The New York Times

Tuesday, June 8, 1999

New Technologies Employed to Trace Kosovar Refugees

By BRUNO GIUSSANI

GENEVA -- The war in the Balkans may be nearing an end, but relief agencies are still confronted with the daunting number of Kosovar refugees spread all over the region and beyond, whose safe return to their home cities and villages has yet to be assured.

According to figures released last week by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), nearly 860,000 people have fled Kosovo since the NATO bombing campaign started two and a half months ago and the Serb Army intensified ethnic purges. Most of the refugees are in camps in Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro, but tens of thousands of them are spread over 30 different countries.

Can the Internet and information technology be harnessed to help these people? Olga Villarrubia, the deputy head of the Tracing Agency within the International Committee of the Red Cross believes it can.

The agency's main goal is to help reunite families that have been separated by the war. Historically, efforts to locate and contact relatives or friends were based on so-called Red Cross Messages, a standard procedure dating back to the Spanish Civil War and based on paper forms, which are circulated through the Red Cross offices network. More recently, during the Somalian crisis in the 80's or in Bosnia since 1991 for example, lists of names have been aired by local and international radio stations and have "proven to be very effective," Villarrubia said.

"For the first time we are now using the Internet in a situation of ongoing conflict," Villarrubia said in an interview. Together with corporate partners like Compaq and Ericsson, the Red Cross launched last week the Family News Network, which the Committee says is the first refugee-tracing system based on Internet technology.

The Web site allows refugees in the Balkans and members of their families living in European countries to locate relatives and friends and to send them electronic messages. Computers linked to the Internet are being installed in the Red Cross offices in cities in Albania and Macedonia, and in big refugees camps like Stankovac near Skopje, while Red Cross personnel will assist people using them, and deliver the messages in printed form if needed.

(Another independent site, Kosova Keep In Touch, has been set up recently by two Britons, Thibault Jamme and Henrik Risager, to help refugees track down displaced family members.)

"Refugees are desperately in need to communicate with their relatives and tell them they're alive."

As part of the same Red Cross project, Ericsson is building an emergency mobile phone network to provide communications between camps, within the two countries that have a poor telecommunication infrastructure and with the outside world.

"Beyond the obvious basic needs such as medicine, food and shelter, refugees are desperately in need to communicate with their relatives and tell them they're alive," Villarrubia added.

Other groups independent from the Red Cross, like Telecom Without Borders, a new small French humanitarian organization, are also providing access to satellite telephones in refugees camps.

The Red Cross tracing efforts rely partially on the registration of refugees by the United Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees, which is deploying sophisticated computer systems on the field to accelerate the process and issue new identification documents.

"Registration is crucial in order to get a basic demographic profile of the refugees population and allow proper planning, target assistance and distribution of relief supplies, and help the reconstruction efforts," Larry Fioretta, a public affairs officer with the UN agency, explained in an interview.

The Kosovars situation is peculiar. "In past conflicts we have mass-registered refugees only when the situation was somewhat stabilized, after new arrivals and movements stopped," he added. In the Balkans the situation is not stabilized yet, but registration has been rendered more urgent by the erasure of identity attempted by the Serbian soldiers in Kosovo.

"The majority of refugees have been stripped of all identification documents, civil records have been systematically destroyed," said Fedde Jan Groot, one of those responsible for the registration process.

Moreover, "all the region has been affected by the crisis, and refugees are dispersed in so many countries that we have to make sure that the registrations handled in different places are compatible," he added.

With the help of companies like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq and Securit, UNHCR and the International Organization for Migrations have developed registration-in-a-box kits including laptop computers, cameras and printers, which will allow delegates to register the refugee, send the data to a central database in Geneva, and issue official photo identification plastic cards within minutes. The cards also carry a barcode, making it easier to track refugees movements.

Microsoft's staff members in several countries have been involved in the project, explained Frank Schott, the company's director of European business development. "When Kosovo happened, we started getting inquiries from employees who were asking whether we were doing something to help," he said.

After contacts and discussions with UNHCR, engineers in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands developed the software, while their British colleagues worked on integrating the different pieces into a robust system.

Several of them will now travel to the region to train and provide backup support to UNHCR delegates.

"The real challenge has nothing to do with information technology, it has to do with logistics: whether we will be able to pull it off in a part of the world where power supply is random and physical conditions such as dust can jeopardize sophisticated systems not to mention security problems," Schott added.

UNHCR has put a lot of hope in the initiative. "Such databases and cards could become the basis for rebuilding the Kosovar society, by allowing to identify people, reconstruct civil records, and address property claims, for example," Fioretta said.

(EUROBYTES is published monthly.)