Hope Returns to Kosovo

Those Who Remain

After fighting ended in Kosovo in 1999, newly widowed women and fatherless children returned to burned-out villages to begin rebuilding their lives. Today, their story is more hopeful, thanks in part to Heifer International.

KORENICA, KOSOVO — On Feb. 17, 2008, the dream of a free Kosovo came true. But after centuries of rule and oppression— by the Ottomans, as part of the Soviet Union and, lastly, by the Serbians—the dreamers were largely gone by the time independence was declared.

These men perished chasing their dream, but fleeing the land they loved. In their absence, the women of Kosovo returned, left to find their way back home and to prosperity among the burned houses and decimated farms of a country that was barely recognizable.

Ten years later, these women—the dreamers’ widows— are still picking up the pieces. It is a bittersweet existence, they say, to live in a free country with a bright future that, for them, is often overshadowed by its dark past.

But the adage that time heals all wounds is at work here. While some wounds have not completely healed in the years Kosovo has spent recovering from a war that saw the deaths of thousands, the disappearance of tens of thousands and the displacement of millions, the healing process has begun.

And Heifer is leading the way to recovery. Ten years after Sadie Kameri (Sa-DEE-uh) and her three children fled advancing Serbian forces, the obsession of finding shoes for her then-3-year-old daughter still haunts her.

It was in the early morning of April 27, 1999, when Kameri’s brother-in-law, Muharrem, ran to the house to warn her that Serbian troops were nearby. Alarmed, she woke her oldest two children, Shpat, then 9, and Shkreptina, then 7, and told them to dress.

As she ran to her 3-year-old daughter’s room, she saw through a window that the paramilitary forces were moving toward the house. Her husband, Shpend, her children, and Muharrem and his wife and child left the house through the back door.

But Shkelqesa, or Esa, the baby, was slow to wake. So Kameri stayed behind.

She dressed the child knowing they may not be able to return to the house. She knew what had happened to other Kosovar Albanians in the preceding months and what had happened in Bosnia and Croatia in the previous years.

But she couldn’t find Esa’s shoes.

“I saw neighbors and the troops going to their houses and making them flee,” Kameri said, recounting her tale two days after the 10th anniversary of the events that irrevocably changed her life.

“I went out the back door to look for Esa’s shoes, and then one of the soldiers came and shouted at me in Serbian to get out and go away. So I took Esa in one hand and her shoes in the other and went out. We went to the fields,” she said.

As they were fleeing, a cousin of Kameri’s had a heart attack. He died in the field. The families stopped. She said they had no idea how much time passed in that field. They saw Serbian troops advance and begin to surround them.

They saw billowing smoke from the fires the Serbians set to the houses and knew they couldn’t go back. They hurriedly buried her cousin and continued their journey.

The families found neighbors who had four tractors they were using to pick up others who were trying to make their way to the Albanian border. There were people everywhere, Kameri said, all trying to make their way out of the village and the country. Kameri and her family climbed onto the tractors.

They didn’t get far.

“We arrived near the school where the Serbian army stopped us. They divided us, asked the men to step out of the tractors and robbed us. They took all of our jewelry, money, whatever we had,” she said. “The men were held down and the women were forced on their way.”

Kameri and her three children made it to Albania where they lived in a refugee camp for three months. All four remember their time in Albania, she said. The children all hoped their father was still alive.

“I didn’t know about him until I got back.” Serbians and ethnic Albanians fought over Kosovo for centuries. While the dispute centered on ownership, the fight reached its peak after Slobodan Milosevic, a Serb, came to power in the former Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia was made up of the six republics of Bosnia- Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. Kosovo was an autonomous province included in the republic of Serbia.

Milosevic, who talked of a “Greater Serbia,” heightened tensions among the various ethnicities in Yugoslavia. Frightened by Milosevic’s rhetoric, Croatia and Slovenia declared independence in 1991, setting off a wave of wars in the region.

While news reports of ethnic cleansing and war dominated the airwaves during the early and mid-1990s when Serbs clashed with Croats and Bosnians, the atrocities in Kosovo were no less severe.

According to information kept by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Serbian forces pushed 250,000 Kosovar Albanians from their homes and destroyed their houses, villages and crops during the summer of 1998. By the end of May 1999, 1.5 million people, or 90 percent of Kosovo’s population, had been expelled from their homes.

By the end of the fighting on June 11, 1999, some 225,000 Kosovar men were believed to be missing. At least 5,000 Kosovars were executed.

One of the worst massacres was in Korenica, where Kameri and her family now live. Though the estimates vary, it is believed that approximately 400 Kosovar Albanian men lost their lives that day. More than 70 of them were from the tiny village of Korenica.

Kameri’s husband, Shpend Kameri, and his brother Muharrem were two of the hundreds killed. They were 49 and 35 respectively.

Now, Kosovo’s citizens are among the poorest in Europe, averaging only $2,300 in annual income. Unemployment hovers around 40 percent, which encourages emigration from the rural areas to cities or abroad.

