The New York Times

Thursday, June 10, 1999

REFUGEES

Despite Pact, Kosovar Albanians Doubt They'll Go Home

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

KUKES, Albania -- There may be a relative peace in the Balkans, but the 120,000 Kosovar Albanian refugees who have staggered across the border into this hot, dusty and rubble-strewn mountain town are still anxious about how they will ever safely go home again.

Many refugees were stripped by Serbian officials of all identity cards, drivers' licenses and passports as they fled Kosovo. And if Serbs control the re-entry process, as Yugoslav officials are insisting is essential, then the Kosovar refugees say the Serbs will simply keep them out by telling the refugees that they have no proof that they belong in Kosovo.

The refugees say this was part of a long-range Serbian plan. "They're going to say we have no identity cards, and we're not Albanians from Kosovo, we're from Albania," said Murtez Zeqiri, 30, an unemployed graduate of the University of Pristina, who spoke Wednesday in his tent at one of the seven refugee camps here.

Zeqiri added that he had heard on the radio that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was opposed to a Serbian control of re-entry, but was nonetheless worried.

"The Serbian intellectuals were working a long time on this project, to have ethnic cleansing in Kosovo," he said.

Zeqiri came across the border on May 26, and told a story similar to those heard many times in the camps. On May 15, Zeqiri said, Serbian police took over the streets of his neighborhood in Mitrovica, a town in northern Kosovo, then came to his door and ordered him with his parents, sister and sister-in-law to the yard of the local elementary school.

The police separated the men from the women and children, then transported the men to Smrekovnica, a prison north of Pristina, Kosovo's capital. There they were beaten, fed only bread and tea and ordered to sign papers "confessing" to being members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the separatist rebel force.

"They said, 'If you don't sign, you can be killed,"' Zeqiri said. He added that although he sympathized with the KLA, "I wasn't an armed member. I never used a gun."

After 11 days, Zeqiri said the Serbian police drove him and a busload of other prisoners to a village near the border. "We heard the police talking, how they were going to kill us," Zeqiri said. Instead, the men were released and told to walk to the border. "I cannot express my feelings at the moment when the police separated us. You should be there to see how we cried, all the men together," Zeqiri said. "To separate young boys from their parents, it was terrible to see and feel."

Other men in Zeqiri's camp agreed that the Serbs would give them trouble in re-entering Kosovo. "They don't want to let us inside," said Nezir Rexhepi, 33, from the southern Kosovo city of Prizren, who owns a supermarket and a barber shop. "For 50 years, they're thinking about this project."

Cynicism was rampant among the refugees. "If they control the re-entry, of course we can't go back," said Nashide Kulkeci, a 29-year-old woman from the village of Vraniq, near Prizren. "It's better for us to stay here."

So far, the refugees have not been issued any identity cards in Albania, although plans are under way for registration system to be run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Albanian government.

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard have donated computer hardware and software, but a UNHCR spokesman here, Rupert Colville, said there were logistical delays. "The problem is, however super-duper the equipment, you've still got to go out and find the refugees," Colville said.

There are 450,000 ethnic Albanian refugees in Albania, two thirds of them in private homes and apartments.