Newsweek: 'Mass Death May Be Imminent' In Kosovo
PR Newswire - May 02, 1999 14:16
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Author David Rieff: Conflict 'May Well Signal the Death of Humanitarianism'
NEW YORK, May 2 /PRNewswire/ -- With some 820,000 internally displaced people inside
Kosovo, many, if not most, corralled into pockets by Serb security forces and "largely cut off from
any sources of food or supplies," the threat of starvation is looming, according to NATO military
chief Wesley Clark. Jennifer Leaning of the group Physicians for Human Rights is much more blunt:
"Mass death may be imminent."
(Photo: newscom.com )
Though the Kosovo Liberation Army has won praise for diverting some of its food supplies to aid
homeless refugees, several KLA regional commanders inside Kosovo tell Newsweek that their food
supplies are running out. One KLA official in northeastern Kosovo said that "If we don't get [outside
support] soon, it will be bad."
In a related guest essay, David Rieff, author of "Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West,"
analyzes Kosovo's impact on humanitarian organizations: "A conflict that was undertaken on
humanitarian and human-rights grounds may well signal the death of humanitarianism as a movement
that can set the agenda of international politics." He argues that humanitarian workers have learned in
recent conflicts in Africa and southeastern Europe that "they had become logisticians to the war
efforts of belligerents." By freeing warlords from concerns of feeding their supporters, humanitarian
workers unwillingly aid the conflict.
In the essay, which appears in the May 10 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, May 3)
Rieff says that in Kosovo "Only NATO, and certainly not the relief agencies, can resolve the
worsening refugee crisis." Kosovo will provide a lesson for crises yet to come, he asserts: "In future
disasters the central role will be played by private companies that have the expertise and
governments that have the power."
(Story Follows)
In Kosovo, Fear and Hunger
Starvation stalks the thousands still stuck inside
By Rod Nordland
The men never venture out of their shuttered homes, for fear of being summarily executed. Women
know they could be raped. So ethnic Albanians who have not been routed from their homes in
Kosovo send children out to the few food stores that are still open or to stand in bread lines. There
is little on sale in the shops. And many merchants will sell only to Serbs. "If you want to buy bread,
ask Clinton," refugees say they were told. One said he had bought a loaf of bread and as soon as he
left the store, a policeman grabbed it and said, "Go to Albania if you want bread."
Albanians trapped inside Kosovo now face an insidious new enemy: hunger. "We figure now there
are some 820,000 internally displaced people inside Kosovo, many, if not most, corralled into
pockets by Serb security forces, largely cut off from any sources of food or supplies," said the
NATO military chief, Wesley Clark. Refugees who crossed into Albania last week gave now
familiar, but still terrifying, accounts of growing hardship -- rape and mass executions. But growing
reports of widespread hunger are what most alarm relief officials.
Starvation could kill many more than Slobodan Milosevic's dreaded militias can. The last normal
harvest in Kosovo was in 1997. War disrupted last year's and this year's plantings, and Serb troops
regularly destroy granaries. Before the NATO bombing campaign began six weeks ago, 210,000
people were already surviving entirely on relief supplies. World Food Program food stocks in
Kosovo on the eve of the war, 3,000 metric tons of wheat, would only have been enough to feed
people for a week. "For those living outdoors, we don't know how they've survived this long," said
WFP spokesman Trevor Rowe. "In fact, we don't really know if they have survived."
Malnourished people have begun pitching up on the frontiers. On April 23, a team working for the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees hiked 10 hours up to the snowbound village of
Lipkova on the Macedonian border. There they found 500 newly arrived refugees who had fled
over the mountains because their food had run out and the normal border crossing was closed.
"Many of the children appeared to be unconscious, others were too exhausted to talk or even eat,"
the UNHCR reported. The refugees said seven children and two elderly people had died from
exposure on the way. A group of Albanian physicians who escaped Kosovo called for immediate air
drops of food supplies, according to Jennifer Leaning of the Boston-based group Physicians for
Human Rights. "Mass death may be imminent," she said. But both NATO and U.N. agencies have
ruled out such air drops because relief planes would be vulnerable to Serb antiaircraft fire.
Western military analysts give the Kosovo Liberation Army high points for diverting its resources to
protect the homeless. But the guerrillas' own food is now running out, according to several of their
regional commanders inside Kosovo contacted by NEWSWEEK via satellite phone. In the Shala
district in northern Kosovo, about 40,000 refugees left KLA protection, risking death or
deportation, to try to find something to eat in the looted homes they had fled. "If we don't get
[outside support] soon, it will be bad," a KLA official in northeastern Kosovo said. A diplomatic
source who visited the town of Podujevo in eastern Kosovo reported that some 25,000 Albanians
had just returned from KLA territory. "They were exhausted, hungry, and their hygiene was
appalling," he said. At night he could hear what he thought were people foraging for food in nearby
fields.
Fleeing remains just as perilous. Stories of casual brutality are common. Zhura, a village where many
refugees begin a final, 10-mile trek to the Albanian border, features in many of these. According to
three separate eyewitness accounts gathered recently by the Albanian Human Rights Group, the
driver of a Serb armored car deliberately ran over a 4-year-old refugee boy who dared to run out of
line to get a drink of water, and police prevented the mother from running to her dead son's side. His
mangled body lay by the road, just a short distance from the border, safety and nourishment.