And despite a huge influx of people to the capital, Pristina, during and after the war, most of the country’s population still lives in rural towns outside of the capital city. Since the war, rural livelihoods have deteriorated significantly and a large portion of the rural population is living at a subsistence level. Kameri, 46, lives in a modest home like most others seen in Kosovo: two-story, orange brick, with similarly colored clay roof tiles. It is set among rolling green hills in her tiny village near the Albanian border.

The house is similar to what she lived in before the war. But it took Kameri a long time to come back to this place.

“The hardest moment was when I came back and saw nothing. Our house was at the entry of the village. It was all in ruins, just in ruins. I had no house and no husband,” Kameri said. “For two weeks, I just lay here and did nothing.”

After the initial shock waned, Kameri decided to move to her sister’s home in Gjakova. She couldn’t stay in Korenica, she said, because she had no way to make a living on her own.

After seven years, Kameri returned to Korenica because she wanted her children to be in a place more connected to their father. Part of the home—one bedroom and one bathroom—was rebuilt by the various relief organizations that came to Kosovo after the war ended. Her family helped build the remainder of the home, but they were without running water for months.

Soon after returning, Kameri learned of a joint project with Heifer International and Medica Kosova, which sought to help women return to their farms and receive medical and psychological treatment for the trauma they suffered during the war.

Heifer started work in Kosovo immediately after the end of the war with the goal to rehabilitate the small farms that were the backbone of the economy. Because nearly all livestock in the country were slaughtered as part of the Serbian campaign to permanently drive out the Kosovar Albanians, Heifer collaborated with Heifer Netherlands and Irish partner Bothar to return livestock to the country.

Aferdita Dervishi, 12, stands outside Korenica with the cow her family received as a pass-on gift from the Kameris. This cow won top honors at a regional fair for Aferdita's mother, the only woman who showed an animal.

As Kameri attended trainings from Heifer International on how to care for the cows they would be receiving, she and the other women in the project initially made crafts to supplement the 65 euros, or roughly $92, she and other widows were sent monthly by the Kosovar government.

That money was barely enough to cover essentials for her three children, Kameri said. But within six months of joining the project, Kameri received a Simmental heifer on June 17, 2006.

And Kameri said she was lucky. Her cow calved quickly, and the family almost instantly had milk. She also learned how to make other dairy products, like cheese and yogurt, increasing her income and nutrition.

Another six months after the calf was born, Kameri fulfilled her requirement to pass on the gift. Another widow, Nakia Dervishi and her four children, who live a short distance from Kameri, are now benefiting from a cow.

“The cow helps me because I received only social welfare,” Kameri said. “With this cow, the children have better nutrition. It has provided me with enough. I can buy shoes, clothes and things for the house when I need to.”

Over the last two years, the government upped the monthly assistance for war widows to 130 euros, or $186. Along with the welfare assistance, Kameri makes the equivalent of another $100 a month from selling the surplus milk from her cow.

She is now able to pay for schooling for all three children. Her oldest, Shpat, who is now 19, is attending university in Pristina, while the two daughters are in seventh grade and high school. The family, Kameri said, is still recovering from the trauma of the war. Her older daughter, Shkreptina, 17, talks of being a journalist like her father. But the one most affected, she said, is her youngest, Esa, who is now 13.

“The [children] talk about their father. Esa was very connected with both her father and her uncle. She couldn’t go to bed without her father,” Kameri said. “She remembers when troops took her father and her uncle from the tractor. She was only 3, but she says she remembers. Even now she cannot accept the truth that her father is gone.”

And Kameri, too, told her story as if disconnected from the events that happened to her and her family 10 years ago. It seems like she’s not that woman anymore, and the family isn’t the same either.

One thing has brought the family solace: her husband’s remains were found in 2006 and returned to the family for burial in the cemetery outside of Korenica for those killed in the massacre. Kameri and the children visit the grave regularly.

The grave marker of Shpend Kameri, Sadie's husband, stands in a cemetery dedicated to those killed by the serbian forces in 1999. The cemetery is one of the only places in Kosovo where both Muslims and Catholics rest.

Still, the family faces hardships. While Kameri makes dairy products for her own consumption and is able to sell milk at a milk collection point, she does not have a vehicle, so it is hard for her to sell other dairy products in markets because she cannot transport them.

And because Kameri and other women Heifer helps live primarily in Kosovo’s rural villages, they are largely invisible to the outside world.

After all, Kosovo is in Europe, where the currency is more valuable than the American dollar, where the culture and the history are taught in American schools, and where major tourist destinations are a short plane ride away. Even citizens in Pristina do not understand the level of poverty in their own country.

While more than 50 countries, including the United States, recognize Kosovo’s independence, Serbia does not. Serbia has even asked the International Court of Justice whether Kosovo’s independence is legal under international law. Consequently, Kosovo is still under the protection of the NATO-led peacekeeping contingent, Kosovo Force, or KFOR.

But where there was once desperation, there is now hope. Despite the hardships they still face, Kameri said the benefits to her are immeasurable.

And she says the next generation will benefit more than anyone from the gift of livestock. Her children in particular are receiving a dual education, one from learning to care for the cow and the other in school.

“My hope for the children is that they have all the good things of this world—to finish school and university and to be independent. Then I can be proud of their success,” Kameri said. “I’ll know that I succeeded in raising them well.”