The Kosova Assignment

A Kosova refugee waiting outside at the UAE Red Cross medical tent to register as an outpatient.

~ Onn Ibrahim, Special Correspondent, Mission of Hope & Mercy

I woke up without hearing gunfire – artillery shells landing with a familiar boom, and the rapid cacophony of a typical Kalashnikov automatic rifle. Could I be dreaming? I had just had a restful six-hour sleep, and in between had missed my morning prayers, because I had woken a mite too early and had decided to catch another forty winkles, before I realised the sun had arisen past the horizon, and I quickly prayed fajr, despite being late.

The youngest Kosovar baby at a refugee camp in Kukes.

Could I be stretching my familiarity? I was going into my twenty sixth day in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and a population made up of farmers, usually Muslims. I was tempted to visit Rapoh, a government official in the ministry of economics who had a small family of four consisting of himself, wife and two children, one of which has gone to high school, or the equivalent of university, and another still in middle school, the equivalent of secondary.

Rapoh (school teacher) and Nor Azaha (bank employee) at a square in Tirana.

I remembered when I visited them the last time, I was caught by the sweetness and tenderness of Rapoh’s wife – till today I have never known her name – and when she served me two generous slices of what appeared like carrot cake (it certainly tasted like one!), and noticed rather strangely that the cakes were sweet as she appeared sweet, but which in the end I was surprised to find out that the cake wasn’t carrot but banana. That led me to realise the stark reality of Tirana. How it was a city of contrasts, how little people knew of Tirana, and how the entire economy revolved around bananas both literally and figuratively. (You ever heard of the saying, “going bananas?”).

It was only the second day of my visit to Tirana, my first of a series of visits to other parts of Albania where my aim was to visit the Kosova Liberation Army who were, as I was advised fighting a fierce battle in the north near the border with Kosovo. I was crossing the street and came upon a ragged child, who sensed accurately, that I was a foreigner. She stuck two bananas to me urging me – and I think not because she wanted to give but sell the bananas to me – before I was pulled away by Nor Azaha, a Malaysian who was working in a nearby bank.  “Poh! poh!” he said, in a common and perhaps universal language used to ward off street pedlars, like this poor street pedlar, a child of barely three years old. (“Poh,” I discovered to mean “easy” later so “poh”, “poh” meant “easy”, “easy” or could also mean “take it easy”. Say that to a vagrant child in need of food and I wonder whether the words should mean “don’t take it easy, else you’re going to starve”).

I was struck by these power cables that crossed the channel because it seemed so low in height. I was wondering how it would affect safety.

It was enough to thwart the child because she had to remain on the sidewalk as we were crossing a square in the central and most prestigious part of Tirana. I don’t think she wanted to cling to me – and I wasn’t sure whether the bananas were any good either, if I bought them, they could be mushed and I never really liked mushed bananas (unless they were made like Rapoh wife’s cakes)  – and we crossed the square controlling our moves with as much dexterity as I learnt from Kuala Lumpur’s notorious city traffic – and made it to the other side, noticing rather abruptly Albania’s folk hero Scanderberg watching at us with a forlorn but serious look on his face, motionless, stationery and of course, brassy. The huge idol was sitting astride an equally huge and brassy horse, and he appeared solemn while carrying an Albanian flag, which made me wonder dutifully whether it was the same flag which he carried on the day when he was victorious or was it a different one. Or was it a lance which he was carrying, and later historians decided that he looked prettier with a flag.

A walk to a nearby park near where Rapoh lived, I came across these children who were selling cream milk.

At that instant, I wondered about the vagabond child and Scanderberg, about whether there was a connection between the two, perhaps even an accidental similarity; whether there was poverty during his time, or whether his indomitable victory against marauding Turks meant that there wasn’t any destitute child forced to beg for their next meal or whether his 25-year reign of power ensconced in a formidable fortress situated on the highest point in Albania, the town of Kornea, created a strategic diaspora of means meant to shower economic abundance for his people that the present people of Albania could only dream of having.

I asked also whether the child whom I had seen was a Kosova refugee, a Tiranian citizen or a gypsy because she was of dark-complexioned yet had fine beautifully carved features which somehow radiated her European descent and even ancestry.

I was amazed – that if the child was of gypsy origin – how strikingly similar she appeared to me from the films I had seen of them: in Madrid to Calcutta and even in Frankfurt. Gypsies remain an indefatigable tribe: their continued existence overshadowed by the pompous Jews, popularly paraded by world public opinion of their plight when I knew the gypsies suffered as much iniquity and cruelty from the reign of Adolf Hitler’s. Their plight simply remained ignominious much to my chagrin. Injustices committed against defenceless civilians become today’s currency: hard core criminals are seldom brought to justice.

Generally, Albanian structures do not have a rendering on the exterior. A view of a channel in the middle of the city.

If only I could hand the child some money in return for her bananas. After all this was fair trade: I admired her persistence and wished that my children had half her courage and instinct for survival, but I was prodded by Nor Azaha who simply brushed her away.

I couldn’t think at that moment, and hurried along, not wanting to be left behind by my two new friends – another one a humanitarian relief Malaysian worker from Sarajevo – past the ornate statue, bristling in the mid-morning sun, and conspicuously eyeing me even as I passed him and almost as I began to discern the rear shape of his horse which now took a grotesque view than from the front or side that made me quickly winced as I hated animal bottoms.

“Tirana, oh! Tirana,” as I heard myself singing in the chaotic mid-morning traffic, the rhyme, resembling “Sarajevo, oh Sarajevo,” which I had heard the first time on the second evening of my extended stay in the United Arab Emirates refugee camp on the outskirts of Kukes, a renowned town swooned by the media and therefore made famous to the gasping and gaping international audience because of the seeming plenitude and variety of  international relief organizations, featured as I was in Kukes watching the same cameramen and reporter broadcast UAE’s camp to the same audience in Abu Dhabi and Dubai like the international audience, in the same camp but from different angles and from different places with a slightly different story than the previous day.

An idylIic lake near Rapoh’s apartment.

I was wondering whether the British idiom, flogging a dead horse was a suitable amplification of this weird sight I was witnessing. I was later to find out from the cameraman, an Iraqi possessing a master's degree in broadcasting and directing from a renowned Moscow university, that he was sick to the bone covering the UAE camp and its litany of restless refugees, eager, as it were to get out of their hot tents and loiter in the camp’s compound, uncertain of their future and destiny, and worried sick that winter (soon to come) could kill them in the very camps they were proud to be fenced in.

