The New York Times
Tuesday, November 23, 1999
STARI TRG JOURNAL
A Battered Kosovo Village the West Forgot to Help
By STEVEN ERLANGER
TARI TRG, Yugoslavia -- Bairam Bala stood on the concrete foundations of what was once his house, surrounded by ragged edges of shelled and collapsed walls, near the burned and rusted remnants of his belongings that were gathered neatly in a pile for some Westerner, who will never come, to inventory and make good his losses.
Myftar Haxha has his own wretched pile of post-tragedy trash, and so does Behram Mernica. They walk forlornly around the twisted remains of washing machines and ovens, television sets and tool kits, lamps and bedsprings, as Kosovo's winter closes in.
They have lost everything, they say, and that is indisputable. Their ultimately victorious fight against the Serbs, in this utterly devastated little village, began in the summer and autumn of 1998 when the Serbs began to attack the Kosovo Liberation Army in earnest.
This Albanian village -- the name means "old market" -- overlooks part of the Trepca mines, one of the few economically important sites in Kosovo. So it became strategic territory, and it was badly shelled.
What survived the fighting in 1998 was obliterated last April, after another Serbian offensive prompted a 78-day bombing war from NATO on behalf of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians. These men and their families fled to the surrounding hills -- only a few left Kosovo -- and returned in July to this blasted landscape, where their fathers had lived before them.
President Clinton is to visit Kosovo on Tuesday to celebrate Thanksgiving with American soldiers at their huge, fortified base at Camp Bondsteel. But having won the war to save people like those in Stari Trg, the West is moving slowly to consolidate the peace and to help them rebuild their lives.
"We lost everything and we have nowhere else to go," said Haxha, rubbing his long stubble on a face that looks 70, not 58. "Look down there," he said pointing to a shattered wall marked by smoke. "This was my land and my house. I had a good house. I had 100,000 marks invested here," some $55,500 at today's exchange rate.
There were 30 houses here; all of them are destroyed. Only five families live here now, Bala said. The rest, for the moment, are scattered in other villages, or they are imprisoned or dead. Of the approximately 250 people who lived here two years ago, at least 12 have been killed, Bala said, and two were arrested by the Serbian forces and have not returned.
In July, aid workers from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees came by and provided a few tents, about 13 feet square, to keep off the rain, and people moved in. But the tents cannot be heated.
And now it's too cold, and there has been no other visitor to provide them with the single warm room that the world has promised them, let alone a winterized tent, so they have gone to squat in an office building across the way. Now the Serbs don't frighten them, Bala said, as much as the thought of eviction.
"I'd be happier here in a better tent than in the office," Bala said. "I'm afraid every day they will throw us out. It is an official place. It's not for family living -- it's all concrete."
He, like the others, says he will rebuild here, nowhere else, and he would like to have started by now. "If those foreign organizations had helped us, we could have rebuilt this year," he said. "We thought they would help with timber and roof tiles. But now they say they will help us in the spring."
No one offered them much after July, Haxha said.
"They said everyone would have one warm room for the winter, and we don't have one," Haxha said. He has six children, two here and four in Germany. "They can't send me money, because there is no bank," he said. "I'm waiting for them to come. But Germany wants to throw them out." Now that the war is over, Berlin and other European capitals are eager to send the ethnic Albanian refugees home.
In Pristina, senior U.N. refugee officials were upset to hear that no one had revisited Stari Trg, and they promised to do so. They were relieved that the families had found their own shelter, however uncomfortable, and said that no one would turn them out.
The officials pointed to the progress they had made in providing emergency shelter for so many thousands, and all the obstacles they had overcome, from clogged borders and production delays to late financing from governments. Some 80 percent of the U.N. refugee agency's 16,000 emergency kits, mostly roof-quality plastic sheeting and stoves, has been delivered, they said, though other organizations were slower.
"This will be a hard winter," said Dennis McNamara, the refugee agency's director here, but he promised that no one in Kosovo would freeze to death this winter. But many thousands, like the people of Stari Trg, will have to fend for themselves.
Bala displayed his pile of rusted rubbish. "Everything I had I put here," he said, showing the broken plates, the melted pipes, the charred alarm clock, and the tool box with his ruined tools, which he used when he worked as an electrician at the mine.
"I heard we should write down what we lost," Bala said forlornly, idly picking up the rusted runner of what had been a child's sled. "But I thought it's better for someone to see it." He paused, and then said: "Of course, all the wooden furniture is lost. And I think they stole the television -- I couldn't find any parts of it."
He paused again. "But no one came to see. They gave us a paper in July to write down damage, but nothing happened."
He sobbed once, briefly, and then recovered his dignity. "I couldn't even save the spoons."
Bala, who has four children, then gestured to some nearby ruins. "From this house, only one woman survived," he said. "Her husband, son and daughter were killed. So we should be happy we are alive."
Xheme Maksuti, nearly 70, was killed in the shelling. His son Ilaz, 35, and his daughter, Saba, 22, were shot to death by the Serbs as they tried to run away, Bala said. Only Naile Maksuti, 64, survived, he said, but he does not know where she is.
Workers from a local charity, the Mother Teresa Society, bring the people of Stari Trg packets of food from time to time, with beans, pasta and other nutritious foods originally donated by Western and U.N. agencies. And they have promised to provide a stove for the office.
Haxha walked in a tight circle, rubbing the moisture from his stubble. "How many promises did they make us before we returned?" he asked bitterly. "If they piled them all up, it would make us four-story houses."
