Kukes moved media to tears
By John Daniszewski Posted Wed, Sep 1 1999
Covering the Kosovo conflict from Kukes, a small town in northern Albania, demanded strong nerves and even stronger hearts: nerves to get the story and hearts to hear the refugees, who often found in the correspondent at the border the first sympathetic ear upon which to pour their wrenching tales of killings, arsons, robberies and other cruelties.
News organizations emptied their European, Middle Eastern, African and even Asian bureaus to chronicle the fighting and suffering that unfolded in the Balkans after the start of NATO bombings March 24.
For the journalists, it was history in the making: NATO’s first offensive war and Europe’s greatest refugee crisis since World War II.
For the residents of northern Albania, it was a rare encounter with the world beyond their narrow, rock-strewn valleys. Indeed, to a region peopled by poor farmers, unemployed miners and small-time smugglers, it must have seemed as though aliens from Mars had landed.
Reporters and television crews from every continent — accompanied by such exotica as satellite uplinks, digital cameras and night-vision scopes — mixed with people who had heretofore rarely used a telephone.
Along with world-weary aid workers in their gleaming new 4×4 trucks, sauntering, red-bereted Kosovo Liberation Army fighters and masses of abject refugees thrown out of Kosovo, the media corps formed part of the tapestry of the new Kukes — the frontline town that became the reception point for 450,000 ethnic Albanian refugees. Spread out above the slate-blue, man-made reservoir of Lake Fierze, Kukes quickly changed from disaster area to boomtown during the Balkan crisis.
NATO operations disrupted commercial air travel, so most of the media made their way to Albania by ferry from Italy or overland from Greece. After reaching Tirana, a journey that was no picnic, there was a daunting eight-hour journey on an accident-plagued mountain road to the border area. Thousand-foot drops made for sheer terror along this ill-maintained route, which early on claimed the lives of three well-known relief workers.
The first journalists reached Kukes at the end of March, and they found utter confusion. There were one or two rudimentary hotels, virtually no telecommunications and only a handful of U.N. personnel and Albanian officials on the ground. Officials were hard-pressed simply to count the refugees, much less provide them food, shelter or medical attention.
Having been abused, beaten, pushed from their homes and stripped of their identification documents, the refugees arrived on Albanian soil with little or no idea of where they were or what they were supposed to do next. They would pause for a moment, look around questioningly, cry a little or wipe a tear from a child’s eye, then push on to a field or an abandoned factory where they could stop their tractors and start a camp.
And the stories they told: As they reached Kukes, many refugees were quick to recount stories of suffering. I will never forget one tall old man striding across the border with his walking stick. Pistol-packing Serb police on the other side waved him through.
‘‘Five of my sons have been killed!’’ he roared as I approached to ask some mundane question. He went on to recount in vivid detail the riverside massacre of 50 to 70 young men at Bela Crkva, one of the specific incidents that later formed the basis of the war crimes indictment of Slobodan Milosevic.
Even more sickening was a realization that dawned gradually — the realization that such accounts were not exceptional. It did not matter whom you asked. Every single refugee arriving had a horror story. One might have been forced to strip naked, one might have been beaten, one might have seen his or her son, brother, or husband taken away and stabbed or left to die in a burning house. Almost all had been robbed. Many had been humiliated and forced to make the Serb three-fingered salute or chant ‘‘Slobo, Slobo.” Many others had been forced to beg for a child’s life or to walk on a Kosovo flag.
Hearing their stories, one could not help but be moved. I remember standing on the border on April 1 — a sodden and gloomy day — and noting several colleagues moved to tears after jotting down their latest installment in the saga of human cruelty. It was a strange sight in a profession usually buffered by a thick crust of cynicism.
As the weeks followed, the atrocity stories became familiar, even repetitive, and attention shifted to other aspects of the crisis. Reporters venturing out of Kukes for Bajram Curry, a staging area for the KLO, were repeatedly plundered by AK-47 wielding bandits operating under the nose of corrupt police. Others were fired at by Serbian border guards if they ventured too close to the frontier. One photojournalist told me of being snatched by the Serbs and being held and threatened for several hours, a bag placed over his head, until he won his freedom by playing a Bob Dylan tune on his harmonica.
Day by day, Kukes changed. In place of clumps of huddled tractors and plastic-sheet lean-tos to keep out the incessant rains, tented camps were organized. Schools and clinics were liberally staffed by exiled Kosovar doctors. The World Food Program got its portable bakeries into operation and produced bread loaves by the ton. The Red Cross began the tedious, frustrating work of trying to locate relatives and reunite children and old people separated from their families. Enterprising residents turned yards and fields into tractor parking lots or found other ways to make a respectable profit from the total transformation of their town.
Perhaps the saddest change that occurred was among the refugees, who initially believed NATO’s military prowess would return them to their homes within days. Over time, hope faltered. They came to accept not knowing. The destiny of their homeland was no longer under their control.