Kosovo refugees, Albania - Tom Stoddart - 1999

Following months of attacks by the Serbian army on Kosovan Albanian villages, NATO mounted air raids on Serbia on March 24, 1999. The Serbian army and paramilitaries reacted immediately with systematic attacks on Kosovans in towns and villages.

Force and terror were used to empty entire villages. Typically, police went from house to house ordering residents to evacuate. Populations from many villages were organized into groups and deported in convoys to border-crossing points. Once villages had been emptied, many of them were then burnt.

Kukes, an Albanian border town, served as a stopping point for many of the displaced. Once the NATO bombing started, camps appeared around the town and an estimated two-thirds of the million Kosovan Albanians began to arrive; on average, 10,000 people arrived per day.

Since it was considered unsafe to keep refugees close to a border, it was planned that people would be moved to camps farther to the south. The Kosovans, however, resisted and choose to stay close in the hope that the conflict would be settled quickly.

As a result, the camps became extremely crowded and Kukes, a poor and remote town, inundated by the flow of refugees as they moved into mosques, schools, hospitals, and private homes.

The camps had been opened from April to June when the first refugees arrived - the weather being cold and rainy and the ground muddy. Since there had been so little time for planning, all possible shelter was used from tents, plastic sheeting strung from tractors to empty rooms. A town of 23,000 ended up playing host to 130,000 refugees.

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