Frank Mulcahy wrote:
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> Enclosed, and also sent as an attachment, is a Front Page story from a major
> Irish newspaper this morning. This is self explanatory and shows the
> necessity for DPI to continue to issue statements on Kosova.
>
> If any further information is required please do not hesitate to contact me.
>
> Best wishes to all.
>
> Frank
>
> You Are Here: HOME > THE IRISH TIMES > FRONT PAGE Wednesday, June 16, 1999
>
> Wednesday, June 16, 1999
>
> Behind the walls, a vision of hell unique to Kosovo
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
>
> A lone Albanian nurse is left to tend hundreds of mental patients abandoned
> by their Serb doctors without food, medicine or water. Kathy Sheridan
> reports
> It may be one of the few buildings left intact in the total devastation of
> Shtimjle, but behind its walls lies a vision of hell unique even to Kosovo.
>
> Four days ago, this hospital housing 350 seriously brain-damaged people was
> simply abandoned by its Serb directors and nursing staff. They loaded vast
> stores into three cars and a bus, took the keys of the hospital pharmacy and
> foodstores and left Kosovo's most vulnerable souls - men, women and children
> ranging from five years old to 100 - without food, water or medicines.
>
> The electricity disappeared with the directors. The doctors who once
> attended these patients had long since abandoned them. Their Hippocratic
> oath ran out three months ago, when they condemned their charges to an
> existence without the vital drugs needed to calm their torment, their
> aggression, their destructiveness, their tendency to injure others and,
> above all, the terrible impulse to injure themselves.
>
> Yesterday, when Dr Afrim Blyta, a psychiatrist and a returned refugee
> working on behalf of the International Medical Corps, became the first
> doctor to enter this place in three months, he had to break the lock on the
> main gate to get in.
>
> Inside, he found a sole Albanian nurse along with the corpse of an
> 11-year-old child. The little girl was skin and bone, her back a mass of
> bedsores, her big, brown eyes still open, framed by beautiful, long lashes.
> Her shroud was the rags she wore in life wrapped in a bedsheet; her funeral
> bier a filthy, hospital stretcher, her hearse an old cart.
>
> It must have been a merciful release. Around her for several weeks, the
> nurse said, unsupervised men and women had been copulating indiscriminately.
> A middle-aged woman was running amok with a long, thick piece of wood,
> roaring out a continuous stream of insults; a six year old of normal
> intelligence, born to her brain-damaged mother in this institution, stayed
> close to us, saying that her mother didn't want her (there has been no
> orphanage in Kosovo since the Serbs closed the Metrovica institution in
> 1991).
>
> In foul-smelling dormitories, young boys lay motionless across filthy wooden
> benches, their heads and faces bruised and bloodied from constant banging
> against walls; in another ward, small, pale-faced children with terrible
> physical deformities lay in cots, rocking back and forth, back and forth; a
> listless, bedridden male, who looked around 25 with full beard and
> moustache, turned out to be a 13-year-old with a probable endocrinological
> condition.
>
> A skeletal man followed us around repeating the words: "Food is in Pristina,
> food is in Pristina . . ."
>
> Outside, in an outhouse which a visiting nurse described as the "idiots'
> place", a dozen men sat on a bench. One, said to be seriously violent, was
> folded into a foetal position with his arms and legs inside a large sweater;
> another sat with his hideously enlarged genitals exposed; several showed
> evidence of cuts and bleeding from fights and self-injury.
>
> A personable 15-year-old ran up to us to say that he had to bury the little
> girl now: "It's my job and I have to finish it," he explained gravely.
>
> Meanwhile, a 35-year-old gypsy Serb, sent here as a child, roamed the
> corridors, expertly coaxing haunting melodies from an accordion. Did he own
> the instrument? No, he said with a huge, proud smile; he had stolen it from
> the home of expelled Albanians.
>
> The fact that they had survived at all for these last days is to the credit
> of Xhevvie Jakupi, the 35year-old nurse who, with other nurses, had brought
> flour from their own homes to a bakery to make into bread for their starving
> patients. They drew water from the well in the grounds and treated it to
> make it drinkable. They changed sheets and swept floors and stalled the
> descent into anarchy.
>
> "After 15 years working here, these people are like my children," said Nurse
> Jakupi, "that's why I could not leave them."
>
> The irony in this conflict is that her "children" here in Shtimjle are both
> Serb and Albanian. The staff in this institution were also Serb and
> Albanian, 35 and 15, respectively, in nursing posts, who - up to a few weeks
> ago - rubbed along together, despite the fact that the top positions were
> all occupied by Serbs.
>
> But these heroic Albanian nurses - on about $80 a month - long accustomed to
> hearing from the hospital pharmacy that many drugs were not available and
> that coffee was as scarce as diamonds, were astounded yesterday morning when
> Dr Blyta broke open the medical supply room. Laid out before them was a
> treasure trove.
>
> "We found an extraordinary supply of drugs, everything you could ever need
> for these types of patients - tranquillisers, sedatives, hypnotics,
> neuroleptics - although they have been denied them for months. We also found
> a lot of drugs not usually seen for these categories of patient - supplies
> more appropriate to an internal medicine department."
>
> With drugs of this remarkable range, quantity and value, he said, he could
> set up his own city pharmacy. Alongside the drugs were nearly 300 bags of
> coffee.
>
> With the arrival of the IMC and the International Committee of the Red
> Cross, these abandoned creatures will soon have food, medicines and a kind
> of peace again.
>
> Outside on the streets of a shattered Shtimjle, their fellow Albanians were
> walking the road again for the first time in three months, showering
> newly-arrived British soldiers with kisses, flowers and strawberries. They,
> too, were celebrating their freedom to live life again in a kind of peace.
> But with liberation comes terrible news long buried.
>
> There may be worse trials to come.
>
> Thirteen people, including 10 children, were injured yesterday after a Serb
> threw a grenade at ethnic Albanians celebrating the departure of Yugoslav
> troops from Kosovo, local residents said.
>
> The US charity, International Medical Corps, said that a 10-year-old child
> was evacuated from the south-eastern town of Gnjilane to Macedonia to be
> treated for a suspected fractured skull.
>
> Last night in Pristina, Kosovo Albanians said Serb gunmen shot dead four
> people as NATO's deadline approached for Serb security forces to quit the
> city.
>
> [log in to unmask]
> Tel. & Fax: +353 1627 1314
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Name: IRISH TIMES, WED 15 JUNE, 1999, FRONT PAGE.doc
> IRISH TIMES, WED 15 JUNE, 1999, FRONT PAGE.doc Type: Download File (application/msword)
> Encoding: base64
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