the kosovo crisis

The Days Ahead for Kosovo

by CARE staff writer

Dobrotin Village, Kosovo (August, 1999) -- The small Orthodox church of St. Demetrios, with its round, white apse and still larger curving nave, resembles a dove with its wings drawn tight about it. For three months last spring, the small church sat immaculate while bombs fell and smoke from burning houses rose in gray plumes from nearby hillsides. When the war ended, the empty landscape intensified the building's sleepy, silent appeal.

Then, in September, three rocket-propelled grenades slammed through the thick, white walls of Dobrotin's little church. Enraged, townspeople turned on those they blamed for the attack -- their neighbors and enemies, the people of the nearby village of Oklab. Oklab farmers were pulled from their tractors as they drove home and beaten.

Soon after, the foreigners came with huge, dark green Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) and Black Hawk helicopters. They came with machine guns mounted above the tiny, rectangular windows of their APCs and tanks. They shut the road leading into Dobrotin and cordoned off the town. And around the ruins of their dove-like church, Dobrotin's people gathered and talked and waited for what would come.

Aid Held Hostage

The CARE relief convoy waiting to pass through Dobrotin Village.

Behind the convoy of white trucks with the green "CARE" logo painted on the front and sides sits an untidy row of ramshackle cars and trucks. Next to this assortment, residents of Oklab and other villages that lie down the road, beyond Dobrotin, stand impatiently, occasionally walking to the front of the line to gesture in wordless frustration at the implacable Finns. The road has been closed for several days and until the troubles in Dobrotin settle down, nothing, and no one, is allowed to pass.

Ross, a veteran CARE relief worker who has spent more than 10 years in refugee camps and war zones, is hoping to take his trucks to Oklab, the bomb-blasted Albanian village nestled just a few kilometers down the road from Dobrotin. The CARE trucks are loaded with wood, tools, nails and other materials that will help Oklab's several thousand people build at least one warm, dry room to house them through a typically brutal Kosovo winter.

But after the violence of the past few days, Oklab is off limits. Dobrotin's troubles have forced NATO troops to close the road, in the process cutting all access to the Albanian villages that line the road beyond it. And so, desperately needed humanitarian assistance is held hostage to the tension between one Serb village and one Albanian village at the end of an extremely bitter and divisive war.

Ross's convoy has become yet another symbol, in a land already overflowing with dark, historical imagery, of the enormous challenges any constructive effort faces in this blood-soaked Balkan crossroads called Kosovo.

A young girl stands in the ruins of a bombed out house in Oklab Village.

Andrew Ross has seen this animosity personally. One week earlier, in the exact place where his CARE convoy of humanitarian aid currently waits, a sniper shot an elderly Serb man off his tractor. Ross, his Albanian translator, and family members pulled the man out of the fields and brought him, bleeding, to a CARE vehicle. But even then Kosovo's violent ghosts rose up to block the humanitarian impulse. Terrified of further reprisals, the family of the injured Serb refused to take him to a nearby hospital in Albanian-controlled territory. Instead, they insisted Ross drive them to Pristina, nearly an hour away. By the time they arrived, the man was dead.

"He was just an old man," Ross says. "Even my Albanian translator said that: 'he was just an old man.' But there is so much hatred here, on both sides."

The result of this hatred has been hard going for relief workers trying to provide aid on all sides of the conflict. CARE staff have been welcomed joyously by Albanians and met stiff resistance entering Serb enclaves for much the same reasons. Albanians working in CARE-run refugee camps for Serb and Roma people in neighboring Macedonia have been forcibly evicted. And Roma neighborhoods in Mitrovica have been torched or, in the case of Halac Ivogel, a small village of Roma and Albanians in the Lipian district of Kosovo, completely cut off.

While it is not the job of humanitarian organizations to investigate war crimes, these disputes are typical examples of the agonizing tightrope CARE must walk to fulfill its "non-partisan" humanitarian mandate.

It helps, of course, that CARE works on both "sides" of the Kosovo conflict, and employs hundreds of staff from all three communities -- Albanian, Serb and Roma. Since the early 1990s, CARE has been active throughout the Balkans, providing emergency relief and development assistance to Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Serbia.

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