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CNN's Eileen O'Connor reports on how some Kosovar kids are coping with war
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April 14, 1999
Web posted at: 10:55 a.m. EDT (1455 GMT)

TIRANA, Albania (CNN) -- As part of the assistance being offered to Kosovar refugees now in Albania, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has started programs focusing on the youngest victims of the conflict.

Estimating that there are as many as a quarter-million children affected by the crisis, UNICEF is working to address medical needs, reunite lost children with their families, provide basic schooling and recreational activities, and alleviate the psychosocial trauma of the experience.

The Belgrade government has not confirmed that Serb police or Yugoslav forces are carrying out the violent campaign against ethnic Albanians reported by refugees and others in the crisis. But these children are being offered a form of art-therapy to help them better deal with what they say they've witnessed.

Each day, 300 children at a refugee camp in Tirana come to a tent set up by UNICEF. They're asked to recreate in drawings what they've seen.

Refugee children draw pictures of what they've seen to help them deal with their trauma.

Mirela Kovaci, a teacher in Tirana, is trying to help children work through the pain of the present and find hope for the future. She has the children draw not only what they've seen, but also what they think their lives to come will look like.

Describing one of the drawings she says, "This is a tank, this is a dead person on the street. This is the future -- a school, a free country, you see NATO here in the middle between them."

One of the children in the program is Valon Bllacca, an 11-year-old fourth grader who doesn't like to admit he's scared. Valon says his most vivid memory is of police pounding on the door telling his family to get out. His father protested, Valon says, and was beaten and bloodied.

Doctors and other relief workers say trauma suffered by these children is one of the most difficult and pressing problems they face in the refugee camps.

As aid workers try to create hope, they must struggle to preserve cultural identity without instilling thoughts of revenge and more hatred.

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"We are teaching the children patriotism," says Ismail Gashi, a language teacher from Kosovo and a refugee himself. "Love of their history and their country, because without that they have nothing."

Gashi is tutoring the children, hoping the dialect of Albania taught in Kosovo since 1998 can be maintained.

Young Valon is a quick study, memorizing a poem about the Kosovar flag. "Red and black we love it so, our mother Kosovo, our mother Albania," he recites.

But experts warn that nurturing national pride like this may make the alleged brutality all the harder to forget -- and may instill in yet another generation the hatred that stirred conflict here in the first place.

For his part, Valon says that if he were older he wouldn't be in a refugee camp. He'd be back in Kosovo. Fighting.