With JOSHUA HAMMER and GENC CAUSHI in Kukes, STRYKER MCGUIRE in Blace,
MARK DENNIS in Belgrade andJULIETTE TERZIEFF in Skopje
The Death of a Good Idea
Kosovo is Teaching Relief Workers a Bitter Lesson:
There are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems.
By David Rieff
When we think of the phenomenon the military rather primly call collateral damage, we usually think
of civilian casualties and shattered buildings. But ideas can be destroyed as well. The war over
Kosovo offers ample proof. A conflict that was undertaken on humanitarian and human-rights
grounds may well signal the death of humanitarianism as a movement that can set the agenda of
international politics.
On the surface, events in Kosovo seem to dictate the opposite conclusion. After all, NATO's first
"hot" war in its 50-year history was not undertaken as an act of self-defense in any conventional
sense, nor out of any treaty obligation. The war is being fought, as President Clinton rightly said at
the NATO summit in Washington, to prevent "the slaughter of innocents on [NATO's] doorstep."
And yet in prosecuting this war, the ideals of humanitarian action as they have been painfully
developed over the past three decades have been challenged, and their limits exposed.
Modern humanitarianism dates not from the 19th century and the founding of the Red Cross, but
rather from the Biafran war of 1967, when the Nigerian Army prevented relief supplies from getting
through to secessionist areas. It was then that a few young French physicians formed Doctors
Without Borders. They were indignant at the implacable neutrality the Red Cross insisted on
maintaining, and convinced that the conflict required moral activism. Contemporary humanitarianism's
creed was not to bring "development," or to offer relief as the Red Cross had done; the idea, rather,
was to look after civilians displaced, injured or traumatized by war, and to bear witness to atrocities.
Young activists jettisoned the discretion of the Red Cross, publicized what the Nigerians were doing
and hoped to pressure and shame the governments of the rich world to act.
Organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International used much the same tactics. And
for more than 20 years they worked brilliantly. With the end of the cold war, however, the limitations
of this kind of activism -- client states may no longer do what Washington or Brussels tells them --
have become apparent.
Humanitarian workers have found themselves in a cruel dilemma. They thought that bringing aid to
suffering people was an unimpeachably good thing to do; but in places like Ethiopia, the Congo and
Bosnia, they discovered to their horror that they had become logisticians to the war efforts of
belligerents. If a warlord knows that he can depend on a relief agency to feed his civilian population,
he may be freer to act solely on the basis of his military imperatives. It is not that the relief workers
were acting in bad faith. To the contrary, whether it was in the camps of central Africa or in
Sarajevo, they were in a lose-lose situation and they knew it. But though the discovery of these
contradictions quickly became the subject of anguished debate within the aid community, the public
retained the impression that humanitarian action was a successful ingredient in international relations.
The Kosovo crisis demonstrates that we were kidding ourselves. It is one thing to insist that
humanitarians want to do good. It is another to believe that they have either the resources or the
power to do so. As one American aid worker in Albania told me recently, "You can't defeat ethnic
fascism of Milosevic's stripe with humanitarian aid. You have to do it with military force." And the
problem goes beyond the truth that groups like Doctors Without Borders and the International
Rescue Committee are not soldiers. Once the shooting started in Yugoslavia and the refugee exodus
began, the aid agencies found that all their traditional norms of neutrality and impartiality, like their
desire to be able to move across front lines, had been blown to pieces.
It was NATO that took care of the refugees in Albania and Macedonia. Only a military organization
had the money, the logistical capability and the political muscle to build camps for hundreds of
thousands. If NATO were to withdraw from the camps in Macedonia, where the Kosovar refugees
are hated by the ethnic Macedonian majority, a new catastrophe would be all but a certainty. The
relief agencies, which seemed so essential only a decade ago, have functioned more like
subcontractors in this crisis -- a trend that is only likely to accelerate as private companies like
Brown & Root and Bouygues bid for contracts to build and maintain camps the way they bid for
other construction projects.
Only NATO, and certainly not the relief agencies, can resolve the worsening refugee crisis -- one
that will grow worse so long as Kosovo remains in the hands of Milosevic's thugs. Relief agencies
would have to negotiate access with the very murderers who caused the disaster. The bitter lesson of
Kosovo is that there are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems. In future disasters the
central role will be played by private companies that have the expertise and governments that have
the power. Whether this turns out to be desirable remains to be seen. In Kosovo, the world cares
enough to devote blood and treasure to setting things right. But what about Angola, Sierra Leone or
Tajikistan? The end of humanitarianism leaves those nations even more bereft than they were
already. But it is already clear that if humanitarianism is to contribute to solving the world's most
awful problems it must find a different paradigm, both operationally and morally. The old way of
doing things is dying in Kosovo.
RIEFF is the author of "Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West." He is completing a new
book on humanitarian aid.
SOURCE Newsweek
/CONTACT: Wende Gozan of Newsweek, 212-445-4862/
/Photo: newscom.com or NewsCom,
213-237-5431; AP PhotoExpress Network, PRN1; PressLink Online,
800-888-6195/
/Web site: newsweek.com
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