The image of the child, this time I was perfectly sure, a Kosovar, came up above me and I recoiled, almost missing a step in our hurried walk, and gulped. “Such a beautiful child,” I thought to myself, remembering my children at home thousands of miles away, “yet now in a refugee camp and with the high likelihood that he might have lost a father” and my thoughts carried me to extremes, thinking of many ways how I wanted to help the Kosovar child and the child like the obviously malnourished and unfortunate street child. And then I almost knocked into my friends who were ahead of me as they stopped suddenly trying to evade a white taxi-van at a juncture which was careening in a rush, I thought, could it be because the taxi driver was carrying a pregnant passenger who was about to deliver!

I caught my breath and reminded myself that I had survived KL traffic; surely, I can’t get hit on this mad road of Tirana, ruger, the roads are called here, as a wave of a stink swept me. “Oh well,” I said, “if I don’t get hit by a vehicle, I could have easily been knocked off just from the foul smell of animal shit.” To be sure, another odour blew (“dog shit?”, close but not too sure) but I was ready this time and nimbly hopped over a big green patch of dung, made flat from the squelch of vehicle tyres; itself a reminder of being vigilant in this city of darling surprises.

Apart from being like a war-torn city, Tirana’s air is filled not with the carcase of human remains as in neighbouring Kosovo but with the unmistakable and distinct smell of shit of all kinds. Like when somebody farts in an airconditioned room, one can’t pretend that he or she didn’t smell the stink, in Tirana, the stink reminds you that there is at least a hive of animal activity; if nothing else, the mastication of animal bowels is seriously at work here smacked in the confines (not in the room where the guy just farted) of the wide, open spaces and boulevards of Tirana.

Correspondent in one of the city’s streets with Nor Azaha, a Malaysian bank employee during his last day at Tirana.

I remembered on the first Friday at Tirana while walking towards Malaysia’s only international bank, The International Commercial Bank, I crossed a swath of yellowish-green carpet of grass in full view of the bank, but almost jumped because a stump of human faeces laid in my path (they couldn’t be animal faeces because they don’t do it in full view of everybody to see and besides animals need some sand or earth to cover their faeces). During the week of course, while walking became a necessary business activity because Tirana is really a small city and it is better to walk the streets than sometimes to ride in a car, I almost became impervious to the many types of animal dung which emerged upon us. There were just plenty to see, and the hot Mediterranean summer never ceased to remind us of the waif of animal shit: goat shit, cattle shit, horse shit and the unmistakable smell of human shit.

Not to be outdone of course, is, until today of a sight which I have recorded in my mind to posterity, of a man groping a bulky tree trunk in a park encircled by the road we were travelling on which, naively or stupidly, solicited a response from me. “Why is the guy embracing the tree in the middle of the day?” I’d ask positioning my question to anybody (my welcome committee from Tirana International Airport) who, just like me, wasn’t expecting an obvious answer, and I got an answer. Alias, who heads the Malaysian bank answered, “Here, there is no public toilet, and everything left standing is fair game,” and that I suppose, is certainly the “warmest” welcome I could receive to Tirana.

While the man was busily sprinkling the bark of the open tree, I was left gazing at his posture: he was upright, yes; he was holding the tree, in fact he was embracing the tree, yes; but why wasn’t he holding on to his pecker. I thought it was unnatural.

It seemed strange that people could urinate in full view of everybody. It seemed even stranger that he was doing it in such a callous or on the contrary, arty manner. The fact that he could do it wasn’t the issue. The issue was that he could do it naturally, without a hint embarrassment or a sign of shame: fact is, he did it because he wanted to, and he did it because he was utterly conscious of his action (as of the stool which laid upon my path) it was as if he was trying to tell everybody something.

This seems like a better and unclogged channel compared to some other municipalities I have seen in other parts of the world.

That it stinks in Tirana?

To be sure, on the second and subsequently following days of my stay in Tirana, I changed my walking shoes which I bought in Malaysia to a new pair I had bought in Slovenia, a few days earlier. I bought the shoe in anticipation of my trek with the KLA and because the trendy boots I had bought at Pertama complex, KL wasn’t functional, although it did look attractive enough, and because Slovenia is known as a green country good for long walks so perhaps, they designed better shoes.

With the shoes I had bought in Slovenia, I walked confidently, lest I stepped on anything “green”. What are my “green” shoes meant for? The same shoes brought me into Kosova with the KLA and the same shoes brought me out safely and back to Tirana.

On my last Saturday here in Tirana, I was going to make sure that I would wear the same shoes on my return to KL. I’ll be proud to show Malaysians I walked in Tirana without stepping on shit and I walked into Kosova without stepping into a mine.

As for this hot and surprising city of Tirana, I will salute Scanderberg as he rides high and mighty on his horse and into history for being the only Albanian who held out against Turk’s conquests before he was finally defeated. In his memory though, five hundred years since then, I thought it ironic if not laconic that I had to be careful where I stepped my shoes.

There are signs of poverty everywhere in the city of Tirane, capital of Albania. During Enver Hoxah’s time, food was rationed and after a long time, Muslims ate whatever was given to them, including pork. Some Muslims eat pork to this day even as they know that it is forbidden in Islam because they acquired the habit during socialist times.

It was going to be my last Saturday, and if I am lucky, it will be my last Sunday when the clock strikes twelve tonight. And I know my shoes will be clean when I arrive home.

About the only thing I will miss are the sweet banana cakes made by Rapoh’s wife. And then again, it would be home sweet home.

Arriving Kuala Lumpur International Airport one day, I could almost see myself kissing the tarmac.

~ Onn Ibrahim, Special Correspondent to the Kosova Conflict in 1999

I’d gone to Kosova because I wanted to do something better with my life. I thought Kosova could provide me with an answer. A clue or two. And then I placed an ad through my former peer group, nicknamed classof72 because 240 of us completed high school at Kuala Kangsar, a prestigious boarding school for elite Malays, a major race in my country.

Durres is a coastal town near the capital Tirane. It was the place where my contacts fetched me from the airport en-route to Tirane. These are the first shots after the party had an Albanian-style seafood lunch at a nearby restaurant.

The ad received no response and I requested that it be forwarded to my bigger peer group, this time covering all the former graduates of my college. I received a reply almost immediately from one benefactor who preferred to remain anonymous. He gave me enough money to perform my mission to Kosova.

The party receiving me are Khairul Anuar of Malaysian Relief Agency and the Manager of the first Malaysian bank in Tirana, Alias who was kind to offer us his apartment during our temporary stay.

Why Kosova? Instinct taught me this would be the best place to test my iman. Iman, which most Westerners and even modern Muslims understand as “faith” is Muslims' greatest practical and liveable asset. I needed to charge my battery. I needed to find out whether there were any defects in my battery storage or whether I needed to replace the old iman battery.

