The New York Times
Friday, July 7, 2000
In the Hundreds of Thousands, Kosovo Homeless Feel Forsaken
By CARLOTTA GALL
PRISTINA, Kosovo, July 1 -- Kosovo's capital today is a chaotic and noisy town, heaving with small traders, construction work, sidewalk cafes and traffic jams. But the hubbub scarcely speaks of solution of Kosovo's many problems: a year after the end of the war here, chaos and dislocation continue, manifested in the doubling or even tripling of the population of this ramshackle town, now home to more than half a million people.
Mostly people from the villages, they are refugees who have abandoned their burned-out homes and have sought work and shelter in the capital.
As more than 700,000 Kosovo Albanians flocked home from refugee camps in six weeks last summer, or came down from their hiding places in the hills, many seized Serbian houses here, forcing Serbs and Gypsy residents to flee.
The Kosovo war forced about two-thirds of the province's two million people from their homes. Hundreds of thousands remain displaced, living in tents and shacks in villages, in drab and despondent refugee centers in towns, or doubled up with relatives in cramped and unhealthy surroundings in the cities, as many as 30 to an apartment.
The refugee camps in neighboring Macedonia and Albania, which took in more than a million Kosovo refugees in the three months of NATO's war with Yugoslavia last year, are long empty, like abandoned parking lots with a few discarded clothes lying among the weeds. Only a few thousand mostly old or sick refugees remain in the two countries, left behind in the struggle for survival.
In Kosovo, people are still returning every day. In front of the Pristina airport stand two large white tents where local officials register the hundreds of refugees returning on daily flights from Western Europe or further afield. As many as 140,000 people will be returning to Kosovo this summer.
Their host countries have deemed the province peaceful and safe enough, but United Nations officials fear the influx will strain Kosovo's limited housing beyond the breaking point, adding to the ethnic and other tensions that continue to explode in almost daily violence.
Arsim Krasniqi, 22, was among the refugees returning from Germany recently. He was traveling alone, and no one met him. "I am happy to be coming back to a free Kosovo, but I am sad because I have no family here," he said. "My father and brother were killed. My other brother is missing. At home everything is burned."
His mother and sisters were to arrive on another refugee flight from Germany in several days, he said. "Where we'll live, I don't know."
On their first night back in Kosovo, thousands of returning refugees end up on mattresses on the floor of a transit center in Pristina. Adem Sylejmani, who runs the center for World Vision, said many were still traumatized and uncertain. "One of the first things they ask is, 'Are there any Serbs around here?' " he said.
Most move on quickly, usually to relatives, or take a tent and head home to their villages. "We are left with the very vulnerable people, the old, social cases, ones with family problems and mental cases," he said.
Despite the enormous building activity obvious in every corner of Kosovo, United Nations officials are growing concerned that Kosovo simply does not have enough housing. "Capacity is limited," said Gottfried Koefner assistant chief of the Kosovo mission of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee. "People are squeezing, and we are already seeing secondary displacement. People are ending up in tents."
Some of those returning are forcing other families out on the streets as they reclaim their houses. There are at least 6,000 people in collective centers in public buildings in Kosovo, most of them villagers whose houses have been burned, whose relatives are unable to help and who have nowhere else to go.
Bernard Kouchner, the head of the United Nations administration in Kosovo, has appealed for countries to slow the returns, particularly because aid officials do not plan to rebuild all the destroyed homes here.
More than 120,000 houses across the province were damaged or destroyed in the war, about 80,000 of them so badly that they have to be rebuilt from their foundations, European officials found. International assistance has helped repair 17,000 of the partly damaged homes.
Of the 80,000 destroyed houses, there are plans to rebuild 12,000 to 15,000 this year and a similar number next year, said Stephen Lewarne, the head of reconstruction in the United Nations administration here. He is seeking $126 million from international donors for housing for this year alone.
The overall budget for the reconstruction and recovery of Kosovo for 2000 is $1.3 billion, an amount that is just trickling in. The 3,500 houses that the European Union, the chief donor for reconstruction, pledged to build last year are only now being completed. Contracts for the 8,000 houses the union plans to build this year were only signed at the end of May, and the immense task of getting the construction materials into a province with poor roads, no seaport and only a small airport still lies ahead.
