Refugees

A woman stands holding up two loaves of Turkish bread. A little girl in a hot pink headscarf and yellow jeweled top smiles broadly. And a wall hanging of Mecca and Medina flashes on the screen as 14-year-old Myra Illysova explains, "It's a symbol of Muslims. Every Muslim house has one." The pictures provide glimpses of the lives of these Meskhetian Turk refugees from Russia, now high school students who belong to Baltimore City Community College's Refugee Youth Project. For the past four days, the 20 students have documented their lives and resettlement as part of a photo camp run by National Geographic, one of 10 camps across the world this year that focused on young refugee populations.

A whopping 1 percent of the 36,000 people of Hagerstown were born outside the United States, so maybe the attempt to resettle about 40 refugees a year there was asking for trouble. In any case, trouble was what it got. A few townspeople were up in arms over the hiring of refugees - mostly from Africa and the former Soviet Union - at a local plastics plant. Theirs, by the way, were among the 2,000 jobs that Hagerstown has added just since 2006. Then a pregnant woman from Burundi had a spell of morning sickness on a public street, and once the hazmat team had arrived in full moonsuit get-up, you could guess that the municipal welcome mat wasn't going to stay out much longer.

KUKES, Albania -- The warm welcome that met Kosovar Albanian refugees as they streamed through here by the hundreds of thousands over the past month is finally starting to wear out in this mountain town, giving way to exhaustion, resentment and grief.A Kosovar Albanian farmer, Sadat Pirkuqi, and the 17 members of his family are moving out of the home where they had been staying and into a camp, because their host, Anton Zela, says, "We just can't afford to keep all these people."Shemsi Demiri, a physics teacher from the Kosovo town of Mirovica, hasn't even begun to think of schooling in Kukes for his three children, because town officials keep moving them from camp to camp.

MOSCOW -- As Russian troops completed their encirclement of Chechnya's capital yesterday, new accounts from survivors bolstered charges that Russian soldiers had killed about 40 civilians Friday in an attack on a convoy of refugees.Russian military officials continued to deny the reports, which first appeared on the semiofficial Itar-Tass news service, calling them disinformation.Radio Liberty, the U.S. broadcast service, quoted witnesses who said the soldiers opened fire on the white-flagged convoy of seven automobiles and a bus Friday morning as the vehicles paused at a military checkpoint south of the Chechen capital, Grozny.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- It was two weeks into NATO's war against Yugoslavia that Dejan Nikolic left Kosovo.The 19-year-old Serb took a bus out of Prizren and never looked back. And he figures others are sure to follow now that Yugoslav troops are on their way out of the Serbian province."I think all the young Serbs will leave," Nikolic said yesterday. "There are no prospects and there is no future."In the coming days, the toughest question to confront Kosovo's Serbs is this: Should they stay or should they go?

MORINA PASS, Albania -- Some wept in fear and rage. Others smiled in relief. And still others crossed a border with a deadness in their eyes that matched the desperation of their lives.This was the scene at the Morina Pass, along the Yugoslav-Albanian border, a lonely outpost where deliverance melded with heartbreak for ethnic Albanian refugees fleeing Serbia's war-ravaged province of Kosovo.Yesterday, refugees continued to make a crossing from war to safety, flooding through the Morina Pass on foot, in cars, on flatbed trailers towed by tractors, even a wooden cart pulled by two gray horses.

KUKES, Albania -- A fierce roar split the sky and awakened her from an uneasy sleep.Before Ymer Qela knew what was happening, she heard an explosion and tried desperately to protect herself, covering her head with her hands and folding herself into the cab of the crowded tractor on which she had been riding since Serbian troops emptied her village six hours before.Suddenly the tiny 54-year-old woman was swallowed by black smoke. Her hands and head felt like they had been licked by fire.She looked for her husband, Faze, but he was already dead.

KUKES, Albania -- Life for the ethnic Albanians of Prizren, Kosovo, took a terrifying turn for the worse at the end of last week, when Serbian forces began driving them out in earnest and sent them fleeing by the thousands into Albania.Arriving in Albania, the refugees spoke of half the people of Prizren, Kosovo's second-largest city, having fled, many with little more than the clothes on their backs.Refugees who have arrived here over the past few days from Prizren described a city where for the past month the food shops sold only to ethnic Serbs, fear of police had kept all but elderly Kosovar Albanians indoors, and "ethnic cleansing" had reduced the population by half.

WASHINGTON -- Amid reports of new Serb atrocities, upward of 100,000 new refugees might be headed into Albania and Macedonia from Kosovo in coming days, further straining already overburdened allied efforts to house and feed the ethnic Albanians, officials said yesterday.It is the largest movement of refugees in more than a week, said officials with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), who noted that more villages are reported burning and young men still are being separated from the refugee streams by Serbian army troops and police units.

FORT DIX, N.J. -- Many resettlement agencies say the grass-roots interest in the ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo is unmatched since the fall of South Vietnam spawned oceans of boat people two decades ago. There has been such an outpouring of offers for food, clothing and logo-laden products that Fort Dix officials asked people last week to stop donating things.Though most offers are altruistic, some are self-serving. Some people want Kosovar Albanians to work as baby sitters or housekeepers.

