Actually government salaries are not huge compared to the private sector. I could probably double my pay working in corporate PR. But that's beside the point.
This article tells the tragic story of Kosovar families being broken up. It also discusses a registration effort further down.
Kosovo Expulsions Break Families to Bits
Those Who Left Wait Anxiously in Albania for Relatives They Had to Leave Behind
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 25, 1999; Page A24
TIRANA, Albania—Neshet Haxhishabani wanders the streets of this city, a ghost in the crowd of money changers, beggars and children hawking cigarettes. Faces jump out at him and just as quickly recede. Each time the phone in his cousin's apartment rings he starts in anticipation and just as quickly sags into the depression that eats into his peace of mind.
The tranquilizers that were prescribed for him shortly after he arrived in Albania help only a little; they can't suppress the sobs that seem to consume his entire upper body. He bows his head, embarrassed by his tears. He fidgets constantly to suppress the tremble in his hands. His cousins look away.
"There is no information," said Haxhishabani, 46, a glass cutter. "She knows to try and come here, but she hasn't come."
Haxhishabani and his son, Besfort, are in Tirana, staying with cousins. But Haxhishabani is without his wife of nearly 20 years, Luljeta, 38, his daughter, Edita, 17, and his son, Besmiri, 13.
Haxhishabani doesn't know where they are. They may still be in the family's home in Djakovica, a town in southern Kosovo. They may be among the thousands of refugees trapped in the Serbian province. Or -- in a possibility Haxhishabani can't stop dwelling upon -- they may be dead.
They must be in Kosovo, Haxhishabani says, because if they had made it to Albania, they would know to call their relatives in Tirana. "If she was safe she would come here," Haxhishabani said. "But she has not come."
In the flood of more than 360,000 refugees expelled from Kosovo and now living in Albania, it is hard to find a Kosovo Albanian who knows the whereabouts of his relatives. Families have not only been displaced by the forced exodus, they have been broken.
"We have nothing to do all the days," said Fehim Goikolli, a lawyer from Pec, in western Kosovo, who is single and looking for his extended family. "We meet other Kosovars and exchange information. So many of our people are scattered. In most cases, families are broken up. You can't find a family that is whole."
Each day in Albanian newspapers and on Albanian television a roll call of the missing unfolds. The notices are without emotion -- lists of names and towns with a phone number where they can reach their kin should they read or hear the announcement.
The United Nations refugee agency and the Red Cross are about to begin a registration effort to list all the refugees and start the work of family reunification. It is a massive task, however, slowed until now by the more pressing needs to feed and shelter the refugees.
Even when registration begins, probably within the next three weeks, it will be months before it is complete. The registration process will also provide the refugees with documented legal status; most of them were stripped of their identity papers or passports when they were pushed out of Kosovo by Yugoslav troops and security forces.
In Kukes, Albania, near the Kosovo border, the Red Cross has set up two satellite phones to allow refugees one-minute calls to relatives anywhere in the world. At the nine telephone booths in the town, where the population has swollen from 20,000 to 120,000 in the past month, the wait to make a telephone call is hours. In allotments of three minutes, refugees desperately cram information about loved ones through the phone line.
"You can't do anything to help them until you do registration," said Ariane Quentier, a spokeswoman for the U.N. agency. "And registration has not started because we were dealing with such a large, fleeing population."
Once NATO bombing began on March 24, Haxhishabani and his older son slept in their home in Kosovo during the day and guarded it at night, never knowing what might happen or what they would do if something did.
On March 28, in the afternoon, Haxhishabani and his son were sleeping when his wife rushed into the room and shouted that the Serbs were coming.
"She was telling me, 'Go, go, go,' " said Haxhishabani, who said his wife feared the Yugoslav forces would target men. "It was decided in that moment."
Father and son jumped from a second-story back window and fled down an embankment to a river. They waded until they reached a village outside Djakovica, where they stayed for seven days before joining a column being marched to Albania.
They haven't seen or heard from the rest of the family since the day they left. "I just hope they are alive," Haxhishabani said.
Sabit Ballabani, 42, his wife, Violeta, 36, and their three children said their goodbyes to Violeta's parents, her brothers and their wives and children two weeks ago in Pristina, the Kosovo capital.
The Ballabanis lived in a Pristina neighborhood popular with international workers, and they moved to Violeta's parents' house when the bombing began because Serbian forces were torching buildings and searching house to house.
Sabit also feared he could be targeted for assassination because he was a founder of the Mother Teresa Society, an ethnic Albanian humanitarian organization that was subject to Serbian repression. A number of the society's rural clinics were torched by Yugoslav forces even before the bombing began.
"It was heartbreaking," Ballabani said of the farewell. "We had just one car, and it was decided we should go."
As they were about to pull away, Violeta's mother ran down. She handed her daughter a blanket for the children, touched her daughter's hand and wordlessly watched them leave.
The Ballabanis believe Violeta's parents, who are both in their seventies, remain in Pristina. Violeta was told by a relative in London that her brothers and their families are in Macedonia, having left a few days later. She hasn't been able to reach them, however. Sabit also doesn't know if his parents and sisters, who lived just outside Pristina, made it to safety.
"I don't go out at all," he said. "I just wait for the phone to ring."
Last week he got a call from a friend in Kukes who told him he thought he saw one of his sisters on a crowded street but lost sight of her before he could reach her.
"I said, 'Find her, look for her,' " Ballabani said, smiling for the first time. "This is good news. It is hope." |