It appeared to me this Albanian resident seemed like a young boy, and I began to wonder whether Albanian youths married early. Pictured here is the town of Durres, near Tirane, the capital of Albania.

It was time to go. Preparations to go to Kosova were quite extensive. But I had most of the equipment already as I had been anticipating moving to another country in view of my hopeless jobless situation. I had been without a regular job for the last six years; and while I was relegated to house minding and child-caring, I was going berserk. My relationship with my children had reached a dry point and I was faced with a stark choice: get a job or lose your mind. I had missed particularly the interaction of peers and colleagues and oftentimes I imagined seeing myself at work laughing and having an enjoyable time, while my kids were whining or panting in the background and the swirl of dust enveloped us as I try unceasingly to remove each speck of conspicuous dust from our floor which I remembered at last count had never been moped now for a year.

The assignment was such that I had to file regular stories from the front-line: the idea being that I stay with the forward column of the Kosova Liberation Army. The challenge was to get to the front-line and crossed into Kosova and this kept me busy with scrutinizing land maps and developing contact possibilities. And during that time, I never forgot to get my peer group involved; first with informing them my intention and then secondly attempting to garner support for my mission.

The other party in the group is Klodiane who is the driver for the team’s mission.

The response from my group was of course lukewarm and at most, became a mere curiosity. Some of my former collegians I had never met for a good 26 years but at the end of a one night’s meeting, the group of forty of us, prodded me to take the stand in a kind of dialogue. Earlier, the group had a view of what to expect in Kosova as a senior collegian had made a trip to Tropoje, northern Albania about 14 months prior to my planned mission. The presentation seemed to have acclimatized them to the real situation there although Kosovar refugees were only beginning to trickle in across the border from southern Kosova. But the real dangers associated with the assignment were only beginning to emerge.

Haji Mohd Kamal’s slide presentation was tempered with many personal view-comments of the then current situation and the group appeared mesmerized. When discussion ensued later, it focused on the expense involved in sending one person like me to such a perilous mission: whether it was worth the effort and what the returns could be.

When the time came for me to present, I could only relate to them two of my objectives: That I wanted to cover the front-line from a Muslim, non-Western perspective, and secondly, that I wanted to be “there” with the Kosovars to share their grief, and “lend my shoulder”, if at all that was possible.

Durres is the port entry for Albania’s import and exports.

Questions ensued forth and there was brisk debate about my competency for covering war situations. There was concern about my safety and there were tactless reminders that I was leaving a big family consisting of children who were still growing up and needed a father. I answered them the best as I could assuring them repeatedly that the mission must be undertaken in view of the relative slowness of the Malaysian government and public to act in response to widely publicized Serb atrocities and genocide.

“I can assure you that I will love my children as I have always loved them...not one little bit less while I am away but you must remember for every Kosova child who has lost a father, I would like to be there with him or her at least for a moment,” I told the group.

As to my wife, I told them that she has known what I am and has always prepared herself for the worst. “What’s nineteen years of marriage if we are not willing to sacrifice for others?” I spoke.

Freight ships queuing to disembark their cargo at the Durres terminal.

At that I noticed the group started to warm, that is, in a way in which I wanted them to be: to feel for the children of the fathers and mothers who were dead or waylaid by Serbs’ aggression. The fact remained that there were already more than three quarters of a million Kosovars who were being forcibly expelled from their homes and forced with almost no personal belongings to bring with them on the road to the nearest border: to the south it would be Morine or Morina and then into the Albanian towns of Tropoje or Kukes; to the west would be Prizren, and then into the Montenegran town of Pec. To the east would be to cross the border at Dakovcia; to arrive at the Macedonian towns of Korab, and further inland, Tetovo.

I was well aware that earlier, just before Haji Mohd Kamal ended his presentation, one of the organisers of the evening’s gathering had asked a pointed question as to the total amount that I would need in one month and the reply was thirty thousand Malaysian ringgit to which the group seemed aghast; but for the fact that Haji Mohd Kamal had presented them his own experience, this wasn’t to be taken as a negative sign. “No problem,” the organizer had assured him, “we are just interested in bottom line figures only”. In any case, I was thrown into a moment of optimism only to realize that after one month in Albania and Kosova not a single sen of that cheery generosity ever made its way into my bank account in Tirana which was set up as my base of operations.

I suppose, in hindsight, the group just wanted to see how their reporter was going to present his story on why he was going to Kosova – at that time it seemed too far away and almost forbidden – rather than committing or pledging themselves to a stated sum to help underwrite the costs of the operations.

I remembered that I received 3,630 ringgits in total from my peer group; one thousand ringgits of which I had pledged and paid after selling off my motorbike which meant I really did only receive a total of 2,630 ringgits. One pledge of one thousand ringgits was withdrawn while the first pledge of one thousand has never been paid until today.

One of the ships at the dock which seems inoperable.

The contribution from my peer group wouldn’t buy me a return ticket to Tirana: not while NATO was bombing Kosova daily.

And yet I left Malaysia and crossed into Kosova to witness some of the hardest pitched battle ever during the 87 days of the bombing of Kosova in an area where there was a complete absence of non-Western based reporting.

“There is always a first time,” as I told my peer group that evening. Whether I am a seasoned war reporter or a first-time correspondent, the fact remains that you must have a brave heart to go out there to join with the irregulars of the KLA. “What does it matter anyway than the fact that this is a once a lifetime opportunity,” as Haji Mohd Kamal commented earlier.

I don’t claim to have a brave heart but sometimes I wished some people’s heart are braver than their words.

~ Onn Ibrahim, Special Voluntary Malaysian Correspondent to Kosovo (1999)

Telephone: Tirana, Albania ++3 55 42 72816 or ++ 3 55 42 37567

 I suspected that this is Rejab’s nephew and that his relative’s portrait painting also hung on the wall above him.

Seventy-eight days of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign over Yugoslavia has finally yielded peace: a cessation of war and an opportunity for the refugees to return before winter. But for us Malaysians, it is about time we take stock of our humanitarian record during the seventy-eight days conflict. It is a record full of shame.

We had to ditch our car and walk for about one hour toward the nearest village near the border to Kosovo. It was already dusk by the time we reached this abandoned house.

On the way to our night’s rest, we passed through this abandoned village. The foreground are the Accursed mountains. Over these mountains lies Kosovo.

I flew in alone to Tirana, Albania on a voluntary photojournalistic mission to record the sufferings of the Kosova refugees and to create a document in history so that Malaysians will never forget this episode in their lives.

My driver Klodiane and Malaysian Relief Agency’s Khairul in the abandoned house. Khairul graduated in Moscow and can speak fluent Russian and a little of Serbian.

