KOSOVO 1999

M I N U T E S T O WA R : Picnic in Hell
We walked to the Italian camp and the United Arab Emirates camps where the people came out to us asking
questions and telling their sad stories. The UAE camp is like the Hilton in its opulence. The budget seems to
be opened-ended, and the cooks are from India or Pakistan. Here the refugees receive two hot meals a day.
Someone might come in and say there are thirteen people, and the assistants dish out massive platters of rice
with bits and pieces, but it has the best reputation.
The families we interviewed talked about the circumstances which had happened. There were almost
stereotypical recounting of events, except that these events were of life and death. When we interview people
there is the usual statements. Each person’s story is so horrific that the stories start to bleed into one another;
and slowly, after listening to story after story, the horror starts to numb me.
One young man in a dirty torn white shirt explains: ‘Paramilitary forces came into my uncle’s place. We were
at my uncle’s place; they came to my uncle’s place. The army came in. I had a car.’
‘Did they take your car?’
Young man: ‘They destroyed the car into small pieces...like crumbs and they told us to bugger off.’
Ray’s words were echoing in my mind: ‘Certainly widespread abductions of men. Abducted, kidnapped I
don’t know what the right word is, in these circumstances…numbers we simply don’t know, but we do feel
there were executions that went on.’
Returning today to the widows apartment today I said to Firouz that slowly we become inured to the
poverty, and it is replaced to become our zero or neutral. We become part of the fabric or the pattern, so that
we are no longer separate and unable to compare: ‘I look around and everybody here are still waiting to return.
Waiting. Everybody is waiting here. Unbelievable. It’s the same horror, the same suffering and it just goes on
and on and on.’
This feelings about this extreme suffering slowly dissipates and it becomes part of the fabric, another day,
another refugee convoy, another group of crying faces, and there are only so many times that these effects can
enter into my consciousness. It is a very difficult and strange to embrace.
Thursday, 29 April, Kukes, Albania, the ‘America Bar’
Still the 29th April, I am slouched in a vinyl bucket chair in the ‘American Bar’ while across from me a
thirty-something gonzo journalist with a three day stubble is wearing a T-shirt which has stenciled across: ‘trust
me I am a journalist’. There is staccato rifle fire outside in the hills two kilometres away, while in the centre of
the town queues of twenty fidgeting Kosavars in dirty track suites are banking up continuously day and night.
Smoking cheap cigarettes, exchanging jokes, staring into the fog of an unknown horizon. Sometimes the people
are very kind and permit us to jump the queue, but I believe it is unjust since these people also need to urgently
telephone anxious relatives. I was able to telephone Lower Templestowe, Melbourne on one occasion, and on
two occasions to let Firouz’s family know that we were okay.
The rain has decided to disperse and now we seem to be half-filled by days of blustering winds and hot dry
air.
Seven hours later I have another moment to speak into the dictaphone: Currently I am attempting to talk
softly so that the people who are sleeping in our apartment are not awoken. It is twenty to eleven and the night
is still like Albanian death and I am cross-legged in the bathroom on the wet fungus tiled floor looking at red
plastic buckets and the copper pipes of the hot water system. The people that we have spoken to have seen
so much tragedy. At every turn somebody accosts me with a futile request. Everybody here is drowning, and I
sometimes I try to help people with food or I don’t help them at all but either way it actually kills me as well.
All the refugees describe in dramatic yet deadpan tones the violence which has been inflicted upon them
these last weeks. Refugees whom we have met some who are now friends have witnessed massacres and
families being separated at the border; the men being taken away and the woman released to cross into Albania;
sometimes its is the reverse. I have heard accounts of the Serbian soldiers allegedly placing knives to the
children’s throats so that the families are forced to hand across their jewellery, their money or their car.
As I am speaking into this dictaphone somewhere out in there in the night along the one hundred and thirty
kilometres of roads from here to the capital or Prizren an unknown family we can do nothing about with a
fading flashlight, and their simple belongings are trudging, walking to nowhere in particular. They are frozen,
unfed, stripped of their money, hungry and very, very frightened—and perhaps they are lucky in that they
are alive. They have only lost their houses their tractors their kitchen utensils but not their lives. They are so
lucky…Ogh so lucky…