

The 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 are fleeing the troops of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav President, and his campaign to murder or forcibly expel the ethnic Albanians from their homeland.

Given Milosevic's history as a serial "ethnic cleanser," it is remarkable that the Clinton Administration appears not to have anticipated the tragedy. The United States evidently made no plans to stop the war crimes now taking place in Kosovo, and it seems to have done nothing to prepare for the humanitarian catastrophe of the refugees. Little aid or assistance was provided to the neighboring countries to help them deal with the influx.

Relief agencies are scrambling to get operations in motion. 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 crisis in the Balkans, but officials there expected only 100,000 refugees. Now their planning figures have jumped to 350,000.

The Administration and its allies need 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 created to provide food, shelter and medicine to the exhausted refugees. At a meeting of major donors yesterday, the High Commissioner's office said it had less than a third of the $168 million it needs to provide short-term relief. The United States pledged $8.5 million over the weekend -- a paltry sum given the need.

Besides the obvious needs of temporary housing and food, it is absolutely critical that refugees be registered on arrival in Albania and Macedonia and provided with documentary proof that they came from Yugoslavia. The Serbian police have been destroying the identifications, 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, the United Nations and other aid groups may not be able to issue a document to every refugee, but all efforts 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 strive 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 to Kosovo when they feel that their rights, as well as their lives, will be protected. 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 is no easy way to resolve 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 being more vigorous in 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, after they were indicted by the war crimes tribunal, maybe their friend in Belgrade would have gotten the message, too. Milosevic has to be made to understand once and for all that punishment will follow this crime.

The United States must not replicate the 1994 disaster in Rwanda, when all the West did was pour money into refugee camps long after the slaughter had 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.