A Kosovo family gets an unusual chance to repay a kindness

When Serb forces invaded the village of Zhegra on March 29, 1999, they immediately gunned down a neighbor of Mitant Zimani. Fourteen other civilians were killed before she, her husband and her children could escape to the nearby hills and begin a 30-hour trek from Kosovo to neighboring former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) and safety.

Across the border, the family of Rexhep Murseli and her nine children were waiting. "We had to help. We are ethnic Albanians and these people needed us," she said recently. They took the entire family of Mitant Zimani under their wing. "We cooked together and slept on the floor with each other," she added. "But it was no problem. There really wasn't anything else to do."

Nearly one million people fled or were evicted from Kosovo in 1999 and the bulk of them stayed with so-called 'host families' in neighboring Albania and FYROM who threw open their homes to the refugees in return for small grants of international assistance.

Humanitarian organizations such as UNHCR acknowledge that the willingness of private families to help was key in sheltering so many people in such a short span of time.

The Kosovars stayed with their hosts for three months, but as the fortunes of war swung wildly, they returned to their village in the wake of NATO troops and began rebuilding their home and their lives.

REPAYING KINDNESS

War often allows people to show great kindness to others in distress, but rarely does it allow that kindness to be returned in such spectacular and symmetrical fashion as in the case of these Macedonian and Kosovar families.

When trouble flared recently in FYROM, it was now time for the Murseli family to abandon their home and flee to the relative safety of Kosovo. Some members took the same mountainous route that Mitant Zimani had taken two years earlier. Others left legally.

The two families had kept in sporadic contact by telephone but had never again visited. However, the Macedonian family slowly made their way to Zhegra village.

"We didn't know they were coming until there was a knock on the door and there they were," Mitant Zimani said. "Of course they were welcome."

Life is not easy. A total of 25 grown ups and children crowd together in four small rooms. Again, like earlier times there is communal cooking, eating and sleeping. The visiting children have already enrolled in local school, but the family will return once things calm down across the frontier.

They agree they will now visit each other regularly, hopefully for a vacation and not as the result of another round of fighting.

Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 124: "The Balkans: What Next?" (October 2001). Download the complete issue (pdf, 2.2Mb) here