Refuge faces
Goldman, Ari L.
Ari L. Goldman REFUGEE FACES Report from Macedonia It's become a cliche among foreign correspondents. The correspondent walks into the burned out village or refugee camp and yells, "Okay, who here...
...But the adults knew better...
...But the longest lines were at the tents of the different countries that were granting asylum to the ethnic Albanians...
...The correspondent walks into the burned out village or refugee camp and yells, "Okay, who here has been raped...
...We look at the pictures of the ethnic Albanian refugees fleeing Kosovo, appearing dazed and carrying their few belongings, and we can only say, "That's what I would look like if I had to flee my home tomorrow...
...Commonweal I I June 4,1999...
...It is precisely because they are white, because they are well dressed, because they are educated and even professionals that many of us in the West so naturally identify with them...
...Only the children, it seemed, still spoke about returning to Kosovo...
...In the distance, to the north, they could see the mountains of Kosovo...
...His English was impeccable...
...After a while, I didn't even have to ask...
...Among the countries represented were Germany, Spain, Austria, and the United States...
...We're going back home soon," said an optimistic fourteen-year-old, Mirjeta Bajrami, from the town of Seva Reca...
...I heard many, many stories like these as I walked through the refugee camp, some eight miles from the Macedonia-Kosovo border...
...We were seven students in our dorm," said Bekin Qela, a twenty-two-year-old drama student whose long wavy hair was pulled back into a pony-tail...
...Who owned a car...
...Those who weren't in front of their tents, were standing on line...
...We thought they were going to kill us, but they just took our money...
...Warned by the soldiers not only to get out of town but out of the country, the students immediately got on a train that took them to the Macedonian border...
...A month earlier, he said, a Commonweal I O June 4,1999 band of heavily armed Serb soldiers entered his university dorm in Pristina and told everyone to line up against the wall...
...Qela said he did not even have time to contact his mother or his brothers...
...We look at their children and say, "Those could be my kids...
...I rejoice when I see the planeloads of refugees arriving at Fort Dix, New Jersey, for resettlement in the United States...
...Farouk Siwawi, a twenty-four-year-old pizzeria worker who wore a baseball cap, told me that he too lost everything...
...The ethnic Albanians fleeing Kosovo looked very much like the people I grew up with in Queens in the 1950s, that is before Queens became the ethnic supermarket it is today...
...The adults stopped looking at the mountains in the distance and began contemplating life in a new country...
...Or even, Is there a doctor in the house...
...I could see the sense of hopelessness in the faces of the people...
...And with each new arrival, there is a death of a dream—the dream of returning home...
...When I spoke to the people at the refugee camps, my impressions were only confirmed...
...But I also feel a twinge of sadness, for while they may look like me, their homeland is far away...
...It's a dirty business, but someone has to find the lead...
...They burned my house, my car, everything I had," he said...
...The camp, known as Stankovic I, had opened only a month before on a former airstrip outside the Macedonian capital of Skopje...
...He does not know where they are...
...All agreed that the volume of refugees had only increased with the NATO bombing campaign of recent months...
...As I followed the war in Kosovo from afar, I came to realize that these were not the boat people of Vietnam or the refugees of Rwanda or the displaced persons of Gaza...
...Ari L. Goldman is on the faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism...
...The same story of dislocation and loss was told again and again in the camp...
...But with Serbian aggression and NATO bombs dropping, their homeland could have been a million miles away...
...There was little left of Seva Reca, the scene of a massacre of civilians a month earlier...
...He fled, leaving behind his hometown of Feriznj, his girlfriend, and his job...
...Adults sat in front of their tents, just staring...
...There were lines for everything, for food, for medicine, for the latrines, for the water faucets...
...Inside, I could see people, obviously depressed, sleeping on their blankets in the middle of the day...
...When I walked into a refugee camp in Macedonia in early May, I wanted to shout other questions: Who here went to university...
...Already it had 30,000 refugees, some 5 percent of the 600,000 who had fled Kosovo since the Serbian policy of "ethnic cleansing" began earlier this year...
...I can identify with these people...
Vol. 126 • June 1999 • No. 11