I was driven to do this alone as the Malaysian government media was slow in coming to the Kosovars’ plight. While in Kuala Lumpur, I watched CNN’s endless coverage of the misery inflicted and imposed upon these poor refugees, many of them sharing the same faith as Malaysian Muslims, currently enjoying more than fifty percent of the population in Malaysia, and the predominant race holding political power in Malaysia.

We stayed the night at this villa. It was a steep incline toward it. The villa is the only sign of life in the deep valleys of Albania’s northern Accursed Mountain range.

But I was saddened and infuriated with the apparent indifference of the Malaysian government in viewing the Kosovo conflict. Here was an opportunity for Malaysia to show to the world its impeccable record in tackling humanitarian problems of a global nature: we had participated in several United Nations peacekeeping effort before, including Bosnia, Somalia, Uganda, and Cambodia, and yet with more than 850,000 Kosovars crossing into Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Bosnia, we couldn’t lift a finger to come to their plight.

Tropoje was the first base camp I entered. I was smuggled by my party of bodyguard, driver, and relief aid worker at a checkpoint manned by NATO soldiers.

What is wrong with Malaysians and what is wrong with the government headed by Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamed, a tested and reliable leader of the country for the last 18 years. Is he so worried about his political future that he can toss the Kosovo problem aside? Kosova Albanians consisted of ninety percent of Albania at some period in Kosovo’s history with most of them being Muslims.

It was getting dark and walking downhill with a loaded vest of photo gear was punishing but my spirits were high, and I didn’t really know what to expect ahead that evening.

Why did Dr Mahathir Mohamed keep quiet during these trying and most challenging times in the history of human exodus? Why didn’t he try? Is he condoning barbarity of the highest order on fellow Muslims?

Coming from a sedentary lifestyle in the tropics, I began my survey of this region as something of a curiosity: “How do you live in this wilderness of the surrounding mountains?”

During my two weeks in Albania, I took the unprecedented step to see the Kosovo Liberation Army and to get their permission to report from the front line at Rrasa e Zagut, Koshare, Kosovo, some fifteen miles from the nearest Albanian town in the mountainous region called Papaj. I witnessed and filed firsthand accounts of the war going on at the area, the difficulties faced by the medical doctors in treating the wounded and the high moral spirits and constructive optimism of the KLA regulars who were mostly civilians' weeks before they experienced their first combat.

Even my bodyguard was relieved (rare smile) when we reached the bottom of the valley where friends weren’t expecting our coming as guests; our trip was deliberately kept secret as my bodyguard advised there are spies among the Albanians who report any suspicious activities to the Serbs.

I was with them in the bunkers, in their sufferings and during the times when they weren’t sure where to get their next meal. This was the hottest area of the conflict, and not a single western reporter also dared to enter the area. But here, the heroes came out alive: They worked 24-hour shifts, they cried and begged to return to the battlefront to join their comrades when half their hands were blown off, they suffered through the rocky terrain on a Serb-seized four-wheel truck, to be ferried to the nearest decent clinic at Baram Curri. Many of them also died while being transported in a Red Cross helicopter en route to the medical hospital at Tirana. Many of them didn’t even know where their families were.

How we made it downhill shall always surprise me because the incline was at least 65 degrees.

It seemed fortuitous that this shot came out okay. We were making our way downhill of the steep incline.

But they fought on – without heavy artillery, without proper medical treatment, without even a proper uniform. They were all soldiers – including the medics – who risked lives and limbs fighting the Serbs who were well equipped and constantly harassed them.

A photo of Rejab, my bodyguard, who, when he was in the army, was probably used to these terrains: He was joking when he told me that if I didn’t make it down, he’d still wanted the full payment for his services.

Despite the odds, they held their ground, and in one meeting with the top commander there, 33-year-old Gadit Hadergjonaj said that victory was within their reach. Had he received a prophetic vision because three days upon leaving his camp, President Slobodan Milosevic finally agreed to his Yugoslav army Serb withdrawal. And suddenly, the world is faced with a major reconstruction effort starting first with bringing home the Kosovar refugees under NATO protection.

Klodiane suggested we took a group shot before the descent, and assured me his photographic skills are “good”; in case it was the last time he’d met me and was eager to try my Nikon F4S. Instead, I said, I wanted to make sure they are safe. “The Kosova Dream Team” I said.

Does he think that the conflict in Kosovo is a European problem? If so, why then did he participate in Bosnia? Malaysia was overarching in their peace mission and there was frantic activity in the country in providing aid to the Bosnians. Malaysia, in fact, were one of the few muslim countries which adopted Bosnian refugees and helped them to integrate into Malaysian society. When the Dayton Peace Accords were finally signed, many Bosnians returned safely to their homes in Sarajevo, Gorazde, Tuzla, Mostar, Banja Luka, etc. We provided them refuge when they really needed one. It was a coup de grace as we proudly told the world we could play our part in humanitarian relief effort.

Upon examining this photo later, I saw a remarkable resemblance with the host and concluded they could be bothers: Rejab and the host of our overnight stay.

But why the indifference now? The effort to help the Kosovars was only started late when the exodus of refugees had begun – and the Kosova Fund is minuscule compared to what the Arab countries had done for the Kosovars. I know since I was a guest at the 5-star camp of the United Arab Emirates. I know since they collected more than USD300 million in one night of telethon. And that is from one Arab Muslim country.

And now, amidst a great deal of fanfare and publicity, five Malaysian doctors are coming on June 19 to join in the relief effort. Couldn’t this be done before the peace agreement advanced by NATO and legalised by the UN Security Council was reached with President Milosevic?

Albanian families tend to extend and in this family, I can feel the closeness of their relationship.

It is a little too late, isn’t it? Unless Malaysia wants to lead among Muslim nations in the reconstruction effort of Kosovo. But for now, Malaysia should say thank you to the heroes of the NATO campaign: President Bill Clinton, Prime Minister Tony Blair, U.S. Secretary Mdm. Albright, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, EU envoy and Finnish President Matti Ahtisaari and Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin, among the many who deserve recognition for ending the Kosovo conflict.

Ironically, Prime Minister Dr Mahathir also must thank President Milosevic for agreeing to end the conflict. Otherwise, if it dragged on, and many more Kosovars are forcibly displaced from their homes and placed in refugee camps, Malaysia’s policy of quiet indifference will erase all its humanitarian effort in the past.

The Kosovars will remember who their friends are. If Malaysia is to be counted among them, we’d better start cracking now. Unless we want the shame of seventy-eight days of NATO bombing to linger in our conscience.

We were having light banter and cushion mats were spread out for the night’s guests. The sharp resemblance between Rejab and his (brother?) probably made my conclusion correct.

