War Diaries Part I | Kosovo
Chapter 1: Misadventures along the border with Kosovo

Date: Wed, 05 June 2002 12:51:53 -0700

KUKES, Albania - GJERGJE'S PONY tail hangs between his shoulder blades. He listens to Dire Straits and prefers to dress in black. If he wasn't walking down the muddy, mountain road ahead of me, I could imagine him late for some Soho art opening. He's from the Albanian capital of Tirana. A good translator, but he annoys me.

He annoys me because I'm all juiced-up on my daily Albanian diet of double espresso and white bread. But more egregiously, he annoys me because the first phrase out of his mouth each day when he sees me is the stern, "Kevin, look what's happened."

I'm sure I annoy Gjergje, too, as does the rest of my team. Most of all because he has been with us for weeks and we still can't say his name right. It's Jer-Gee (the Albanian equivalent of George). But each one of us riffs on it so differently -- Jay-Jay, Gee-Gee, Joe-Gee -- that it surprises us every time he turns around when we call to him.

Gjergje points toward an ancient-looking woman coming down the mountain pass.

She's so bent that the top of her head couldn't be taller than a fire hydrant. While her son and daughter-in-law lift her by the arms, she bicycles over the slippery ground, barely touching the surface. It turns out they've been walking for two days through freezing rain without food or water. They stop in a shallow stream at the bottom where the man and his wife dip their hands in the icy water to wash the mud from the old woman's boots. Rust brown turns to ruby red. It's a small gesture of dignity in a world turned upside down.

A MEETING WITH RAMO

When we first arrived in Kukes all three hotels are booked solid. But a $100 bill on the bar at a place called the Adriani gets me a meeting with Ramo.

Ramo is kind of a "made" guy in town; a shrewd businessman and local political party boss whose bar entertains an eclectic mix of cops, bandits, spooks, guerrillas and U.N. blue berets. Ramo smokes incessantly, wears sharkskin suits and carries a dirty Russian pistol in his waist belt.

Later on, Ramo will nearly get us killed and save our lives -- all in the same day. But for now, he is our new landlord. The Adriani (named after Ramo's 10-year-old son) is just eight rooms above a bar. They are monk-like cells, Spartan-clean and furnished only with a couple of beds and a window overlooking a house-sized pile of garbage … and a direct view of the largest refugee exodus in Europe since World War II.

When Ramo and I are done talking, I've rented all eight rooms and some office space off the bar. It was a feat complicated by the subsequent discovery that by being the new high bidder in town I've unwittingly evicted New York Times writer John Kifner and his photographer Eddy.

"Kevin, look what's happened."

GROUNDHOG DAY

Every day I wake up in Kukes it feels like the day before. I gulp bottled water at my bedside, put on the same dirty clothes, wash my face, and search for toilet paper. Downstairs, I down a double espresso before we head for the Morina border crossing. There we watch the refugees pass from the Yugoslavian checkpoint into Albania. They come in horse carts, buses, even wheelbarrows -- but mostly they come in tractors. Old men or little boys driving a wagon-full of extended family into uncertainty.

Getting stories here is easy. Like picking apples, your basket gets full fast. Many of them are crying as they cross over. Crying both with relief and with the thought of how their lives have become so hellish so quickly. They tell us of being forced from their homes at gunpoint, of husbands and sons rounded up and taken away, of their homes burning behind them.

MISERY IS A VIRUS

We are so busy documenting these tragedies, that we don't realize how they infiltrate us emotionally and physically. I've worked with NBC News correspondent Fred Francis for three years. We have a natural journalistic synergy, but here on the border we've come close to fisticuffs.

Cameraman Steve O'Neill never misses a shot. His style is to move fast and get on top of the action, but in between he's coughing up his lungs, perhaps brought on by bonfires of garbage and damp mountain air. Only John Hall, our sound tech, remains healthy and even-tempered. Maybe because his empathy isn't stifled, but built into the job of careful listening. At the end of each interview, he's able to tell me about a thought or gesture that I've missed, which captures the essence of our subject.

Back at the Adriani, I log the video through the eyepiece on Steve's camera, making notes of shots I want to feed for a story that will be edited in New York. Since we are six hours ahead, it's not uncommon that we file our scripts before anyone at NBC even gets to the office. In Kukes, our days start by 7 a.m. Often, we're still waiting for script approval by 10 p.m.

CASABLANCA

But our deadline is also the time I must play my nightly game of Casablanca with Ramo. We duck behind the beaded curtains that separate the dark, recessed booths from the rest of the bar. It's there we negotiate, Ramo smoking on one side of the table and me on the other. Since Ramo only knows only two words of English: "Kevin" and "super" and my Albanian working vocabulary consists of "po" and "ikim" ("yes" and "we go"), Gjergje sits between us to referee.

"Kevin," Gjergje says to me, "this man, he is not honest. He promises us rooms that belong to others. And the food: each day the prices get higher, the portions get smaller."

Sounds like a typical big city hotel in America, I think. But still, I wave my arms and work up an indignant -- but measured -- lather, because Ramo, as I've learned, will sell to the highest bidder. I've nearly lost the rooms once to CBS and another time to the United Nations. But I've established a friendship with him over the weeks, completely devoid of trust and built on a foundation of NBC money. In the end, as usual I'm counting out $100 bills while Ramo snuffs out a cigarette, picks up the money, smiles at me and says, "Keveen....Sooper!"

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