Imagine eating lunch with your family at home. You chat, you joke around, and you talk about your daily life. Suddenly, you hear a loud noise...Somebody breaks through the door into your house. As you wonder who that unexpected visitor is, you see a group of masked people with automatic weapons pouring into the room. They give you ten minutes to pack up and leave. No discussion. No mercy. Ten minutes. You leave or you die...So what would you take with you? Your water bottle, some food, a warm jacket...only 3 minutes left. You still hope that you will wake up any moment now, that this is only a nightmare, a fantasy. But as you look into the guns pointed at you and your family, as you are brutally forced out of your house now being torched, and as you see the same thing happening to your neighbors, you realize that this is real.

For 500,000 ethnic Albanians it has been an unfortunate reality. They realized that everything is about to change and that their life is the only thing that they should be concerned about. When international negotiators failed to reach a compromise with Yugoslavia’s dictator-like president, Slobodan Milosevic, hell broke loose in Kosovo. As NATO planes began to drop the bombs, the Serbian army rushed to “clean” Kosovo from the ethnic minority. Small paramilitary units of armed men moved quickly from village to village with one objective in mind: to make Albanians go away and to convince them to never come back. Serbia used a simple yet very powerful argument: violent terror, humiliation, and merciless force.

While some ethnic Albanians were physically forced to leave, others did not want to wait. Men were separated from women and children and everybody was sent towards the border. Some had to walk, often for a couple of days without food. Some were sent in locked trains. They left everything: their homes, their careers, and their dreams. They arrived at the border: exhausted, sick, frightened, and helpless. After hours of waiting, they entered into refugee camps; huge, fenced areas with soldiers all around them. Except for a few who flew to other countries, the vast majority of the Kosovars remained in refugee camps.

Miserable conditions plague these camps. They have tents but the temperatures fall below 40 degrees during the night. They get up as soon as the sun rises to start fires and to warm up. There is a ninety-minute line for the NATO sponsored lunch. This meal will have to get them through the day. They watch their kids crying out of fear and shivering from cold, they worry about relatives who did not arrive with them...yet there is some happiness in the camp. They are alive. Many others are not. They hear stories about men being shot in front of their families and women being repeatedly raped by soldiers. They have seen dead bodies on the way out of Kosovo. Yes, at least they saved their own lives.

I really wonder how does one feel in a situation like that. For a moment try to close your eyes and imagine that...hunger, cold, fear, and sense of hopelessness. Knowing nothing about where your relatives are or what your future will be like. I realize things worse than this have happened before. However, knowing that while I am writing this article the refuges from Kosovo are trying to get through another cold night makes this misery almost tangible. One wonders where all of this evil comes from. Why are human beings capable of growing hatred that bears such terrible fruits?

The whole world follows developments in Kosovo. How long will Milosevic hold out? How far is NATO willing to go? Will Russia step into action? Only the future will bring answers to these questions. Only in the future will we analyze the steps that have been taken and decide whether they were adequate or not. “The 20th century begins and ends in Yugoslavia” somebody said once. Regardless of the destiny of Kosovo, I feel like that the reality now is already a very tragic ending.

Voytek Weickowski ’00 is a staff writer and a native of Poland. Currently he is majoring in Economics.

NATO	The Fall of Yugoslavia : The Third Balkan War
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia	Yugoslavia : Death of a Nation

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