It was the first time I held a rifle. This is a posed shot. I handed the rifle quickly back to Rejab but I did feel its heaviness.

During the evening, Klodiane oiled his Made in China TT handgun.

I can never hold a Kalashnikof AK-47 but will always want a Nikon to be my weapon of choice for promoting and recording peace. A Kalashnikon then it is.

92 ~ Onn Ibrahim, Special Correspondent, Mission of Hope & Mercy

It was the perfect day and the perfect setting. I was on the road to see my first refugees in real life. I was excited, I felt my heart beating, and I wished I was perspiring. But I didn’t perspire. Instead, my heart missed a beat.

Two days after arriving Tirane, we got word we could fly out to Kukes; the refugee camp at northern Albania where refugees were streaming in from neighbouring Kosovo. My first impression of the airport base was one of apprehension and excitement for my mission was about to commence.

I almost died.

As the party headed toward the tents called the Waiting Area, I was rewarded with my first sight of US’ military assets: the Apaches and Chinooks. The airport combined the forces of the UAE and US together during the conflict.

Khairul, a director of Malaysia Relief Agency based in Sarajevo in discussion with a staff of the UNHCR on the way to the tents.

The Waiting Area already had military flight personnel when we entered. They were pilot officers of the UAE Air Force.

Flights to Kukes were regular: Twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, three or four times a week.

Some of the helicopter gunships belonging to the UAE Air Force.

Party of that day ready to board. They consisted of UNHCR, medical, NGOs and volunteer personnel.

Our pilots on that day consisted of the pilot and his co-pilot as well as their navigator waiting for the time to take off.

A view of the flight cockpit airborne to our destination, Kukes. It was about an hour’s flight.

A view of the mountainous regions of northern Albania that borders both Montenegro and Macedonia.

UAE’s flight navigator catching up on news from UAE reading the local newspaper.

Each flight journey is accompanied by a second helicopter that has no passengers for safety reasons.

I have always felt vulnerable but with the sound of the whirring blades of this once-of-a-lifetime-helicopter lift bringing me toward a strange destination, a sense of self-vulnerability multiplied through seeing the rocky terrain below me. I sensed that if I am a refugee, the only pass toward refuge is that single road that leads to safety, some type of assurance that life may be still ahead. This mix of jitters and anticipation led me to believe some of us were meant to be what we are.

From high, as the UNHCR helicopter began its descent, tiny trivial things began to emerge as familiar shapes but in this remote stretch of flatland -- sitting at the beginning of the mountain’s natural shape -- these shapes cut an unfamiliar scene, a scene that reminds of temporariness, of longing for sympathy, and of lingering uncertainty.

A glimpse through the open door of the helicopter revealed familiar patterns of human activity: groups pf people, fencing line with laundry, vehicles, and the neat rows of the tops of relief tents with their typical pointed heads. I was closer to ground than I could have ever imagined before.

Arriving Kukes, and upon seeing the refugees, my first instinct was of the deepest sadness and empathy: I wished I could trade places.

A most welcoming sign at the main gate of the camp. There were lots of Orangie-red colours -- one of my favourite colours -- and the white background contrasted neatly with the Soviet-era car parked behind it. I was assured, I will be in good company soon.

The first thing that struck me when Khairul commented that this is the best refugee camp among many others, was the irony; it seemed to me also an iconoclast. There were many other similar camps like this one set-up by the UAE government but to differentiate other camps based on “Ritz-like” comfort seems to me to defy normal convention: A refugee couldn’t care less. This camp attracted mostly refugees of the Islamic faith (Muslims) while another one, set up by the Italian government, attracted mostly Christians.

Our ride took off and I managed to get a shot of the helicopter against the magnificent northern Albania’s mountains; I was impressed with the sharp white lines gravitating toward its base.

What attracted me about this boy is not the way he handled the sign peace -- a universal symbol of friendship -- but the group of boys at the awaiting truck, the two flags of two Muslim nations, and the wide expanse of the gap of the mountain in the background that prompted me to ask: “Will humanity give peace a chance even though there is a noticeably wide gap of optical understanding among us as individuals, groups and fraternities?” “What are we waiting for for peace to take its place among communities of this habitat everyone calls home?”

I couldn’t help imagining that the tips of the tents resembled yurts, the dwelling place of the Mongols for thousands of years but yurts are circular in design, and these are oblong; yurts are comfortable during winter, but these are stuffy during these summer period of Albania’s seasons. Yet, as the activity shows, we undertake the same things every day. Does this mean that we can share dwellings?

Misery was not shy to be paraded. It was displayed in the bright sunlight for everyone to see. I was struck by the scene.

What is the camp like? My walkabout started. I was relieved that I could catch some shadows as the Kodak Ektachrome 400 tended to display a bluish tinge, so today’s bright sunlight helped with the shadows, but I lost contrast. With my favourite Kodachrome 100, it would have displayed a warmer photo, closer to the skin colours, but I had to make a choice about carrying faster lens, and these I couldn’t afford.

Like all camps, the new earth is a feature of recent digging. In this photo, I was drawn to the crowd of young people and to the two boys at both ends: one, carrying a soccer ball and another, pensively looking in one direction. This composition reminded me of Buddha who in his contemplation of the inner self and dharma, seemed to suggest a tension of many things at the same time: at both ends of his eyes, the first sensory, the flanks concentrated on the centre, like the bridge of our noses if we squint down, the second sensory, smell but it also reflected the earth, our common experience of Mother Nature, even as we group together and share a common yet central and normal activity: something interesting.

One of the three boys’ father is military personnel at the UAE camp. Can you spot him?

During summer, it is easy to access water from this water storage sack, but I wonder, during winter, or rainy season, how the ground shall turn and whether mud shall pose some difficulty. Even so, I know that water is like life and these refugees are fortunate to have water readily supplied by UAE authorities.

Against the endless open canopy of the pale blue skies, washing activity is frantic yet a necessary chore of everyday living.

Construction work digging pits and installing supply lines continue in the hot morning sun; as we construct life for permanency, we also deconstruct our lives to ruin. Nothing is permanent, I thought to myself, but everything is impermanent -- temporary structures of habits with shifting definitions. (It was in this photo that I realised the white tents seen as we land weren’t the only colours of these similar type of tents; similar in design but not the same in colours).

I wonder what will happen to these crowds in the future. What are they in 20 years' time?

There are at least 92 percent of Albanians living in Kosovo. Since 2008 when Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia, the first country to recognize its independence is Albania. These ladies waiting for their daily provisions, came from the city of Prizren in Kosovo.

I wonder too, will this car run again soon and, in the future, will it be around anymore, or could it be a vintage model?

