Along with the Serbs, the Gypsies would also become an Albanian target for vengeance since they were widely believed to have collaborated with the Serbs and to have looted Albanian homes.
Tim Judah,
—Kosovo: War and Revenge
The cherub materialized from the swirl of dust and hot wind that surrounded the refugee camp called Hope. I didn’t see him at first, just heard the rumors. “A gypsy boy was here,” one of my interpreters mentioned.
If we had a gypsy boy at Camp Hope, we had a problem. Gypsies, by and large, were sympathetic to the Serbs in Kosovo and had helped them in their ethnic cleansing against the Kosovars. The Kosovars hated the gypsies as much as they hated the Serbs.
The gypsies were seen as the people who raped and tortured Kosovo’s mothers, wives and daughters and tortured and killed the fathers, sons, and brothers. Those Kosovars who survived the “cleansing” were thrown out of their family homes with only the clothes on their backs. An entire population of 700,000 souls had been cast out into the bone-cold winter, a land riddled with landmines, and vulnerable to Serbian snipers and bombings.
A pale, helmeted face peeked into my office tent through the flap. It was a young soldier from the U.S. Military Civil Affairs unit assigned to help us manage the camp. I could not help but wonder whether I had looked that young and eager some 30 years ago, back in Vietnam.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said. I cringed. I hated it when they called me “Sir.” “Name’s Paul,” I responded.
The corporal went on, “Yes, Sir. Sir, there was trouble in the camp last night. There seems to be a little boy here that no one likes.” He added that, “The marine guards are escorting the boy this way down the central camp road.”
It was easy to spot the gypsy boy coming toward me. He was small and walked round-shouldered, like a tough guy from the movies. He was bracketed by two well-armed, flak-jacketed, lanky U.S. Marines. They were being followed by a crowd of about fifteen or twenty refugees. When the Marines were about ten feet away from me, I loudly called out to them above the noise of passing trucks and construction: “Do you think you have enough armament to subdue this kid?”
The African-American Marine, who was carrying an over-under combination M-16 and grenade launcher, laughed and replied, “Not sure, sir. We have seen this whirling dervish in action.”
I sent for one of the interpreters, a cocky seventeen-year-old Kosovar. The kid was blond, blue-eyed, good-looking, and had an attitude. We took what we could get when it came to interpreters. We approached the gypsy boy, also a good-looking kid between 10 to 12 years of age, just over four feet tall, with jet black hair and black eyes. He showed no signs of starvation, and in fact he carried a bit of muscle. He kept his head down and moved his feet in the gravel as I cautiously walked over to him and tried to put a reassuring hand on his arm.
Pushing it away, he yelled out something in his native tongue. Judging from the expression on my interpreter’s face, I had no doubt that what the boy said was profane and probably had something to do with my family lineage. When he moved, I caught a glimpse of cuts, abrasions and bruises on the side of his head and arm.
I asked for a name but got a grunt in return. I asked for an age, and he spit out an answer: 12. Then he told me, through the interpreter, that his father was dead and his mother was missing and possibly in Germany. I knew it was useless to ask for details about her. Probably he knew about as much as I did.
I cursed to myself as we conducted this interrogation in the noonday sun. This was not my job. Where were the United Nations Human Right investigators? The caseworkers? The U.N. had requested an interview tent over a week ago. We had it set up and there it sat a few feet away from me unused. It wasn’t just this boy who needed help.
Every day, refugees approached me with claims about relatives living in Germany, France, Britain, Canada and the United States. They had a U.N.-protected right for family reunification, but I could only tell them that the U.N. would be at the camp “soon”—whatever that meant.
I asked the boy what he wanted to do. He stopped and thought, and I realized he just didn’t know. “How did you get here?” I queried, but got nothing from him.
Still, this was a refugee camp, and he had a right to be here. He also had a right to protection—and it looked like he was going to need it.
The crowd began to move closer. Someone said something to the boy that he didn’t like. He shouted something back. In seconds, it seemed, rocks started flying. The boy returned fire with his own stones. The scuffle escalated quickly. Four or five Marines from the guard post a few feet away moved in to break up the stoning. As the gypsy boy squatted down for more stones, I grabbed his hand, forcing him to drop his ammunition. God, he was both strong and determined.
Another six or seven Marines came up and dispersed the group. No one appeared to be hurt. I had my hand tightly around the boy’s arm, and was hit by the irony of what was happening. This camp was packed with people who had been abused, tortured and humiliated. They all knew what it was like to be on the wrong side of a hateful mob, to be social outcasts. And now they were giving it back in kind to a frightened, angry 12-year-old gypsy boy who should never have been there in the first place.
No one seemed to care that this was just a kid. For all his toughness, he was still a little boy who needed protection, and he had come looking for it in a place called Hope. These people seemed as willing to snuff out his life as they would have been to kill a rattlesnake.
In one incredible thrust of strength, the boy broke my grip and started running toward the crush of Kosovars, who were now being escorted down the central camp road. As the boy ran, he picked up stones and threw them at the crowd. Now that he’d made it into the light of day, he was going to get his tormentors, even if it was going to be his last stand. It might have been, too, except for the fact that ten to twelve Marines swiftly positioned their bodies between him and the crowd. May God or Allah bless the US Marines. I raced to catch up with him.
Things finally settled down again. My interpreter came back from wherever he had been hiding. It was my turn to be furious. I bellowed at the gypsy boy, “Just what the hell do you think you are trying to do? Do you think you can take on the camp and win?” He stood in his defensive position, eyes down, and his worn shoes digging into the dirt.
