Exodus: A Rough Rite of Passage
By David Finkel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 23, 1999; Page A18
BLACE, Macedonia – The bus, for the moment, is empty. Empty and clean. Every night it gets disinfected. Every morning, when it arrives at the border, it smells of cleansers. Cleansers and, this morning, of roses – two roses, both in full bloom, which the driver picked from his garden, stuck in a soda bottle and propped against his fractured windshield.
But now come more smells. The passengers are coming aboard. Dozens of them. Filling every seat. Filling the aisle. Filling the door wells. Fitting themselves into every bit of reachable space. Day 58 of the NATO bombing campaign is underway to stop the forced expulsions in Kosovo, yet in Kosovo they continue, and in Blace another bus is loaded with the proof.
How long can it take to empty a place? At Blace, on the border between Kosovo and Macedonia, the answer is always at least one more day. This is where ethnic Albanians on the run from Yugoslav soldiers and Serbian police and paramilitaries arrive almost every morning after riding on packed trains out of Kosovo.
A mile or so from the border, the train stops. Then comes a journey by foot across the border. Then come smiles and tears. They are out of Kosovo. They have escaped.
But it is the ride on the disinfected bus that will mark these people for what they are now: refugees. Because while the streaks on their faces when they get on the bus are from relief, the ones that will be there when they disembark hours later at refugee camps will be from the realization of what their lives have become.
It will happen to Fikrijc Berisha, on a bus with her two children, who says her husband died after being stabbed in the neck. And it will happen to Agron Luza, 20, standing at the back of another bus, who says he has no idea where the rest of his family is. Pick a bus. Pick a seat. Pick a person. The story doesn't change.
Pick a day, even. Some days there are only a few refugees, as was the case most of last week. Other days, such as yesterday, the number climbs into the thousands. Either way, they are herded by whistle-blowing police onto buses with small windows that can be cracked open, large windows that can't and 33 hard plastic seats, and – if a certain shift commander is in charge – room not just for 33, but for 100. Or, sometimes, 120. On the refugees go, obediently, gratefully – hurrying onto buses that they soon come to understand aren't going anywhere any time soon.
"These people are so patient," says Astrid van Genderen Stort, the U.N. refugee agency worker in charge of Blace, who has loaded tens of thousands of refugees onto buses and has asked the Macedonian authorities to, please, limit the maximum number of people per bus to 80 and, please, allow the buses to leave the border area sooner than they do.
But decisions have to be made before the buses can go. Which camp should they go to – the one that is running out of tents, or the one that might have an outbreak of diarrhea? How many buses need to be lined up before the police will bring an escort car – 10, which is what the police say, or half of that, which is what aid workers suggest? And what should be done with a woman who, after coming to Blace every day for two weeks in search of her husband, just saw him walking across the border, but then lost sight of him, and who is screaming, "I don't see him, I don't see him," as the police escort her backward, farther and farther from the buses?
So many decisions, and meanwhile on the buses, smiles are gone, cheeks are flushing and people are sweating as the temperature of the stilled air rises.
"Forty degrees," a driver says – meaning over 100 Fahrenheit – and it doesn't help that many of the refugees are dressed in what they were wearing when they were forced from their homes weeks before, when the weather was cool. Winter coats. Wool scarves. Long pants. Sweaters. Heavy shoes. Not only is it all the clothing they own, in many cases it is all of anything they own.
The buses only get hotter as morning turns into afternoon. Noses and foreheads are pressed against windows. An old woman who can't stop coughing is fanning herself with her hands, and a boy is stretching out his sweat shirt and blowing onto his chest. A woman is kissing her daughter's head, a head so warm that when it touches the window, it coats the window with perspiration.
And then, suddenly, movement. The police escort arrives. The buses take off. Hot air becomes merely very warm air, and as the buses roll south, and then west and then south again, the questions to the drivers begin. "Where are we going?"
"Senokos."
"What's it like?"
"I don't know."
"Are there showers?"
"I don't know."
"Are there toilets?"
"Yes."
Another bus:
"Where are we going?"
"Cegrane."
