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The KosovarsRemember the Children
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WRETCHED
WAIT AT THE BORDER OF DESPAIR New York Post Online 4/03/99 STEVE DUNLEAVY WRETCHED WAIT AT THE BORDER OF DESPAIR By STEVE DUNLEAVY BLACE, Macedonia. IT IS 6:45 a.m. at the Border of Despair as the fog lifts over the Lepenec River Valley. I gasp. Four hundred feet below me there is the biggest human mass I've ever seen forcibly squeezed into a tiny area. About 80 yards away stand young Macedonian soldiers who probably never fired a gun in anger in their life. They don't lock and load their guns. They just point them at a desert of humanity that could easily be a lake filled with the tears of the wretched. "Get back, get back," the Macedonian soldiers scream, with more bark than bite. Kosovars know about guns being pointed at them and they retreat in almost riot fashion. Forty yards away, Albanians who live in Macedonia are throwing bread loaves across the tiny Lepenec River and little boys are catching them like footballs. The men soon realize it's bad business to get the soldiers angry by throwing bread across the river. One guy, Faroud, suggests they give it to the soldiers. My partner, Aliya Dedajic, says it's a good idea. Suddenly, the soldiers who would not shoot a squirrel are taking the bread and throwing it across that tiny river to the refugees. On their left arms they carry guns slung loosely. But with their right arms they are heaving bread loaves across the border. Dedajic sees a mother and son. He presses the equivalent of $20 into her hand and says: "We will drive you back in our car to Skopje," the capital of Macedonia. Then he sees Farie Morina and her four children from Pristina and invites them to come back to the capital where they had friends. Then, the crunch. A border guard screams: "Get back, get back. You have to go on a bus." Dedajic yells: "Why? We are taking them to Skopje." "No, they are getting on these buses and going to Albania from here." The Morina family had come from Pristina and there is much conversation about brutality. What is happening to the Albanians in Pristina, Farie Morina is asked. "What Albanians?" she asks, as her children cry in a foreign land. "There are no Albanians in Pristina. "Tell NATO not to bomb the army barracks there. Whatever is left of Albanians, they put them in the army barracks. "The good houses that are still standing, and there aren't too many, are occupied by the soldiers and the police and the special forces. The other houses, the Serbs invited the gypsies to live there. "The Serbs hate gypsies. But they hate us more. A very big insult. Our family has lived there for 300 years." Some 35,000 documented ethnic Albanian refugees have struggled their way into Macedonia in the last eight days. They've lost their homes, their jobs, their neighborhoods, and their way of life. All they have left are their horror stories. Visar Muharremi tells of a particularly dark night on Tuesday in his home town of Kossova Polje when masked Serbian police pounded on his door and ordered the family out of the house. His father, Ajet, a film director, refused to leave. "They shot him right at the front door," Muharremi says. He says more than 20 neighbors were executed that night. "My grandfather came the next day to put my father in a grave," Muharremi says as he stands at the border, waiting for word on his mother and other relatives. The minister for internal affairs in Macedonia, Pavle Trayanov, confirmed yesterday what we all suspected: "This is the beginning of a humanitarian catastrophe and I'm not quite sure how many people we can take." It is hard to grasp that behind this valley of misery is a fair and honest estimate of 100,000 human beings in a four-mile column. This is where a train drops the refugees. Ljulje Sicani is here with her son Veton, who knows how to respond in English when he is asked his name and knows how to say he is 5 years old. But what his mother says is monstrous. "They tell us we have to stay on the railway track because if you go left or right, it is mined." That's unlikely, but who is going to gamble it's a bluff? I am supposed to be of average intelligence. What I see today tells me I'm not. I am supposed to be average in street smarts. What I see today, tells me I'm not too smart. I'm supposed to be half-assed religious. I am not. I cannot conceive that one human would do this to another as we look into the 21st century. |
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and remember the soldiers fighting for them |
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