I see the faces of people smiling together forgetting their temporal situation for a moment in the cool shadows; a misgiving that will soon pass as the tents are bought down and the shadows disappear.

And happenstance, I met Mumamet Sallahaj who told me that there many others like him who weren’t lucky to get into a refugee camp like the one he is staying in now. “There’s a group of refugees nearby who are still without a shelter like this one,” he told me. The next day, Khairul and I set out to the nearest town to verify his story.

I could not fail to spot these concrete covers on the way to Kukes town. I asked Klodiane and he replied that “Albania is pockmarked with such bunkers”. “Concrete military bunkers are a ubiquitous sight in Albania, with an average of 5.7 bunkers for every square kilometre (14.7 per square mile). The bunkers (Albanian: bunkerët) were built during the Stalinist and anti-revisionist government of Enver Hoxha from the 1960s to the 1980s; by 1983 a total of 173,371 bunkers had been constructed around the country.” Furthermore, “Hoxha's program of ‘bunkerization’ (bunkerizimi) resulted in the construction of bunkers in every corner of the then People's Socialist Republic of Albania, ranging from mountain passes to city streets. They were never used for their intended purpose during the years that Hoxha governed. The cost of constructing them was a drain on Albania's resources, diverting them away from more pressing needs, such as dealing with the country's housing shortage and poor roads.” Sourced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunkers_in_Albania with the title: Bunkers in Albania.

Walking in the rising sun the following day, I shot some fields of maize. Albania is considered an agricultural country with many of its crops grown mostly for domestic consumption. Maize is the highest grown crop followed by tomatoes, potatoes, wheat, and watermelon. I remembered when I first landed at Tirana and lunched at Durres, watermelons were served as watering-down appetizers then.

My thoughts began to sink in the morning sun. I see the distant houses and wonder whether there were more houses beyond. Would there be an endless carpet of maize fields and when it ends, another field emerges, and houses appear from nowhere as a mark of civilization?

And then, these barbed wires emerged, and against the background of flats, which were the first signs of reaching our destination, I asked: “What happens when we reach town? Do we start our project with what we already had in mind? Interviewing the refugees and getting as much information as we wanted to complete a report, something that we were obliged and accountable? It seemed to me that life is a process of stops-and-starts with no end in sight.

And then, suddenly I noticed a single person, a woman, whose profile indicated sadness, remorse, or she was only tired. It hit me then that fields that we grow to feed our existence can either sprout sustenance or produce weeds which farmers hate. So, the battle of life is unceasing, and when tired, we take a rest, to reflect on our being and in the meanwhile recouping energy to start all over again.

Muhamet Sallahaj has been sleeping under his brother’s truck for two months. “Tomorrow, it will be two months since we arrived from Prizren,” a town of about 100,000 inhabitants and about three days walk away. “We have no electricity here and we want a generator badly,” he mused.

These were some of the new arrivals at the town of Kukes.

Khairul Anuar speaking to one of the members of the Sallahaj family that Muhamet was referring to at the UAE camp a day earlier.

Muhamet and his extended family of nineteen members are part of the throng of refugees who have crossed over into this tiny northern Albanian town of Kukes, about 40 minutes away by helicopter from Tirane, its capital and about 10 to 16 hours by road. He looked emancipated and his jagged looks made him aged many times over. I asked him how old he was. He was forty-eight, he replied, and stopped short of competing his sentence. I wondered why.

Another refugee came to see us because he was curious about my photographing. Eventually, when Khairul Anuar spoke to him, he was pacified and brought his family for a photo.

It was normal for Muhamet and his family to be wary of strangers since I came with Kharil Anuar, a Malaysian relief worker from Malaysian Relief Agency, based in Sarajevo, Bosnia. But I also suspected he was tired, tired of seeing misery around him. Tired of seeing so many stuck tractors and trucks; with their tires embedded in mud and enveloped in a nicely curved outgrowth of wild grass.

Khairul Anuar discoursing with the encamped residents and slowly gaining confidence as we seemed like unfortunate strangers.

We talked and found out that the family was forced to move out of their homes. Muhamet indicated a slash across the throat so I knew what he meant before Khairul could interpret his words. It wasn’t difficult I imagine for us to understand the universal language of death. And, as I heard him say later, the sign wasn’t meant to be metaphoric. It was real. People’s throats were slashed.

One of the daily activities at the progressing albeit impermanent encampment.

I used to hang these cloth napkins like these forms before and felt incredulity at the common tasks of a father or grandfather, a typically common bond of kinship in our creaturely ways.

I asked him whether he saw any of his villagers killed. He kept quiet. He finally said he hadn’t personally seen the killings, but he knew who was killed in his village. And then I asked him whether he knew of any rapes. To this question, I thought, I had dropped a bomb. He felt silent. He looked wary. He lowered his eyes and for that moment I witnessed the most terrible crime I had ever seen. It was all in his eyes. He knew or he saw. And Khairul stopped me. “Don’t, don’t. Don’t ask him anymore.... let him say if he wants to.”

He never said anything after that. It was as if he suddenly withdrew from the conversation. It was a frightful experience for me.

Another family in a truck.

One of the family members in the sun watched over by the mother.

Albanian families love children and they seemed plenty of them in all the families we visited.

We were invited for coffee. Here in Albania when they make coffee, they serve it in tiny little cups. Coffee was made Turkish style; thick, almost waxy yet charmingly delicious. I sipped my coffee and felt relieved as the syrupy flavour coated my mouth and slid down my anxious throat. I joined Khairul’s conversation, now joined by two other men, one of which is Muhamet’s elder brother, who also happened to be the head of this refugee group.

Over a cup of coffee (kaf) and chai (tea).

I got a wave from an Albanian child.

He is another Sallahaj although I wasn’t sure.

Another refugee family with all his boys.

A refugee couple in between their laundry.

They were about forty-five families he said, and most of them came from his village and several neighbouring villages near Prizren. Close by he indicated there were thirty-five other families, from another village. While he talked, I noticed that the refugees were camped on a steep incline; at some places, it was at a forty-five-degree angle. “It must be fortuitous that they can actually live on this piece of land,” I thought as I watched a child play with his moped tricycle on an earth dump, still on the steep incline and precariously perched and close to death – if somehow the tricycle were to move down there would be no stopping it.

This was shot from afar with a telephoto lens.

I was impressed with this child’s mindfulness.

I saw that in the future he would become a skilled motorcyclist.

He controlled his destiny in the most innocent of ways.

At the end of the incline was a swath of gleaming water; bathed in shimmering blue and set against a rising lake out of which one could distinguish even fuller cliffs and mountains. In the sheer horizon, one could just discern the markings of the United Emirates Refugee Camp where I had earlier come from.