By 2002, Mr. Lewarne said, the aid is likely to run out, and Kosovo will be left to the dynamics of the private housing market. "We are not going to repair or rebuild everyone's home -- we do not have the internal budget," he said. "Even if we were able to, it would not be a good idea, it would not be good governance."
Many Kosovo families have the means to build houses, yet it is clear that thousands will never get their houses rebuilt.
Perhaps the very poorest Kosovars are those in refugee centers, or the few who never made it back from camps in Albania or Macedonia. Macedonia hopes the 900 Kosovo Albanians still in its care will get home this year. Hamdi and Elheme Bardiqi, an elderly couple, remain in a camp in Macedonia dependent on houdouts because their home in central Kosovo was burned and they gave what little money they had to a son so he could rebuild part of it. The son and his wife have eight children, so it is too crowded to join them.
In the Macedonian village of Radusa, where thousands camped in tents last year, there are just a few families now living in refugee housing. They are apathetic and depressed.
Izet Rama, 42, a farmer, who lives in one set of rooms with his wife and six children, said: "We do feel left behind. We don't feel good at all. There is nothing to compare to your own country." But he is cautious about going home, for his house is burned, and he clearly does not want to give up what he has.
On the edge of Pristina, in a suburb called Germia, is a typical refugee center, immediately recognizable by the lines of washing hanging in the garden. A former school, it is now home to 38 families, and smells strongly of unwashed, crowded humanity.
Isa Plakiqi, 62, and his two sons live there. Leaning against the door of his room, dressed in a characteristic Albanian white felt hat that is dirty and yellow with age, Mr. Plakiqi told how he lost his wife and daughter in an artillery attack by Serbian forces last year. At the end of the war, he returned from their refuge high in the mountains with his sons, one of whom is an invalid, and found that his house in Drenica, in central Kosovo, had been leveled with a bulldozer. "We didn't have a tent, just a sheet of plastic, and some people came and photographed us, and then they brought us here," he said.
"Ninety houses in the village were destroyed," Mr. Plakiqi said. "They promised to rebuild them. They said I would be the first in line, but I don't trust them anymore." He said he had no money to rebuild.
"If they gave me the building materials, I would build the house myself," he said. "I would be slow, because I am an invalid, but I just would like to have my own house again. I am old and just want to die there."
But not everyone wants to return to the villages. Shefkia and Omer Zogjani are torn between city and village. With their three children, they moved into a Serbian house in Pristina last summer after they found their house and village destroyed. Grabovac, or Grabofc as it is called in Albanian, is a small mining village tucked into the hillside and lies just 10 miles from Pristina. All but one of the 47 houses are burnt.
"They did not even leave the outhouses standing," Mr. Zogjani said.
When he occupied a Serbian house in the city last year, he thought that he had solved his problems. Now he is not sure that he will be able to keep it. He earns a small wage at the mine in Grabovac and said he could not afford to rebuild his village house. And while he is in the city, he is unlikely to get any aid.
In the village, his relatives face even more uncertainty. From outside his tent on the hillside, Dalip Zogjani, 51, a cousin of Omer, stared down at the village below him, his hands on his hips, his eyes crinkled against the harsh sun. A year after he returned from Macedonia, the houses remain charred ruins, their blackened roof timbers poking into the sky, weeds growing in the living rooms.
"The grass was up to your waist," he said. "No one had lived here for two years since the Serb police occupied it." Nearby, a cousin, Banush Zogjani, who spent the war hiding in the mountains, cleared a small garden in front of a house whose roof was destroyed.
Only 7 of the 47 families who lived here have returned, living in tents and clearing away the rubble of broken tiles and glass. They are busy digging their garden and growing vegetables for the winter.
Only two families received aid last year and have plastic sheeting stretched over new wooden beams for a makeshift roof. Their bathrooms and kitchens are open to the sky. There is no school and no shop, and life is tough in winter, when Dalip Zogjani lived here with his 12-year-old son, brushing snow from the tent each morning.
He came back to Kosovo last July, and lodged his wife and children with a friend in a neighboring town. But his elderly mother insisted on returning home to the tent in the garden. "She was 86, she was sick, but she did not want to live in the city," he said. "I carried her on my back to the refugee camps, and then I carried her back home. She died here in our tent last October."
