UAE Sets the Pace in Kosovar Refugee Relief With Construction of Camp, Field Hospital and Airport

By JoMarie Fecci

At first glance the row upon row of tents seem no different than those of the other refugee camps in the Kukes area of Albania. The most visible signs of difference are the children, wearing clean new T-shirts with “UAE” emblazoned across their chests. But for refugees housed here, the so-called “Arab Camp” provides a haven and, it seems, far more than just an opportunity to wash the dust off the families’ belongings.

The United Arab Emirates Red Crescent Society camp is a model of comparative cleanliness and order. Refugees in this northern Albanian border town often refer to it as the “best” camp, and many queue up for a place inside. Gjevdet Berisha, a 52-year-old Kosovar from Prizen, who had just arrived with his family two days earlier, said, “I imagined the conditions would be terrible, but we are lucky. They are responsible and here the camp is good. We thank them for their aid and contributions.”

While the people of many nations have come together to help the Kosovars, the UAE’s frontline assistance has been a model of efficiency that includes more than just the border camp. One of the few non-NATO countries to have taken such an active role in the humanitarian effort, the UAE has mobilized both financial aid and teams of field workers quickly, and focused their relief effort to meet the most urgent needs.

In the first days of the crisis, the situation on the border near Kukes became, according to Human Rights Watch, “dire with almost no emergency supplies and few international humanitarian aid workers in the area to assist thousands of exhausted refugees crossing the border every hour.” The refugees had been on the road for several days without adequate food or water. They were arriving in Albania in desperate need of warm clothes, food, medication, and shelter.

The UAE Red Crescent Society (RCS) immediately began an intensive effort to raise funds for the fleeing refugees. The multifaceted campaign was carried out by RCS and others such as Médecins Sans Frontières, and from charities within individual emirates of the UAE, including Dubai Al Khayriyah (Welfare) Association, Al Fujairah Charitable Society, Charity International Sharjah and Human Appeal International Ajman. It eventually grew to include direct mail solicitations, telethons, volunteers collecting donations in shopping malls, school fund-raisers organized by students, and a direct appeal by Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, wife of UAE President Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi.

Supplies and money quickly poured in, and the UAE RCS set a policy of airlifting the material as soon as it had enough cargo for each planeload of approximately 38 tons. The first aircraft carrying tents, blankets, clothing, medicine and food, arrived in Tirana, the Albanian capital, in early April—just a week after the launch of the fund-raising appeal. French army helicopters, which had been stationed in Bosnia as part of the peacekeeping force there (SFOR), began ferrying the desperately-needed international aid to Kukes as rapidly as it arrived.

The UAE, and the NATO member countries with whom it was cooperating, began putting up tent camps near Kukes to shelter the Kosovars temporarily. According to a UAE RCS worker at the camp, “When we first got here we worked for 10 days with almost no sleep to get it up and running.” The camp would grow to include a fully-equipped field hospital by the end of April.

With the security situation in the border areas continuing to deteriorate, the relief effort was forced into almost total reliance on the Tirana-Kukes airbridge. And the helicopters ferrying humanitarian aid, which soon included four UAE armed forces’ Puma helicopters, were already working at full capacity.

So the UAE sent members of its own armed forces to Kukes to convert and old World War II-era airstrip into an international airport capable of handling large aircraft to speed the flow of by now massive shipments of aid. According to Fares Al Mazroui, head of the UAE mission in Tirana, the UAE-renovated and expanded airport, completed on May 6, is capable of receiving 150 tons of aid a day. It has a 3,000-foot runway and soon will have a mobile control tower and an area for storing cargo.

At the airport’s inuauguration, the Albanian prime minister expressed the gratitude of the Albanian government and people to the UAE, adding, “This airport has been completed in record time. It surely would have taken longer if it had been built by the international community.”

Volunteers returning to the UAE from the camps at Kukes brought renewed urgency to the fund-raising effort at home with grim tales of the horrors suffered by the Kosovars. “They are running for their lives,” Abdul Karim Mohammed of Human Appeal International told the UAE’s Gulf News Agency. “Their families are scattered and they do not have any information about their lost relatives, including little children. They reached the camps in complete chaos and in a state of trauma.” Mohammed recounted how women delivered babies at the border without medical aid, and many arriving refugees were suffering from exhaustion, trauma, respiratory problems, infections and diarrhea.

After renewed Serb ethnic cleansing operations in Prizen, 11,000 new refugees poured through the Morina border post, near Kukes, during a 24-hour period starting May 2. Suddenly, despite the creation of additonal places at the UAE camp, it again was filled to capacity by May 7 with 8,000 refugees, and the camp hospital was treating 450 patients a day.

By this time the number of Kosovars in Kukes exceeded 100,000, and the overcrowded tent camps faced water shortages. Yet people were still reluctant to leave for the south, fearing that the farther they traveled from their homes in Kosovo, the harder it would be to return.

The aid organizations began focusing on new problems. For example, the influx of refugees into Albania had overstretched the entire country’s capacity for making bread—the main staple of the Kosovars’ daily meal. One of the NGOs therefore bought machinery for a bakery to increase the supply of bread available for distribution. The new machinery is able to produce 720 loaves per hour.

With this problem alleviated, the UAE’s camp hospital began a preventative health program, and in six tents to one side of the camp, UNICEF set up the first of its Child-Friendly Spaces, which aim to help children begin their return to normality by providing opportunities for play and study as soon as possible after their arrival in the camp.

The movement of refugees to the south remained an issue. Though the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) was able to evacuate some refugees from the camps each day, these were for the most part new arrivals with their own transportation. By mid-May, it was becoming increasingly difficult to convince other refugees—some of whom had been in Kukes for over a month—to move away from the dangerous border area.

The UAE therefore began, in coordination with UNHCR, to investigate the possibility of moving its entire camp south, complete with camp management, staff and equipment. UAE Maj. Obaid Al Ketbi, commander of the Kukes camp, said the aim was “to provide the refugees with security and the right conditions to live in relative comfort.”

Now, as the emergency relief needs continue into a third month, the UAE remains in the forefront of the relief effort. It has announced that UAE RCS will begin setting up new camps as soon as suitable sites and security conditions are identified.

Cementing the UAE committment to the Kosovars, the UAE Armed Forces chief of staff also announced, on May 12, that the UAE will participate in whatever international peacekeeping force eventually moves into Kosovo to supervise the return of refugees to their homes.

JoMarie Fecci is a free-lance photojournalist based in the New York metropolitan area.