I came close to this lady and only noticed she had a baby in an ingenious cot. The covers were hung so low, but I could barely make out the living quarters.

I came across this lady and during our walks, this was the first baby we met. He was about three weeks old and was born on-site at the encampment.

The sun was sinking, and I wasn’t sure how fast. I could understand something clearly at last as the light began to fade but I felt a surge of calmness. I thought, the scene was like an art gallery where paintings hung on the wall, and I was always drawn to dusk; the artist’s gift of a light of nature as he faithfully reproduces colours using oils.

In the second shot, I knew this would be a genre called Romanticism where it was the trend at that time. This photo reminded me of an oil painting in Dutch land or the present Netherlands.

My eyes were drawn toward the two-land mass that joined this artificial lake with the greater lake; the town of Kukes was on its left and soon the lights would appear. It reminded me about estuaries: how masses of water would mix like freshwater mixing with salt water, and it conjured of relationships. How humanity is the same but because of fears within us, we set up responses of division.

The light was fading, and I wanted to capture a pond. It reminded me of an oasis in the desert: Do we thirst for love or is loneliness an inevitable fate?

Dimming the scene, I began to see shadows and a soft profile begins to emerge. A butterfly begins with a cocoon and as it emerges from its darkness, a pair of beautiful wings springs to action: Is life always beautiful? For these refugees by the lake, they take their leave from these shadows and retire in their makeshift tents and convenient trucks to prepare for the evening. The war rages and it seems quiet except for the crickets for now. Beauty surrounds despite adversity.

Every space is used to dry washed laundry, a testament to human ingenuity especially when adversity climbs.

These people seemed to have arisen from the lake, my mind wandered. They could climb the hill and hang on it like their lives depended on it. The kid, barely three years old, Muhamet, the steep incline, the heavy vehicles slumped against the orange red earth; reminded me that life and death were intertwin ably close and that at each moment, one could give way to another, and victory assured to the winner, defeat to the vanquished.

It was evident that a stranger pointing a camera was a rare sight, but I had gotten used to it after the initial shoots at Durres, Tirana and the UAE refugee camps. It is a welcoming gesture from my subjects because it shows their innocence. During my 26 days sojourn with the people of Albania and Kosovo, it was uncanny how similar our cultures were: Albanians and Malays.

Our contact was happy to gather as many of his family when he realised the purpose of Kharul’s mission.

In this life and death struggle of perpetual drama, one could sense one’s invincibility and fallibility. For we are creatures of God’s creation, and we could fall at any moment. But for now, the conversation held supreme, and we talked obliviously to the peculiar circumstances around us.

And then, one of the men spoke. As if on a cue, he asked Khairul, and Khairul translated for me. “Could he go to Malaysia with his family?”. I was astounded. I had on many occasions – including during the time I was flying between Zurich and Lubjlana – had rehearsed this line of questioning. “Why couldn’t Malaysia take these refugees? Why aren’t we doing so now when we did once before during the Bosnian conflict? Why are we stalling?” And now suddenly, I was confronted with this question.

It was another one of the Sallahaj family. His name was Hazin and he had a wife and four children, three of them girls. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and for a moment, I thought God had answered my prayer: That, yes, there are Kosova refugees who would like to come to Malaysia. And, I didn’t even have to ask.

Earlier, during the times when we were preparing to go to Kukes, Khairul Anuar had indicated to me that it wasn’t going to be a clever idea for us to bring Kosovars to Malaysia. His argument was that it would be “too expensive” for us to maintain these people and that the Bosnian experience showed that we could not “have them”. I failed to see this line of reasoning; more so since he was directly involved with the Bosnian conflict and is now also helping the Bosnians recover and rebuild their torn lives from their war in Sarajevo. But I also saw his view that only Bosnians could help their own kind and that may well be for the Kosovars too.

From far, I noticed a human being but when I moved closer, there was another human being, a baby. The makeshift shelters strung between farming machinery.

But what if there were people like Hazin who wanted a sanctuary: at least temporarily. What if he sought asylum from political and humanitarian repression? What if he wanted just a decent meal or a house on a flat piece of land? What if he wanted his children to play in a park and not slide off the hill into the vast blue lake. For people like Hazin, I also wanted to ask myself, what if I could find a better place to live in rather than suffer the incongruities of Balkan politics and history. What if I wanted some semblance of justice? Could Kosovo or for that matter the world guarantee it for me while his children struggled to climb the slope of life?

Amazingly, I composed fast enough to answer the question Hazin posed. I said to Khairul and he translated it for Hazin. “Onn doesn’t work for the Malaysian government, and he has no authority to say yes or no. But he will write it in his report home, and he will also try to get the question answered by the Malaysian government.”

Hazin blinked and I could sense a wave of excitement over him. I asked. “Do you want to write down your name and all your family members?” At that he obliged willingly and pushing a pen and my notebook to him I saw him scribbling fast which reminded me instantly how I was when I was a small boy trying to get my parent’s attention when I first learned to print my name.

It was late afternoon before we managed to move to another “encampment”: this time in downtown Kukes. But as I walked away and waved at them, I could sense an overpowering sensation of happiness. I knew that I had achieved a great deal of my mission. And God is Almighty because this was the first refugee family I had ever interviewed. The mission seemed right. The signals were strong and getting stronger.

I do not know whether this is a Sallahaj member, but I knew from the minaret they are Muslims. A steely portrait of mother and son in the harsh, Albanian sun.

It was a perfect day to cherish.

End.

Postscript to Kukes, North Albania.

How “Kosova” is spelt by the Albanians and how “Kosovo” is considered derogatory by Albanians who say that it is a name Serbs conceived (to degenerate them).

It is not a mirage when it comes to reality and the best reality is our experience of self.

The border town of Kukes is characterised by a monument in the town’s square. In this photo, I caught the first glimpse of a UCK fighter. (UCK or Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës, was a separatist militia that arose in the 1990s which sought to separate from the former Yugoslavia and Serb republics as its members were ethnic Albanians, seeking a way for a greater Albania joining Kosovo and Albania). It is also known as the KLA or Kosovo Liberation Army.

Self is a concept that looks at us, and in this case, it is not in the collective but in the individual.

Pedestrians of Kukes.

If I say red, it is because I see red. It is a visual experience, but the visual experience is also a psychological one. It becomes subjective because each person’s retina sees red as a colour which cannot be defined properly as our eyes are biologic.

The streets of Kukes.

Red is associated with alarm in some cultures and in others, it is considered either as omen or luck. Yellow, on the other hand, projects a feeling of uplift but in some cultures, it is considered profane, and so, the slogan, “Yellow Culture”.

