The Mail on Sunday - January 9, 2000

AT LEAST ONE OF THESE BABIES, 
LYING IN A HOSPITAL DEPRIVED OF VITAL DRUGS, WILL NOT SURVIVE THE NEXT MONTH. 
YET OUTSIDE 300 AID AGENCIES HAVE MILLIONS 
OF POUNDS TO SPEND. 
SO WHY IS THE WEST 
LETTING THE BABIES OF KOSOVO DIE?

By Kim Willsher and Christian Jennings

KOSOVO, Pristina-- They lie in neat rows, wrapped in swaddling clothes and protected against the winter cold by a single blanket. Tucked under their tiny heads are typed sheets of medical notes. It's a miracle that each baby is returned to the right mother after delivery in Pristina's maternity hospital.

These are the babies of the war in Kosovo, and its most poignant legacy. They are also the future of a province still torn apart by the ethnic hatred which left thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.

They are too young to know it but they are the lucky ones, having survived in a region where infant mortality is ten times higher than in Western Europe.

It is seven months since Nato drove out the soldiers and paramilitaries of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic who had terrorised the province's Albanian population.

Today, the icy streets of the Kosovar capital are frequently choked with fleets of gleaming white vehicles bearing the names and symbols of more than 300 international aid agencies who flooded in behind the tanks.

The aid workers came with millions of dollars and promises of relief and reconstruction. But so far -through tardiness, bureaucracy, rivalry and lack of coordination -they have delivered precious little of either.

Certainly their presence appears to have had little effect on the death rate among Kosovo's newest arrivals: one baby in 20 is dying within a month, while more than half of those delivered prematurely fail to survive. The figures are appalling, but these dry numbers fail to convey the human tragedy for families already traumatised by months of bitter war.

Deep in grief, the women collect their dead infants

In Pristina's neonatal unit register, the Latin words exitus letialis -'passed away' -are scribbled in ballpoint next to the names of 16 babies admitted to the unit recently. Outside the basement mortuary, the grief is palpable as knots of distraught women stand silently while a hospital attendant picks over a stack of cardboard boxes. Once these boxes held cans of food and photocopying paper. Now they contain the remains of 24 stillborn babies, wrapped in bloody white rags.

It is a pitiful scene. One by one the women, their faces lined with grief, step forward to collect their dead infants. A name is muttered and a dirty cardboard box is handed over with as much sensitivity as the attendant can muster. The woman then shuffles out into the snow, her heavy breath visible in the icy air as she carries the child away for burial.

The conditions are also taking their toll on the mothers -the maternal death rate is the highest in Europe at 24 per 100,000 births.

Some 350,000 Kosovars are spending the winter under tents or in makeshift shelters after their homes were destroyed by the Serbs, and disease and infection are rampant.

The United Nations' so-called 'shelter programme' to provide emergency repair kits for those whose houses were shattered was already well behind schedule before the onset of winter made many roads impassible. Now many of those in villages cut off by snow have been left to fend for themselves. The fact that there are no proper facilities outside Pristina means that babies die very quickly,' says Dr Muja Shala, the hospital director.

Bad diet and poor sanitation share some of the blame for the abnormally high level of premature births and miscarriages, along with an increase in viral hepatitis and anaemia among pregnant women. But the unremitting trauma and stresses on those caught up in this bitter ethnic war and the lack of even the basics -food, shelter, heating have taken their toll.

Agnesa Kokovalli, only two weeks old and yellow with hepatitis, is just one pathetic example. Sylvie, the baby's 19-year-old mother, was eight weeks pregnant when Serb paramilitaries forced her out of her home in Suhareka in southern Kosovo. She walked 40 miles to Albania, where she spent the next three months living under a tent in a refugee camp.

Sitting next to her is Zoje Qelaj, who did not even know she was pregnant when she and her husband fled their home in Decani in western Kosovo. Like many other new mothers at the hospital, she is now a widow. She was separated from her husband, who was dragged away and shot. Now her child lies in an incubator further up the hospital corridor, suffering from internal bleeding and meningitis.

But, however inadequate the conditions are at Pristina hospital, the picture is a hundred times worse elsewhere. At Sbrica, babies are still delivered by candlelight and the wards are so cold that weakened mothers are sent home a few hours after giving birth. And while the hospitals and clinics scream out for simple things which we take for granted -nappies, drugs, bedsheets aid agencies often arrive with expensive equipment which is at best well intentioned but at worst useless. Pristina hospital -desperate for washing machines- was recently given three modern ultra-sound scanners which hardly any of the medical staff know how to use. 'Of 15 clinics with maternity facilities in Kosovo, all but two have no heating, the electricity in all is unreliable, and hot water in the delivery room is an exception, a recent UN report admitted.

Despite the scarce resources, an estimated 12,000 babies will be delivered there in the next 12 months - more than at any other hospital in Europe. Dr Sjedullah Hoxha, head of obstetrics and gynaecology, said: 'We have had 43 births for the past 24 hours. We deliver more than 30 babies a day.'

The most tragic part of all this is how swiftly many of the problems could be solved. Olivier Brasseur, a representative of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), said it would take just 15 days and $1.5 million to reinstate all the basic functions and supplies for the maternity unit -if all the international aid groups coordinated their efforts. But the UNFPA's mandate does not cover repairing the general infrastructure of the hospitals in which the maternity wards are located, so numerous organisations will have to work in tandem to tackle their share of the problem at the same time.

To many in Pristina, the likelihood of such cooperation appears remote. From a window, Dr Muja Shala looks down on the street, where aid workers, representing multi-million dollar organisations, cruise the streets in gleaming white Toyota Land Cruisers. Like most Kosovars, he is reluctant to complain. He is simply grateful that the rest of the world is here at all.

But why, he asks, has so little of this humanitarian effort been directed to his tiny, helpless patients who will represent the future of Kosovo...if they can survive the night.


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