I remember reading somewhere that an international organization was putting together a database of refugees - most likely it was the Red Cross or UN High Commission for Refugees. Check their Web sites for info. I don't know if anything has been put up on the Web yet. Sounded like they were struggling just to get it onto laptops there.
I have read so much on Kosovo in the past month that I just can't rattle my brain enough to remember more. Sorry.
You could try the group who will help in the US, Interaction (http://www.interaction.org). They should know something about how the refugees were registered.
Here is an article on how some refugees are getting out - sounds like chaos, but that is often unavoidable i a situation like this.
Luck of the Refugee 'Lotto'
People in Camps Wait to Be Tapped for Flights to Third Country
By William Booth and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 24, 1999; Page A17
BRAZDA, Macedonia—Sali Prenici, a grandfatherly man with a big white mustache, was dressed in his cleanest clothes, waiting with his family at the dusty edges of this sprawling tent city of refugees from Kosovo. His long, strange journey was about to take another turn.
He had asked to go to Germany, but no such luck. Germany had fulfilled its pledge to take 10,000 refugees and had stopped accepting more, at least temporarily. Prenici was offered Poland.
That required some thought. It wasn't exactly disappointing, but Prenici, 61, a former clerk at an Albanian-language newspaper in Kosovo that was shut down by Serbian officials in 1991, didn't exactly feel uplifted, either.
"Okay," said Prenici. "If Poland will take me, I will go."
Some of the refugees here have begun to call the process of being chosen for transferal to third countries "the lotto." For more than a week, these countries have been taking in people from the seven Macedonian refugee camps, and to date more than 18,000 of the 136,000 registered by the Skopje government have been evacuated.
Many refugees here seem to expect to be released into the free world once they reach a third country, but in Germany, Poland and other prospective host nations, they will be confined to a different camp -- maybe better, maybe not.
Most of those who have left so far have gone to Germany, while another large group -- 4,100 -- has been sent to Turkey. Norway has taken 1,100, Belgium 676, Poland 635, France 628 and Austria 483. Israel, Iceland, Croatia and Switzerland also have taken a few dozen apiece.
Before Vice President Gore announced Wednesday that the United States would allow 20,000 Kosovo Albanians to live there with relatives, the best U.S. offer was for the same number to be housed at a site unappealingly listed on the registration form as "Guantanamo Camp" -- temporary quarters set up on the U.S. naval base at the tip of Cuba. It was still unclear how many refugees ultimately would take up the latest U.S. offer; when Guantanamo was one the refugees' choices, only .3 percent of the initial registrants -- a total of 25 people in two families -- listed it as their top pick.
Relief organizations are trying to ensure that those in greatest need get the first seats on planes to other countries. Ideally, these are the sick, the pregnant, families with babies or those called "the vulnerable people" -- women or old people without families or relatives to take care of them in the camps, where the daily grind consists largely of standing in long lines, sometimes for hours, for food, toilet paper and other necessities.
But it is, still, a lottery -- sometimes a strange one. Many refugees list Germany as their first choice because a large number of Kosovo Albanians have relatives who work at menial jobs there. "I think they believe that Germany is a cool place to go," said Rafael Robillard, a coordinator here with the U.N. International Organization for Migration.
So attractive is the idea of being moved to prosperous Western Europe that guards at the camps have caught some Macedonians attempting to sneak in so they can register for the flights to Germany. But the reality is that many refugees there are garrisoned behind barbed-wire fences at Spartan military bases that were abandoned at the end of the Cold War.
"I hope they are aware that they are going to another camp," said Hein Peter Albrecht of the 55-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, himself a German. But they are not.
Prenici had no idea what to expect when the bus arrived to take him to the airport and the flight to Poland. But he liked what he saw -- a nice clean vehicle with big windows and plush seats. "So far, so good," he said. "It's a start." As for what awaited him in Poland, Prenici hoped it would include a bed and a hot shower. He said he hopes that his son, who works in Germany, could come to Poland to get him.
"I don't think these people understand they're going to another refugee center," said Safet Begoli, 35, a physician who worked at a factory clinic in Kosovo. Begoli had been waiting to see if he and his family -- including his wife, who is seven months pregnant -- would be ticketed out of Brazda, a tent city overflowing with more than 20,000 refugees.
"I put down on the forms Germany, Austria, Turkey and wherever," Begoli said. "I appreciate all that NATO has done, do not misunderstand me. I am not complaining. But this is no place for a family, no place for children and pregnant wives."
A fundamental principle of refugee-care agencies is that no one who is forced from his country should be forced again to a place they do not wish to go. But the exodus from Kosovo has been so immense that only a small fraction of the refugees who made it to Macedonia can be sent to a country of their choosing.
Until the past couple of days, refugee flights out of Macedonia had been proceeding far more slowly than the rate at which people were arriving from Kosovo. The result was that the seven Macedonian refugee camps were stuffed well beyond their capacities, with far more than the normally prescribed standard of no more than 5,000 people in any temporary shelter.
"We're way stretched," said Edward Joseph, an official of Catholic Relief Services, which recently assumed control of the Brazda camp. |
