Kosovo: the forgotten war

Kosovo is the forgotten war.

It's a long time since the images of bewildered refugees spilling out of the country filled our television screens, and their stories of murder, plunder and rape were splashed across our newspapers.

The news agenda moves on to the beat of another conflict … Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. So many tragedies that we have almost become immune to the inhumanity and the suffering of others.

I first encountered Ahmeti all those years ago in a chaotic refugee camp just over the Macedonian border where tens of thousands of Kosovo Albanians fled as Serb militia tore through their towns and villages.

His face was a mask of grey, his wife Miradije weeping at his side. Their youngest son Alban was killed fighting with the Kosovan Liberation Army (KLA) close to their home. Ahmeti had asked to use my mobile phone so he could call his other son in Germany to tell him they had been forced out of Kosovo, their home and village torched.

Like so many refugees who fled what then-Prime Minister Blair had labelled the "slaughterhouse" of Kosovo, he has had to find a way through the trauma and pick up his life.

Today, in the sunshine, we drink coffee in his garden and he talks quietly of how so much was lost. "My son is a hero in this country, but we have lost him and our hearts will always be broken. When the Serbs began the ethnic cleansing, Alban used to say to us, 'Don't worry, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton will come and save us, the way they did for the people of Bosnia.' But it didn't happen. By the time they did intervene through Nato forces, it was too late for my son.

"Many people lost everything - their sons and fathers, their homes. But we still see ourselves as winners, because we are free. We would never have been free if we had not fought back, and I am proud of that."

The Drenica massacres between March 1998 and May 1999 are written into the bloody history of the Balkans. Serb forces had been systematically shelling the region which was a KLA stronghold for months, and by the time of Nato air strikes, thousands had been massacred by the militia.

The Serb militia was made up of soldiers and police, including thugs and murderers allowed out of jail. Their orgy of violence only ended a year later as Nato's bombs rained on Belgrade, forcing Serb leader Slobodan Milosovic to pull his troops out.

By then up to 12,000 lay dead and more than 800,000 people had fled.

Retreating Serbs had attempted to hide their genocide by digging up corpses from mass graves and burning hundreds of them at more than 1000 degrees in industrial furnaces at the Trepca mining complex and more at a lead refinery in northern Kosovo, according to evidence uncovered in 2001.

Former Serb deputy prime minister Nikola Sainovic and generals Nebojsa Pavkovic and Sreten Lukik were sentenced at the war crimes trial in the Hague to 22 years for their part in ethnic cleansing. Vlastimir Djordjevic, the former chief of police, was jailed for 27 years for his role in the murder of more than 700 ethnic Albanians, but it is unlikely that an exact toll of all the war crimes or human rights violations will ever be known. They left behind burned-out towns, emptied of people they had marched at gunpoint on to trains to the Kosovo border with Macedonia.

I was there at the start in 1999, and spent a month witnessing the desperate scenes as refugees came over the border - old men and women, faces bruised and battered from the butt of Serb rifles; young families who thought they had crossed into freedom were forced to live for weeks in the open because Macedonia was not prepared for such an influx of refugees.

In the Blace field, people had no shelter from the rain and cold. A river at the foot of the hill was used for bathing, cooking and as a communal toilet. There were near riots as hungry masses trampled on each other in the mud to get to the tractor, from which bread was thrown to them. In the ensuing chaos many became separated and whole families were scattered to the four winds. The scenes unfolding were like something from the archives of Nazi Germany, and they have haunted me since.

I have returned to this troubled land on a personal journey, as my experience here inspired my latest crime novel, Screams In The Dark, a tale of Kosovan and Bosnian refugees going missing in Glasgow at a time when the city has refugee fatigue.

I've come in the run up to Kosovo regional elections, on November 14, because I wanted to see how this beautiful country has progressed since the war.

What I have found is an incredible story of survival, of resilience and determination to rebuild their country. And a story of Kosovan refugees, given a lifeline in the UK, who have returned to help a nation that is slowly picking itself up from the misery and chaos of those months of bloodshed.

But I have also found a country that is divided in two extremes - the people who have thrived abroad and are able to rebuild bigger, better homes and businesses, and the dirt poor, many who remain displaced and are living in the squalor of the dark ages.

