World’s Muslims Did a Better Job Getting Relief to Kosovars Than in Telling World About It

By Delinda C. Hanley

When a visitor to a Kosovo refugee camp says Arabish, the Albanian word for Arab, there is an immediate response of respect and gratitude. The Kosovars will never forget the helping hands and the outpouring of humanitarian support from Arab countries, the Khaleej Times of Dubai noted in a May 25 article, though news of these good deeds rarely reaches the Western press.

While most refugees have left the camps to return home, those who remain are the most vulnerable—the sick, poor and elderly. International relief organizations have dubbed the United Arab Emirates camp for 10,000 of the 120,000 Kosovar refugees in Kukes, near Albania’s border with Kosovo, the “five-star refugee camp.” UAE Armed Forces personnel guard the camp around the clock, preventing the crimes that have plagued many other camps. The UAE camp also offers social and educational services along with food and shelter. Children and teenagers are provided playgrounds and schools staffed by fellow Kosovo refugees. The camp includes a hospital and even teaches nursing skills to Kosovar women. Films, news and cartoons are shown in an open area of the camp.

UAE Armed Forces also rebuilt a World War II runway near Kukes in record time and provided a control tower to make it capable of landing large cargo planes with relief supplies, even compensating farmers for the land used, and paying for all the equipment.

To add to state-sponsored support, UAE President Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan urged UAE private citizens and the expatriate communities to dig deep into their pockets to help Kosovo refugees, in accordance with the Islamic obligation to donate to the needy. The results have been startlingly generous, but since it also is considered bad form for Muslims to discuss their charitable giving, accounts of this Muslim aid are hard to find in the Middle Eastern press, and go virtually unmentioned in the Western media. Nevertheless, many such instances can be gleaned from English-language newspapers published in the Middle East (see pp. 6-10 in the July/August Washington Report on Middle East Affairs).

By May 27 Mansour Saleem, a young Pakistani manager of a garment company in Sharjah, UAE, had collected 15,000 ready-made garments worth $45,000 and a truck full of food to give UAE’s Red Crescent Society, the Khaleej Times reported. He hoped to collect a total of 50,000 garments from other garment factories in the UAE. Saleem had already collected clothes for victims of the Colombian earthquake earlier this year. Also in the UAE, students at Zayed University for women in Abu Dhabi collected $94,000 in a single day at a charity benefit that included arts and crafts, dancing and music, physical and mental games, and a popular henna parlor.

On the governmental level, the UAE decided in May to send military units to join the NATO and U.N. peacekeeping forces in Kosovo. The UAE had previously provided peacekeeping help in both Lebanon and Somalia. The UAE units included women soldiers, which inspired the Arab News of Jeddah to extoll the value of assigning women to such peacekeeping forces. The June 17 article referred to a recent British ad campaign to increase the enlistment of women, noting that when a woman has recently suffered indignities at the hands of male soldiers, the last thing she wants to see is another soldier unless that soldier is a woman.

The article noted that, in many cultures, women are prohibited from talking to male strangers, so practical difficulties may arise when peacekeeping contingents do not include women. In recent operations just 1.7 percent of the U.N. peacekeepers have been female, yet in almost any conflict, 80 percent of refugees are women and children. The article concluded that peacekeeping soldiers should include more women, like the UAE female soldiers who provide a conciliatory, patient, and peaceful influence on their fellow soldiers in international operations.

Saudi Arabia had sent $45 million worth of relief supplies to the Kosovars by June 26, Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Suwailem, president of the Saudi Red Crescent Society and chairman of the Joint Relief Committee for Kosovo, told the Arab News. Now a daily Saudi cargo plane is providing more supplies to help people inside Kosovo. On July 2 the Saudi Gazette reported that the Hammad Medical Services company in Riyadh had sent ten tons of relief materials for infants worth $1,814,400.

In addition to supporting a Saudi field hospital, camps, and health centers across Albania, early on in the conflict the Kingdom began planning for the return of the Kosovars to their homes. Refugees were taught how to avoid mines and booby-traps left behind by the Serbs, and sociologists conducted programs to help refugees deal with the heartbreak of returning to destruction and loss. Saudi authorities also provided tents to shelter the returning refugees inside Kosovo while they rebuild their homes.

A Joint Relief Committee made up of seven Saudi nongovernmental organizations is operating 50 buses to transport refugees back to their homes. The committee has also received donations worth $22.5 million that have been earmarked to reconstruct Kosovo mosques and schools and support children orphaned in the war. The Jeddah-based International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), a member of the joint relief committee, shipped enough food supplies to feed 172,000 refugees for two weeks on June 25. The IIRO is sponsoring 20,000 refugees, including 6,000 who remain in its three camps in Albania.

