By Rod Nordland
SPECIAL REPORT:
The War in Kosovo
Early morning Sunday and the fog lifts from the Kacanik gorge at General
Jankovic in Kosovo, which is where the last Yugoslav checkpoint was on
the road out of Kosovo for the 260,000 refugees forced to flee south. The
mountains look so crisp and green and the softness of the light obscures
the ruin of the late war. Lines of cars are in an orderly queue going south,
patiently waiting for a convoy of tanks and APCs belonging to Big One,
the U.S. Army's First Armored Division, to rattle past on their
way north to reinforce KFOR. This was the scene of such terror and squalor
for so many months that it's jarring to perceive it as something almost
pretty now. The American soldiers manning the checkpoints on the Yugoslav
side are friendly and courteous, full of "have a nice days" in place of
the venal taunts, random robberies and much worse acts that Serbs routinely
inflicted on the refugees. The same ratty old cars are in line, but this
time they're making supply runs to Macedonia, or going to pick up families
and bring them home. Just down the hillside is where boxcar loads of refugees
were deposited, thousands to each train, spilling across the border into
a no-man's land where they squatted in the mud under scraps of plastic
in a field called Blace, sometimes for weeks. Having been expelled by the
Yugoslavs, their torments were just beginning as Macedonian officials kept
closing the Blace border crossing, denying even relief agencies the right
to help the trapped people. Some scores of people died there, where none
need have, of disease and exposure and even hunger; unknown numbers of
others were preyed on at night by Yugoslav thugs. Macedonia finally relented
under great pressure from the West, but its reputation as a fellow member
of the community of nations suffered irreparable damage, and justly so.
Now the field in Blace has not only dried up, but it's been swept and
groomed. Neat rows of big tents are laid out, with large canvas latrines
and even showers marked with huge letters M and F, which of course are
meaningless in Albanian. Warehouse tents are full of supplies, and red
crosses and the flags and emblems of a dozen NGO's and UN agencies brightly
decorate the khaki and green canvas of office tents and aid stations. It's
now a transit camp to be proud of, and one that has been empty ever since
it was finished. By then the exodus was over, and the war in its final
stages, and now it's so beside the point that Macedonian police don't even
mind if you photograph it-something they tried their hardest to stop back
when it was a field of unspeakable human suffering.
Up on the road, the Macedonian border checkpoint is identical to its ex-Yugoslav counterpart, except that it's yellow rather than blue. And the Macedonian border guards, though their faces are the same, have undergone a remarkable transformation. Before they were kicking refugees who got out of line, cursing them and even on occasion threatening to shoot journalists and aid workers who tried to reach them.
Now they're models of correctness, if not quite as earnestly cheerful
as the American soldiers. Refugees leaving Macedonia to return to Kosovo
are processed briskly and efficiently. The Serbs had somehow thought they
could prevent Kosovar Albanians from ever returning through the cynical
expedient of stripping them of their passports, ID cards, car papers. But
UNHCR has simply given each refugee family a registration card with a polaroid
of their members stapled to the back, and home they go. The Haxhia family,
ten women and children in all, were among them. Even their littlest boy,
Idriz, 6, shouldered a massive bedroll like everyone else as they prepared
to walk across the no man's land, to a bus on the other side. Their men
are all missing, they heard their village near Urosevac has been put to
the Serb torch, and they're going back to a land of mass graves and an
uncertain future. "I feel happy and sad and scared and excited all at the
same time," said the eldest daughter, 19-year-old Lea. Above all they were
glad to be leaving Macedonia, where they had been like unwanted guests
in a house of uncharitable people always shouting at them to please shut
up. Despite all that awaits these returnees, Kosovo looked pretty good
on a morning so fine it made everything seem like it might just have been
a bad dream.
