POLITICS-KOSOVO: UN Pushes for Access to Refugees

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 5 1999 (IPS) - The United Nations announced plans Monday to place thousands of Kosovar Albanian refugees in camps in neighbouring Macedonia and process them for travel to Western countries amid Kosovo’s worsening humanitarian crisis.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the 15-nation Security Council that the world body has made arrangements over the past weekend to accommodate some 70,000 Kosovars who have been stranded in Macedonia in recent days without food or adequate shelter.

Annan and UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata both urged Macedonia this weekend to allow access to the refugees, who were stranded in a “no man’s land” between Kosovo and Macedonia as heavy rains swept the Balkans.

Ogata said that the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) could process some 20,000 refugees each day, placing them either in camps or preparing them for transfer to other countries, if Macedonia allows access. So far, UN officials said, the processing of the massive refugee influx has been slow, with only some 5,000 of them being processed by the Macedonian authorities daily.

By contrast, some 388,000 civilians have fled Kosovo just over the past two weeks, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) began its air offensive against Yugoslavia, said Sergio Vieira de Mello, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs. About a quarter of Kosovo’s pre-1998 population has been displaced from the Yugoslav province since the beginning of last month, he added.

“Reports on events within Kosovo suggest a widespread, systematic campaign of forced displacement of civilians,” Vieira de Mello said. “The recent tide of refugees has lent credence to these claims,” he added, noting that such acts could constitute crimes against humanity.

To deal with the huge refugee exodus – 120,000 of whom have crossed the border into Macedonia over the past two weeks – UN humanitarian agencies are stepping up activities to distribute aid to the refugees and to coordinate their transfer by air to other countries, Vieira de Mello said.

Germany has pledged to take in some 40,000 Kosovars, while Turkey and the United States have each promised to accept some 20,000. US officials said Monday that the refugees may be housed temporarily in Guantanamo Naval Base, a US-occupied outpost in Cuba which served as a transit point in the early 1990s for Haitians and Cubans who had sought asylum in the United States.

US officials, however, insisted that the humanitarian effort to relocate the refugees did not detract from the main thrust of the NATO attacks: to force the Belgrade government to allow the Kosovars to return to their homes and win at least autonomous status within Yugoslavia.

“This is a temporary arrangement designed to deal with an emergency problem,” said US State Department spokesman James Rubin. “It is not designed to have a permanent relocation of these refugees.”

The NATO attack, however, has not stopped the exodus of refugees nor has it brought a halt to reports of Yugoslav troops’ harassment against the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo.

“Reports of masked men in uniforms knocking on doors and telling people to leave or be killed are countless,” said Vieira de Mello, recounting interviews with refugees. “Their homes are then looted or burnt…Recent days indicate that we are witnessing the emptying of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.”

Annan called the actions that have been reported by refugees “a vicious and systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing conducted by the Yugoslav military and paramilitary forces in Kosovo”.

Yet UN officials also pointed to the humanitarian consequences of the NATO strikes, which began on Mar 24. Vieira de Mello noted reports from Belgrade that the bombing of the main bridge at Novi Sad, Yugoslavia’s second-largest city, had damaged the water supply to some 600,000 people.

Dozens of civilians have been killed and more than 1,000 injured by the NATO bombing, the Yugoslav government has said.

Vieira de Mello added that there are “fairly reliable” reports that the Kosovar Liberation Army, a separatist group fighting the Yugoslav government, is “checking male refugees on the Albanian side of the border, no doubt for recruitment purposes”.