“I need to get some of my stuff,” the boy blurted out through my interpreter. “It’s up in the camp in a tent.”
I got him to explain, as best he could, the location of his “stuff,” and asked a Marine and my interpreter to go on the recovery mission without the boy. If I had sent the boy alone, I am sure it would have become a “search and destroy” mission.
With the Marines’ permission, I put the boy in their compound for the day. For most of the time, he sat on the ground while a marine with a gun straddled him. My plan was to move him that night to the NGO compound. We had office tents there with cots and blankets. A detail of French soldiers were also billeted there. I figured that both the soldiers and NGO workers could keep an eye on this little terror.
Later that day I was informed that some U.N. personnel had arrived. I immediately sought them out. The U.N. staffer I met was not a human rights representative or caseworker, but someone responsible for refugee registration. No matter—I quickly told him my story. In order to save the boy’s life, the U.N. needed to take the boy out of the camp immediately. I emphasized the word immediately. I was told that a U.N. Human Rights case officer would be in the camp early the next morning and the issue would be solved then. Since we had to wait, I pursued my first plan to move the boy into the NGO compound and requested the French troops to put a night guard on the boy.
But the next day came and went without any U.N. personnel showing up. Another day went by, another night. During the day, I would ask the Marines to guard the boy as few staff stayed in the NGO compound. The Marines began to complain to me. The boy was troublesome. It was not their job to babysit a child, especially one so angry and bad-tempered. On several occasions, he tried to escape their compound. If it were up to me, I would have taken the boy to my living quarters in the city, but the team I was with consisted of five men literally sleeping on top of each other in a small rented apartment in Fier, a forty-minute drive away. The road to Fier was rough, insecure roads. Mafia attacks were a real possibility.
Then, one night, the boy did succeed at outwitting his guards and escaping. I did not learn of this until I arrived at the camp at 8:00 the next morning. The Marines and other personnel were scouring the grounds, looking for him. My heart sank. I assumed he was dead.
As I was gathering my thoughts, I heard a commotion on the camp road and ran out of my tent. About 300 feet away were a couple of Marines. They were dragging the gypsy boy, kicking and screaming, behind them. Two other Marines were deployed behind the boy, and a good-sized crowd of Kosovars followed them.
The Marines dragged the kid closer. I noticed how frustrated they looked.
“A tough one, sir,” one said to me. “Lucky the kid is alive. Apparently, he has been telling people that his father is—or was—a Serb cop, and that his dad is going to come and get them all.”
The boy’s face showed new cuts and bruises. How long could this last? The Marines went to work dispersing the angry crowd. We dragged the little gypsy back to the Marine compound. I asked for a nurse to apply first aid, and this time two Marines stood guard over him. I went to see the Marine captain in charge of the guard detachment and asked him to be patient a little longer. I was determined to end the siege.
Later that morning I headed to Tirana, the capital of Albania, for a staff meeting. The trip brought me through Fier City which was where the main U.N. office was located. Generally, I am very diplomatic. That morning I wasn’t. I marched into the U.N. office with a purpose and insisted on a meeting.
Within a short time I had a meeting with a Human Rights officer. I told him that the gypsy boy’s life was in immediate danger, that his rights were being abused, and that he must be removed from the camp by noon that day, if not sooner. I indicated that I didn’t care how this was done. Even if the boy had to sleep in the U.N. office under guard, he had to be taken from the camp.
The head of the U.N. office assured me that he would dispatch a caseworker immediately, and the boy would be taken into protective custody. I left for my meeting in Tirana, relieved that something was finally going to be done.
That evening I was dining out with some friends at a café in Tirana when, by sheer coincidence, I spotted the same U.N. caseworker I had talked to in Fier City entering the café. I rushed over to learn what had been done about the boy. It took a second for him to figure out who I was, but then he grudgingly replied that the boy was still in the camp. The caseworker went on to explain that he had gone all the way out to the camp and questioned the boy, and the boy told him that he wanted to stay at Camp Hope.
“Since when does an abused 12-year-old tell a U.N. protection officer what to do?” I asked.
“What would have been the implications if the boy was seriously hurt or killed and CNN picked up the story?” I asked the UN staffer.
I hated to pull the CNN card, but something had to draw these folks into action. I told this man that I was returning to Camp Hope the following day. If I found that the boy was still in the camp, I would personally take action.
I was unable to sleep that night. I blamed myself. I had not done enough for this child. How could a system designed to protect thousands of human beings fail him? Would I find him dead the next day?
As the sun broke on the horizon, I sped back to Camp Hope. I immediately went to the Marine guard compound and spotted the sergeant who had been guarding the boy. Even before we could exchange salutations, I asked where he was.
“Gone” was the reply. U.N. officers had come into the camp before sunlight and removed him. They said that they had found a safe house in town where the kid could stay until they figured out what to do next.
I never learned what happened to the little gypsy. I told myself that the boy was safe, and that was what counted. His story, like so many others, had an unfinished feeling. That was how it usually was in this type of work.
I would leave Camp Hope after about a month and return to Kate and Kara and CARE headquarters in Atlanta. From CARE headquarters, I followed how Camp Hope was doing. In June 1999, NATO Forces crossed into Kosovo ending the war, followed by a mass spontaneous repatriation of refugees from Albania.
Camp Hope, which was never filled to capacity, would no longer exist, but not before heavy rains would completely flood the camp. Those of us who train others in emergency response and planning, and who knew about Camp Hope, would use it as a training example of how not to build a refugee camp.