The World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), which is continuing to collect donations from Saudis for the reconstruction of Kosovo, also has organized a sponsorship program under which individuals can fund a Kosovar child for $80 a month.

The Qatari Charitable Society was one of the first to help Kosovar families inside the country after the withdrawal of the Serbian forces. The society sent an ambulance and 500 cartons of foodstuffs and has pledged to send ready-made houses in a recent agreement with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the Saudi Gazette reported July 2.

A Web site called ArabicNews.Com lists the following donations from the Middle East as of May 1999: Kuwait’s solidarity day collected $13 million; Qatar raised $4 million and a half-ton of gold; Sudan donated $104,000. Egypt, Yemen, Iran, Jordan, Bahrain, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar all sent varying large totals of medicines and goods.

While little news of the aid given by Muslims can be found in the mainstream press, there have been numerous articles published in American newspapers (and even one in the May 18 Khaleej Times of Dubai in the UAE) about the Israeli-run youth center in a refugee camp in Brazda, Macedonia. Israelis have donated five tons of paper, coloring books and watercolors to children in this camp who spent their time drawing, dancing, studying, and playing ball. “We don’t think anything about Serbs or Albanians or Muslims,” volunteer Eran Brautman told reporters from the Los Angeles Times. “We just love the children.”

A Cultural Reluctance

While the total contributions of such American Jewish organizations as the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) for Kosovar relief; American Jewish Committee; United Jewish Communities for the relief activities of the JDC and the Jewish Agency; American Jewish World Service and other coalitions of Jewish organizations have reached almost $7 million, according to a June 18 article in The Jewish Week of New York, Muslim-American charity figures are not publicized. Phone calls by the writer to various Muslim charitable organizations in the U.S., including the Holy Land Foundation, Mercy International, Islamic Relief, Life for Relief and Development, Islamic Circle of North America, and Global Relief indicate that Muslim groups have raised well over $8 million in the United States, although there seems to be a cultural reluctance to publicize or be specific about this. Large sums have also been donated by U.K. Muslims.

An examination of the CNN Web site yields widely varying totals of aid to Kosovars from a variety of countries: Japan has provided $15 million in aid. Britain donated $500,000 to the International Red Cross; Denmark more than $1 million; Norway $2.7 million; Italy helped the Albanian government provide shelter for 20,000 refugees; Switzerland delivered tents for 5,000 people; the European Union released $10.7 million for humanitarian aid. Not a single Arab country is listed as a donor by CNN, despite the fact that the UAE effort, at least, was perhaps the most widely discussed among humanitarian relief workers themselves.

Muslim relief organizations are continuing to work outside the limelight, and have joined other organizations like the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the International Committees for the Red Cross and the Red Crescent to help returning refugees winterize shelters, rebuild schools and mosques, decontaminate water supplies and restore electrical power. All the relief groups are helping to provide medical and counseling support as well as continuing to provide food for a countryside that missed its planting season.

The World Food Program is currently planning to feed 1.5 million beneficiaries, said Alice Spring, a spokeswoman for the U.N. agency in the Macedonian capital of Skopje. “We expect to need 1,000 tons of food per day,” Spring said.

A donor’s conference convened by the European Commission and the World Bank was scheduled for Brussels July 28. Rebuilding Kosovo will take an estimated three years, and officials say peace will cost much more than did the war. More than $31 billion will be needed for reconstruction, humanitarian aid, and repatriation of refugees to Kosovo and to help neighboring countries that suffered in the war.

President Bill Clinton has said that since the United States bore the main cost of the NATO war to drive Serb troops from Kosovo ($2.6 billion, or $60 million a day), other countries should pick up most of the bill for a major reconstruction. While the U.S. would help with humanitarian aid, such as rebuilding hospitals, in Serbia, Clinton has said the U.S. would not want to contribute to rebuilding Serbian infrastructure such as bridges and roads so long as Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is in power. Britain has expressed the same reservation, but some other European nations are less inclined to distinguish between reconstruction efforts in Serbia and in Kosovo and nearby countries affected by the Kosovo fighting.

Although their humanitarian efforts have gone largely unnoticed outside the Balkans and the Middle East, the world’s Muslims can take pride in their generosity. Their governments also deserve praise not only for organizing the relief shipments but for getting them where and when they were desperately needed. What still needs work is the ability and willingness of these governments to let the world know what they are doing, and give their own citizens credit for a good job, well done.

Delinda C. Hanley is the news editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.