A European War

Just after Thanksgiving 2001, I headed to Macedonia, a country in southeastern Europe where refugees from Kosovo had sought safe haven during the brutal war in their own nation several years earlier. Many of those remained there still. Earlier in the year, fierce fighting had broken out in Macedonia between the ethnic Albanians and the Macedonian majority. The government of Macedonia had bombed a number of Albanian villages in an effort to stop the uprising. In August, a peace agreement had been tentatively brokered between the ethnic Albanians and the government of Macedonia, but fighting still continued in many areas and ethnic hatred still lay festering just beneath the surface.

Even before this crisis, Macedonia, though industrialized and developed, was a poor country with few resources. The national health system was not able to meet the basic needs of the country’s residents, and there was no medical care at all in the “crisis zones”—those areas where fighting continued.

To meet the needs of the thousands of Kosovans still there in refugee camps and the many thousands of displaced Macedonians, IRC ran six health clinics, along with providing shelters and school reconstruction. Kosovo had seen the largest outpouring of refugees in Europe since WWII, and the vast majority of them were women and children. Macedonia, among the poorest regions in Europe, with 24 percent living below the poverty line in 2001, had a limited capacity to host the refugees. In 2001, UNICEF declared that the children of the Balkans region were among the most endangered children in Europe due to wars and sanctions.

Displaced Macedonians, mostly ethnic Albanians, were only then returning to their villages, hoping to rebuild their lives and homes. My responsibilities would involve overseeing the network of primary care clinics already providing care to refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), as well as undertaking needs assessments in order to expand the scope of our programs if necessary to meet the changing needs of the population.