Rebuilding for Survival and Reconciliation in Kosovo: The Really Hard Part

By Alan Heil

“A walk in Mitrovica is a crash course in the problems facing Kosovo. First we visited a mosque. It had been burned to the ground. The destruction of religious buildings is part of the sad logic in this tragic war. The surprising thing was to find a man in the mosque’s ruins, praying. The image of the man on his knees praying in the gutted mosque will stay in the minds of all who saw it.”—Hans Marklund, U. S. reconstruction team leader

Most of the refugee camps have shut down. The camera crews have moved on to other world hotspots. The stories of human misery have given way to those about the unprecedented return of nearly all the Kosovar Albanian refugees. The war is over. But the really hard part is just beginning: rebuilding for peace and reconciliation in Kosovo as winter approaches.

War devastation is particularly acute in the city of Pec and surrounding villages in the western part of the province. A quarter of a million people live there, and in many neighborhoods, not a single dwelling remains intact. The zeal for reconstruction is remarkable. Some poor families who have returned there are rebuilding their homes, brick by brick, section by section, with lumber and other materials which are trickling slowly into the city over shattered roads. Often, they have only small savings to buy these things.

Pec, known as Peja to Kosovar Albanians, is 3,000 feet above sea level, and winter comes early for thousands still living in tents. For these residents and for international aid workers, it is a race against time. Winter housing kits, including plastic sheeting for makeshift roofs, are being trucked in. Freezing weather is expected around Oct. 1. Throughout the province, there is the plight, as well, of the Kosovar Serbs and Gypsies. Increasingly, they are victims of revenge attacks. Their homes have been torched by uncontrolled elements of the Kosovar Albanian community. Seven out of eight Kosovar Serbs have fled north to Serbia proper, fearing for their lives.

On the peacekeeping front, KFOR, the international NATO-led force, is trying to apprehend and prosecute Albanians who have taken retribution into their own hands, or the few remaining Serbs suspected of war crimes. Eventually, international and local police forces will be established to take up the task. On the reconstruction and healing front, dozens of international groups are joining with Kosovars to try to put their lives back together again.

Both governmental and non-governmental organizations are helping. These include the U. S. Agency for International Development (AID), Mercy Corps International, the European Union, and a private American organization called Action by Churches Together (ACT). They work with displaced persons who are glad to be home, but still recovering from the worst year of their lives: the death of loved ones in unspeakable Serb massacres...destruction of their homes and workplaces...torching and leveling of schools and mosques...traumas lingering from weeks of displacement and living in constant fear of death.

These teams of Kosovars and international aid workers face daunting challenges:

reconstruction or rehabilitation of the homes and buildings, where sometimes only a chimney remains;
providing water systems in villages and towns, where wells have been polluted with corpses of cattle or even people;
turning the lights back on, where power plants are charred testaments to war’s explosive bolts of lightning from the air and on the ground;
training in mine awareness, where farmers till the soil and little children run and play in the tall but perilous grass near the roadways;
healing the trauma those youngsters and their parents have suffered, where memories are seared by what they see today and what they experienced just a few months ago.

AID’s Office of Transition Initiatives has been convening town and village councils to elicit views on priorities for rebuilding. Among its tasks: cleaning up three miles of the river front in Peja, and locating a fleet of buses to improve public transport in that city. AID also is replacing water pumps in Prizren, increasing local water supplies there by 20 to 30 percent. In another town, Ferizaj, local and AID workers have restored telephone services to 2,000 houses, started work on restoring the town’s electrical grid, and reactivated a local animal feed mixing plant that can enable hundreds of farmers to get back on their feet. Teams have rebuilt 15 classrooms in an elementary school in Gjilan.

Meanwhile, Action by Churches Together has shifted its efforts from the camps to the villages of Kosovo. Originally, ACT and the other non-governmental organizations were building winterized shelters in Albania to accommodate the refugees. ACT is still doing this work, but the sturdy shelters are now portable. They can be taken apart and hauled wherever necessary as winter comes.

Kids Care is among the principal programs of the Presbyterian Church (USA), which has contributed more than $1,000,000 and considerable volunteer talent to ACT. That program consists of reading and playing games with youngsters, designed to help them overcome the trauma of war, as well as to make up this summer for weeks of school missed during a winter and spring of conflict and dislocation. There are four Kids Care teams, originally assigned to the camps but now quickly surveying and fanning out all over Kosovo to serve returning families.

Seldom recognized heroes and heroines of the Kosovo tragedy of 1999 are the many desperately poor families in Albania and Macedonia who took in their Albanian-speaking kinsmen during the peak of the refugee crisis. Their generosity is awe-inspiring. Seventy percent of Albanians are without jobs, and the per capita income in that country is $1,300 a year and falling. Yet a mark of pride, as Albanians families took in thousands of refugees from Kosovo, was the number of shoes on the doorsteps of crowded Albanian homes and towns close to the border.

The churches have recognized this, and are giving assistance to some of those families who took in strangers from across the border. “The value of a church-based emergency program,” says Susan Ryan, director of Presbyterian Church (USA) disaster assistance, “is that we can focus on a host community as well as a refugee community...we have the freedom to work on recovery issues with both groups.”

And there are thousands of others whose plight the world tends to overlook. More than 170,000 Serbs have fled northward from Kosovo since the Yugoslav army and Serb paramilitaries withdrew. Most were innocent civilians, whose families had lived in Kosovo for generations but who now must pay, in what they see as a forced relocation, for the war crimes of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his paramilitary death squads. Church World Service has provided about $125,000 worth of blankets and ACT is building temporary shelters in southern Serbia for 1,500 Serb families as a modest start in meeting their relief needs.

Monumental challenges lie ahead. As the bitter winds begin their seasonal descent on Kosovo, the determination of those in need there to quickly rebuild their lives is a moving one. New York Times correspondent Steven Erlanger relates the story of 71-year-old Hajri Gjota of Peja, who has hired some workers to put a temporary roof over the first floor of what had been a relatively lavish two-story home. Gjota ponders his good fortune: he is lucky to be alive, to have money from relatives abroad to buy building materials, to be able to afford even this modest reconstruction. But of Kosovar Albanians hammering away to restore his roof he notes: “Their houses are burned, too….Who will help them? They’re earning money just to get bread and shelter.”

Contributions to assist in Kosovo relief may be sent to Church World Service, 1627 Monument Ave., Richmond, VA 23220, or to Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, 100 Witherspoon St., Louisville, KY 40202-1396.

Alan Heil, a former deputy director of the Voice of America, traveled twice to Bosnia and Croatia in 1998: in April as a member of a Presbyterian (USA) peacemaking study mission, and in September as an OSCE election supervisor in Bosnia.

SIDEBAR

A Doorway to the Future?

Presbyterian Brett McMichael of the Evangelical Seminary in Osijek, Croatia, tells how church workers are helping a new generation. “Refugee children,” he says, “are in an extremely vulnerable position. Recreation helps them to deal with the harshness of life as well as develop, physically and mentally. Art permits children to work through their painful experiences...these activities encourage them to build new friendships, the source of a new social support system.”