The trip takes more than an hour. Passing cars flash their lights. People by the side of the road wave, and the refugees wave back. One person greets the buses with a Serbian salute, and the refugees who see it look away. By the time the buses near the camp, the people are mostly silent, overtaken by fatigue.
The highway has become a narrow road. The narrow road has become dirt. Finally, the buses stop – and if the people were quiet before, the silence that descends now is total. Everyone seems frozen, with every eye wide and aimed in the same direction, taking in a landscape of tents, thousands of tents, and thousands of people as well, pressed along against chain-link fences, watching them arrive.
And then, pandemonium. Inside the bus, people keep staring, but outside people come running – crawling under fences, sliding down dirt piles, surrounding every bus, knocking on windows, scanning the faces pressed against the windows and hollering questions:
"Where are you from?"
"Ferazi."
"When did you arrive?"
"This morning."
"Do you know . . . " and then come the names of people left behind, people lost, people being looked for, and from inside the bus come shouted answers, mixed with occasional shouts of recognition, and the sounds of children starting to cry. Some of the people on the bus extend their hands through the open little windows and the people outside reach up to touch them, and Fikrijc Berisha, seated with her two children, bursts into tears because the person who has stopped in front of her window – stopped and stared and burst into tears as well – is her sister Sahadete.
They look at each other through the dirty window. Fikrijc holds up the children. Sahadete waves, and places one hand against the window and Fikrijc does the same on the other side, and the children, whose father has been killed by a knife to the throat, are watching with the widest of eyes.
From outside comes the sound of someone else crying, a sound of utter despair from a woman who has collapsed against a fence.
"She has three brothers in Kosovo, and her father, and her mother," explains Fitnete Bogujevci, who is trying to comfort the woman, a stranger who in recent days has become her close friend. The woman, named Sebahate, is alone, and so is Fitnete, and that's what has united them. "Every day, we're here," says Fitnete. They come together to look – Sebahate for her family, Fitnete for her husband. They walk by every bus. They peer into every window. Up one side, down the other. "He's not here," Fitnete says without emotion, and neither is Sebahate's family, and Sebahate collapses. Fitnete, who wishes she could collapse too, or even cry, merely lights a cigarette, while on the buses people who don't know her, who know no one, just keep staring out the windows at the tents and strangers as the recognition of what's ahead takes root.
On a bus to Cegrane is an old woman who sits perfectly still except for trembling lips and hands she keeps turning over and over, as if she's washing them. On a bus to Senokos is a girl, maybe 5, her nose pressed against the glass, with flushed cheeks and wet hair from the rising heat, and a worried forehead, and eyes that sweep back and forth.
The heat is now stifling. Aid workers pass water bottles through the windows. No one can get off, though, until the buses are past the guards and through the gates and inside the camp. At Senokos, they rumble forward one by one to the disembarkment area.
At the back of one bus, patience runs out. Fingers pry open a sealed door, and out rushes Agron Luza, gasping for air, into the arms of his uncle, who holds Agron's head against his chest while all around them swirl others emerging at last into the fresh air of Senokos. Except the air isn't fresh at all, because the disembarkment area is by the latrines, with an odor so strong it bites.
Now comes the additional smell of exhaust as the bus backs up, offering the refugees their first unencumbered view of the place they have come to live. Agron separates from his uncle, uses his jacket to wipe his eyes and looks around at the crushed gravel that gives off an ever-present dust. At the rows of tents, staked inches apart. At the thousands of people already settled here, milling about, doing nothing, such as Ramadani Muharem, here a month, who remembers how astonished he was when he arrived on a bus.
"When I arrived here, when I saw these tents, it was like seeing a graveyard." As he watches the buses arrive, he says it's like watching a thousand replays of himself. He watches anyway, knowing what's head for these people, until the last of the buses is emptied.
Back he goes to his tent, and into their new tents go Agron and all the others. Blankets still need to be dispensed. Food still needs to be passed out. It will be several more hours before everyone is settled in, by which time the buses that brought them will be back at the depot, cleansed of what was left behind in the transition of a thousand more people into refugees:
Sweat-stained windows.
Empty water bottles.
Empty jars of baby food.
Cracker crumbs.
One red jacket.
One bag, carefully knotted, of vomit.
And two pink roses, crushed.
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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