In this new Kosovo, everyone has a story. People like Fetije Murturi, now head of an aid programme with SOS Kosovo, whose own life is a humbling story of survival and hope - and the kindness of strangers.

"I am where I am today because of Britain and the people there."

Murturi, 45, was on the first plane load of Kosovans to arrive in the UK following the break up of Yugoslavia and the invasion of Croatia in 1991. An economics graduate, she and her husband were on a hit list as the Serbs targeted educated people to be ethnically cleansed out of the country. They ended up in Stanway, Essex.

"I will never forget our first days and nights in England. I was three months pregnant and we were so afraid. We didn't speak the language and we had very little. People took us in and we were put in hostel accommodation at first."

Tears come to Murturi's eyes as she remembers. "Talking about it now, even though it is so long ago, brings back the pictures for me. One day, the Christian Action Housing Association took us to a house that needed a lot of work. They told us the church wasn't using it, and we could live there. They handed us the keys and the start of our life. Local people worked and painted it with us, and it became our home.

"The British people showed us so much kindness I will never forget. They saved us and our family's lives. I was already a qualified economist, and I continued with my studies, gaining an MA in refugee care and then stayed on in the UK for 15 years, raising my sons and working in the community to repay them for the chance they gave me. It was important for me to pay into the system that saved us. But the time came for me to come back and try to contribute to my own country."

Like many Kosovans who have returned, Murturi didn't recognise her homeland since it became independent in 2008. And she, like most of the Kosovans I met, is appalled at the creeping Islamism of a country which is Muslim but has never been strict and is a secular state.

"The people seem more nationalistic," she says. "That is not really a problem but we see more men wearing the beards and sometimes women being encouraged to wear the burkas. That is not Kosovo or how we lived. We enjoy a glass of wine and our lives are not strictly controlled by our Muslim faith. We would not tolerate fundamentalism, but there is a belief that money is coming into the country from Islamist groups who are seeking to radicalise people, especially in the deprived population."

So far the attempt by Islamist zealots to infiltrate communities has been rejected, but the formation of an Islamist political party called Join! (Bashkohu!), which is aligned to the pan-Islamic Muslim Brotherhood movement, illustrates their growing influence. In June, Muslim cleric Irfan Salihu was forced to stand down from the mosque in Prizren after preaching that Kosovan women were "prostitutes", and urging their husbands to abandon them. His diatribe was condemned by all three biggest political parties.

It's easy to see how the poverty and the divide between the two Kosovos could make its people ripe for manipulation by extremist organisations.

SOS Kosovo works with many families who have nothing, and their living conditions are a stark contrast to the crowded capital, Pristina, where Mercedes-Benz and BMW garages sit alongside new villas.

We meet Xhevamire Goxmufi, 35, who lives in a condemned shack in the corner of a building with her husband and four children under 12.

During Serb bombing in 1999, Goxmufi suffered 38 wounds to her body and the family home was burned to the ground. They lost everything, and survived in the forest for weeks until Nato troops brought them to Pristina. Now she has €96 a month from the social services to feed the entire family in what passes for their home - a cold, damp hole where water pours down the walls in winter and they all sleep on a stone floor. Her husband who is partly disabled from a fall in a building site collects scrap metal from rubbish damps to make money. They have been living like this for 14 years.

Murturi's programme with SOS Kosovo visits them once a month, taking food, making sure the children are able to go to school and takes care of any of their social work and medical needs. The organisation also brings the children to social gatherings with other kids. Without this kind of support they would be completely destitute because the social services structure in Kosovo is utterly inadequate.

We visited another family in Pristina as they were being evicted from the house they have lived in for seven years. Before the war the family ran three bakeries, but spent weeks in the muddy field at Blace border camp after they fled Kosovo. When they returned home, the bakeries were gone, burned down by gangs of rampaging Serbs.

The family's oldest daughter, 19-year-old Florentina Fikriji Shehu, speaks fluent English and is desperate to study abroad. For now she will have to settle for a few months' work experience in a doctor's practice with the hope of being taken on as a medical assistant so she can earn and support her five brothers and sisters.

Like so many other families, they rely on handouts from aid organisations.

We came here with UK aid group, Hope And Aid Direct, which is one of the few groups which continues to distribute aid long after most of the non-government organisations have left.

It has travelled to Kosovo with nine lorries filled with everything from food and clothing to wheelchairs and Zimmer frames, as well as toys and equipment for schools.

