Sunday, April 25, 1999
DISPATCH FROM KOSOVO
Serb-Run Hospitals Hold Fate of Infants Left Behind
By PAUL WATSON, ELIZABETH SHOGREN, Times
Staff Writers
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia--When the order came to get
out of Kosovo, many ethnic Albanians had to leave
behind what they loved most, even if that was a
newborn child. The soldiers, police and paramilitaries
who drove them from this Serbian province, some
disguised in black masks, weren't very sympathetic to
a mother's pleas for a little more time to get her baby
from the hospital. Some of the infants were too small
to be moved safely anyway, so theil be reunited with the
parents who were forced to abandon them. For now,
they are in the hands of fate, and of Serbian medical
staffers like Mirjana Rascanin. She swore long ago to
care for all of her patients, no matter how they came
into the world, or her ward, and that is what she is
acedonia. She cries every
day. She knows the name of baby #1127 in
Rascanin's registry. He is Kushtrim, her son, who was
born two months premature, at 4 pounds, 6 ounces,
on March 19. Two weeks after Gajtani gave birth to
Kushtrim, Serbian paramilitary forces came to the
family's home in Pristina, Kosovo's provincial capital,
and ordered them to leave immediately. Gajtani
begged them to let her collect her baby first, but they
old her they didn't care about the infant. Like
thousands of other ethnic Albanians in the city, Gajtani
and her husband, Hyzri, had to join a column of people
walking solemnly to the rail station, where they were
loaded onto trains and deported. When they reached
the border, Hyzri wanted to turn around and go back to
Pristina for Kushtrim, their firstborn. But his wife talked
him out of it. "I didn't let him because the road was full
of police," she said in an interview at the Brazda camp.
Gajtani reported the missing baby to the International
Committee of the Red Cross two weeks ago, but each
time she has checked with the group at her camp,
she's been told they have no information. Along with
all but a few Greek relief agencies, the Red Cross
evacuated its staff from Kosovo, so the first news
Gajtani heard of her baby came from a foreign
journalist. The couple have registered to go to
Germany, Austria or Sweden, but they worry that if they
leave the Brazda camp, it will be even more difficult for
them to be reunited with their son. As Kushtrim grows
older, he also gets closer to being declared officially
abandoned and then, when he is too old for the
maternity ward, sent off to an orphanage. Kushtrim
has put on the weight he needed to get out of an
incubator--and then some--and now he sleeps and
eats with the rest of the babies under the care of
Rascanin and her nurses. She has heard reports
coming from outside Kosovo that claim the Pristina
hospital staff has mistreated ethnic Albanian patients
or kicked them out altogether, and she can't just shrug
them off as war propaganda. "It hurts me very much
when I hear this," she said. "I'm trying to be a
professional every single moment. "God is watching
all this, including those who report on this
unprofessionally and those of us who are doing our
jobs professionally." Each night, when the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization's bombers usually attack
targets in and around Pristina, the nurses carry the
babies down to an underground bomb shelter. They
make enough warm milk for the night and keep the
babies as close together as they can, because the
shelter is cold, and then carry them all back up to the
ward after sunrise. NATO's daytime bombing in the
vicinity of the capital has increased over the last couple
of days, so the risk and the tension are constant. After
a bomb blast just outside Pristina, people on the
second floor of one hospital building could feel the
entire structure shaking Saturday, and the windows
rattled. That's a regular event, and it's not very healthy
for babies, especially in a maternity ward with large
windows that shatter easily, Rascanin said. "It's
awful," she said. "Children are screaming, and there
are detonations here, and then over there, so we don't
know where to take them." In the ward where 22
civilian bombing victims are recovering from shrapnel
wounds to arms and legs, all but one of the patients
are ethnic Albanians. Six of them are from one family.
Sehrija Vojvoda lies in one bed, breast-feeding her
6-month-old baby, Rilidona, while her children Albert,
3, Bedzet, 5, Mentor, 13, and Valdeta, 15, lie nearby
recovering from arm and leg wounds. Her son Sefcet,
7, is all alone with severe internal injuries in a room on
another floor. His mother says the family members
were all injured soon after they heard planes above
their Srbica home about 10 a.m. on April 15. "We went
out to see what was happening, and suddenly a bomb
fell on our house," she said through an ethnic
Albanian nurse who acted as a translator. "There were
11 dead and 25 wounded." Saturday afternoon, the
hospital took in two more Kosovo Albanian children
who were injured after finding a yellow canister with
numbers on it in the field by their family's farm in
Doganovic, about 30 miles south of Pristina. To boys
tending cows, it looked like something fun to play with.
But it was an unexploded bomblet, one of several that
fell from a cluster bomb. It went off in the children's
faces. Five of them died, all from one family, and by 4
o'clock--just 4 1/2 hours later--the Koxha children were
buried in a grassy cemetery by a small brook near the
village. Their names were written in blue ink on
wooden stakes: Edon, 3, Fisnik, 9, Osman, 13, Burim,
14, and Valdet, 15. A small pool of coagulating blood
marked the spot where the bomblet blew up, tearing a
hole in the ground about 3 feet long and a couple of
inches deep and throwing the yellow canister about 30
yards. Just an hour after the cluster bomblet exploded,
something fell from the sky over the ethnic Albanian
village of Velika Dobranja, about 12 miles south of
Pristina. It smashed two small holes through the red
tile roof of one house, shot shrapnel into another and
destroyed a farmer's tractor in the neighbor's yard. The
shrapnel also killed Orta Lugici, age 6. His distraught
uncle Mehmet Lugici, 36, brought two other children to
Pristina's hospital, where one was listed in critical
condition Saturday night. "Please, God, let this war
end," the boy's uncle said. It was also a busy Saturday
in the maternity ward's delivery room, where three
children were born. One of the babies was a Serb, the
other two ethnic Albanians. Watson reported from
Pristina and Shogren from Skopje, Macedonia.
All of Paul Watson's dispatches from Kosovo are
available on The Times' Web site at
latimes.com.
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