The Eastern Shore's second annual Chesapeake Film Festival kicks off at 8 tonight with Scott Teems' award-winning "That Evening Sun" (Teems, producer Laura Smith and cinematographer Rodney Taylor will all be in attendance) and ends with a 7 p.m. Sunday screening of the 1936 comedy "After the Thin Man." Other movies set for the weekend celebration of cinema include director Kimberly Peirce's 2008 "Stop-Loss," with Ryan Phillippe as an American soldier re-upped against his will for another tour in Iraq (12:30 p.m. Saturday, at the Academy Art Museum in Easton, with an appearance by screenwriter Mark Richard)

KENNETH BACON, 64 Noted Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon, a Pentagon spokesman in the Clinton administration who became a voice for millions of refugees uprooted by violence and conflict, died Saturday of skin cancer that had spread to his brain. He was 64. His death at his vacation home in Block Island, R.I., was announced by Refugees International, a Washington-based advocacy group that Bacon had led since 2001. "Most Americans remember Ken as the unflappable civilian voice of the Department of Defense," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a statement.

Mazen Abdulwahab chose No. 6. His brother picked No. 3. Another boy went with No. 9. By next week, those numbers and the boys' first names will adorn jerseys now being produced for the Tigers, the fledgling soccer squad these young Iraqi refugees have formed in Northeast Baltimore. And a week from Saturday, the Tigers will meet up with three other well-outfitted refugee teams, thanks to Peter and Allison Tran, owners of the EmbroidMe apparel shop in Fullerton. They offered to provide 60 sets of specially ordered shorts and jerseys for $1,300 rather than the $4,000 they'd normally charge.

The first thing Nabizhan Zavutatze remembers about his life in Krasnodar, in southern Russia, is the watermelon fields in which he was forced to load carts bound for market - heavy labor for a 4-year-old boy. To Nabizhan, now 8, the memory invokes everything that was wrong with life in the old country and everything that appears right with his new one, the United States, where he and his family, ethnic Turks of the Islamic faith, have settled as refugees....

Violence is significantly lower these days in Iraq, and the Americans who still keep the peace there are busy planning for a significant troop withdrawal over the next 18 months. But that country's hopes for a brighter economic future are shadowed by the loss of more than 2 million refugees - many of them doctors, lawyers, teachers and engineers - who have fled to Jordan, Syria and other neighboring countries. Most of these displaced people are afraid to return to Iraq, which they believe remains unsafe.

JARAMANA, Syria - Hasem Abed is thinking about going back to Iraq. The small-time auto trader, 32, left Diyala earlier this year after members of a Shia militia destroyed his house. He says this town outside Damascus has been more secure, but he has run out of money and has been unable to find work. He is thinking of trying his luck in Baghdad. Hassam Abdul Rahman might join him. Life in Iraq, the 42-year-old mechanical engineer says, "is very bad." But he, too, has exhausted his savings in Syria.

DOUMA, Syria - Second of three parts Mustafa Hamad Rassoul doesn't see how his family can survive. Back in Baghdad, the 55-year-old Iraqi Kurd says, the money he made running a clothing shop was more than enough to house and feed his two wives and 10 children. But here in Syria, where he came last year after being threatened by the Mahdi Army, the food and cash assistance his family receives doesn't last the month. Rassoul blames the United States. "America always talks about human rights," he says while waiting at the U.N. refugee registration center in this city outside Damascus.

AMMAN, Jordan - Najim Abid Hajwal thought he would be back in Baghdad by now. The 49-year-old businessman fled Iraq after a worker in one of his factories warned that his name had appeared on a local hit list. He needed no convincing: By then, he says, two of his sons had narrowly escaped kidnappers, and a brother and a nephew had been shot to death. Still, he expected the exile to be brief. Packing up his wife and their seven children, he imagined a sojourn lasting weeks. That was four years ago. While violence in Iraq has declined in 2008, kidnappers, car bombers and other killers continue to menace Baghdad.

DAMASCUS, Syria - These refugees aren't in camps. And that's making it more difficult for aid workers to address their growing needs. The great majority of Iraqis who have come to Syria have settled in and around the capital. Most have disappeared into the cosmopolitan population of this Middle Eastern hub; many are intentionally keeping their profiles low, for fear of being caught, detained, and sent back to Iraq. The pattern is the same in Jordan, Lebanon and other Iraqi neighbors. "It's completely different from a camp situation," says Imran Riza, who represents the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Jordan.

One year ago, I found myself fleeing a firefight out in the eastern deserts of Chad with Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner. Mr. Hosseini and I had traveled by World Food Program planes and Toyota truck for several days to meet with Darfur refugees who had found shelter in remote desert camps run by the U.N. High Commission for Refugees just across the Sudanese border. One day, rebels backed by the Sudanese regime in Khartoum attacked a camp we were in, and we had to run for our lives.