The group is made up of volunteers who collect and fill warehouses with material to transport. Most of them on the trucks are old hands and have negotiated these winding roads to the outlying villages north and south of Pristina to bring hope to the people who have slipped through the social work net.

We go with them to a "collective" only 20 minutes' drive from Pristina, but it is like a different country.

The people gather on the brow of the hill, waiting patiently for the truck, with their wheelbarrows to take the supplies to the drab former office block of a local mine that has been turned into miserable flats.

They have had no running water for six years and no electricity. Yet they scrub and clean their houses, determined to have as dignified an existence as they can. It's heartbreaking and humbling.

Hope And Aid Direct knows the small bundle of clothes, food and shoes it gives them is piecemeal, but for one day at least the Kosovans are happy.

The organisation's co-ordinator, Charles Storer, has been doing this since just after the war ended, working with the Mother Theresa Society. "Over the years we have seen a huge transformation in Pristina and the surrounding area, with new houses and hotels and petrol stations springing up. You can be in downtown Pristina where there is a cafe society and the place is buzzing, but you can turn a corner and people are living in metal containers and have been like that for years. There is so little help for these people that they rely on outsiders to come and make the very small difference we do. But it's a drop in the ocean.

"There's talk of Kosovo joining the EU, but that has to be a long way to go. Right now there are poor folk who lost everything in the war and have never been able to get back to living a proper, dignified life."

Next to our hotel in the middle of Pristina, we discover four families living in broken down metal containers which had been used by Nato for storage during the war.

Thirteen people including eight children share two open toilets that are just a hole in the ground and no doors. In one of the containers a woman lives with her severely mentally handicapped son. They have been there for five years.

The children were using an old door perched on a pile of wooden pallets as a desk to do their school work. When we told Hope And Aid about them, they came round with tables and chairs, clothes, plus a pile of school jotters. You'd have thought they'd been given a fortune, just to be able to sit at a table.

The whole landscape and the future for Kosovo is changing, and despite being the poorest country in the Balkans, many see it as being able to pick itself up and play a part in Europe in the future.

Money has come from all over the world, and from the EU, to improve the infrastructure and millions are being spent on a new motorway that will go all the way to Albania.

But everywhere there is talk of corruption, and while many of the new homes and business being built are from Kosovans who have grafted abroad and sent money home, there is a firm belief that Albanian mafia money is being laundered all over the country.

Remy Duli, 41, another success story went to the UK before the war when the Serbs closed down her university where she was studying to be a pharmacist. She completed her studies in the UK, but with the outbreak of war decided it was more important to work with the Kosovan refugees in London.

"I remember in the beginning when we were just young students in London and hearing about the atrocities back home, and we were all heartbroken. We used to have what we called 'crying parties', where we would meet and everyone would talk about their families and friends back home. It was a desperate time."

Duli remained in London with her Kosovan husband and their teenage sons, however she decided to come back earlier in the year to make a contribution to her homeland.

Now she works as a volunteer with an organisation, Building Blocks for Success, which helps impoverished families.

She, too, is appalled that the country is being targeted by Islamists.

"The number of young women covered in burkas and generally young people attending regular prayers at the local mosques has multiplied in a very short time. Kosovo has always been a liberal Muslim country, but sometimes if feels more like the Middle East.

"I strongly believe the financial restraints, the lack of inclusive and monitored religious education in schools, unemployment, poor parenting skills, and excessive access to the internet has affected the present Islam situation in Kosovo, and there are fears that radical Islam is taking a serious hold - especially among the young.

"The older generation have real fears that the radical Saudi Muslims are investing in the poorest families to promote radicalism. That is not the country I grew up in.

"In London, sometimes our children were given a hard time by other Muslim kids who said they weren't real Muslims because their mother didn't wear the burka. But we were never brought up like that in Kosovo, and we don't want it for our sons.

"Now we come back here and you see that the situation is changing a little and that some people are influenced by these preachers. I really hope the Kosovan people will not allow that level of extremism in their lives. It would mean a huge change to the way they have always lived." n

Hope And Aid Direct takes two convoys of aid a year. Visit hopeandaiddirect.org.uk. SOS Children's Villages International has been working inside Kosovo with refugees since 1999. Visit sos-childrensvillages.org/where-we-help/europe/kosovo.