Street vendors of Kukes.

Words therefore develop feelings within us; sometimes, we do not even know how and what to feel given a certain stimulus. Therefore, if we ask a linguist about words and their meanings, a linguist will return to etymology to try to provide us an answer as to its meaning. But whether the meaning is meaningful is again subject to the listener’s experience of his experience.

A Kukes restaurant. We stopped for lunch here.

Whether this is logical or a double-speak, we would now have to refer to the Logicians and certainly not the Philosophers (Philosophy of Science or Science of Philosophy) nor the Rationalists (Reason versus Dogma) and not even the Skeptics (except Science of Logic and Skepticism). Each have their own version of Definitions. And this is not a code nor an ancient cryptic; it is simply the way it is or in an eyes’ blink, it could be “some other” sciences, arts, or rhetoric, like Quantum Mechanics (Do we ask a Quantum Physicist now but what will the DNA Biologist say, and will the Astrophysicist get a pass into a sneak answer?).

(This is not to say that Uniscience isn’t important but at this stage, any new sciences that involves metaphysics would have raised eyebrows).

No matter, it is always how we construct our own realities that we should remember that it is the Realists who are the final arbiters of our physical and psychological sense-experience with the conscience of the awe, the metaphysical sense of experience, a true reality.

A typical store in Kukes.

Twenty years out of Kosovo and Albania, things have changed but things have also remained hidden. For example, it is incredible that in these days of listening devices, snoops, and disinformation, we are faced with a situation of recklessness on all fronts.

Like a market in Kukes.

Main players such as politicians, academics, experts, and moral vigilantes have come together in occultism: the existence of truth is no longer a necessity nor of objectivity, but it is now a Game of Thrones.

I can never forget these children, the youngest street vendors. His eyes were the most innocent eyes I have seen in my life. His sister portrays courage in that sweet and candid smile while putting her arms around her little brother, cuckold, like a hen to her chicks. Taking responsibility at an early age.

There is not any equivalency in any matters that concern the public; the only other equivalency is called a null factor meaning that whatever a person acts upon, she or he or they will leave a trail of unverifiable truths. In other words, the best measure of humanity is denials and obfuscation. Audiences are usually left confused. In the jargon of obliteration, it is suitably referred to as strategic ambiguity.

A small gathering metres away from the sister-brother children street vendors in Kukes.

In other words, lies.

A bakery shop in Kukes.

Where once journalism was in the public interest, journalists are now in the pockets of Wannabes who parade their latest media gadgets in the widest of information dissemination: the social media. It is in this arena where the Spectacle of the Gladiators are now returning to life, the world endearing to Grand Standing because it is the loudest and the most audacious of feats that make a Champion an Idol and spectators, an inevitable fool.

A child vendor toward the end of the town of Kukes. Behind him, through the public flats, I saw the first symbol of resistance, UCK, scrawled in blood-red.

Invariably, the next Kosovo conflict would begin in the Stratosphere where our listening and guiding posts are stationed. This is how wars of a strategic form shall be fought in the future. It is an ominous gloom if our climate has not reached us first. Between, climate, human engineered diseases, and bombs, self-destruction is Self.

We reached the end of town, and at the boulevard, we see a minaret.

The locals tell us that funds from Saudi Arabia helped in the construction of this mosque.

Will a Spirit survive to our next Parallel Universe? Only The Wheel of Time can tell. For now, we are aimed to break more things.

Opposite the mosque, refugees occupy an unfinished residence.

~ Onn Ibrahim, Special Correspondent, Mission of Hope & Mercy

Tirane, 7 June –– People say, "dead man don't talk". They are right but did they die as soldiers or martyrs? Does it matter?

Sometime during our visit to the refugees encampment located on the outskirts of Kukes, somebody suggested that we visit another group of refugees in the city centre. We found the place and was amazed at the nature of the group there. We spoke to the leader of the group and he said they were mostly women and children and all the women either had their husbands go to the front-line or had their teenage children join the UCK. It was a moving testimony to their patriotism.

Nowhere is this question more intractably posed than when I was less than two hundred meters from death row. Your life isn’t priced with a single bullet. Your life is worth only an instant away from infinity.

Some of the young Kosovar children left behind by their husbands.

The rigours of life on the front line are as exhausting as is perplexing. The illogical becomes logic and the logic begets illogic. There is no semblance of reality. It is only one dark alley to hell. For some that is. For others it is a tortuous exercise living with the ultimate reality of death.

The leader of this group kept a record of everybody in that room and who their husbands were.

There is only one reason to be fighting with bullets and your life: Existence or expiration. This is cold truth. Hard reality. There is no turning back. When you do, you are called back. It is time for you to take up position. Along the way you could be sniped. You are forever in death row. Except, you never know when you’’ll be hanged.

This is one of the families who were fortunate to get accommodation at UAE’s refugee camps.

Sometimes, it is easy, as I sat in the bunker with shells zooming overhead with a stinging swish, that life could simply end with a bullet to the head or with a lethal injection. This preposterous sound of shells blazing and exploding can make me (and I suppose, anybody) sick: You'd never know whether one could hit your bunker, you'd never know whether the bunker could survive a shell as long as the width of the Jetta Volkswagen; you'd never know. You'd never survive anyway to tell the story. And, who cares anyway. They were just fighters or soldiers. They wanted to fight. Journalists –– me included –– wanted an easier assignment. Why risk death when you could be covering a political story starring the prime minister. It sure beats the hell out of being frightened.

Another family at the UAE refugee camp.

One of the mothers and her child whose husband joined the UCK.

But there I was 15 kilometres deep into enemy territory in a place called Rrasa e Zagut within the province of Koshare, Kosovo ("enemy" in this context referring to the Serbs from Yugoslavia). I was more amused than shocked at the surprise which awaited me. The commanders didn’t tell me where they were bringing me. The doctors certainly did not. All they did was bring me to the frontline. No explanation. No justification. Only plain ole’-bundle-me-in-with-a-pack-of-medics in one of two Serb-seized four-wheel truck, and next thing I knew, I was deep, deep into enemy territory.

Just the tonic I needed to start a new day. Was I lucky to come out alive to tell this story? I don't know. What I do know is that this was already planned for me. Not by Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves (UCK for short) doctors or commanders but by God himself. Only He knew whether I should come out alive. He Knew and He Wanted it to happen to me. It was as if He Wanted me to come out alive and tell the story. This story then, if I am true to my faith, must therefore be a story of faith, a story of courage, and in the words of Muslims who believe, it must contain elements of jihad, and that is quite simply, a message of telling people that some people fight in the Name of God, while others fight, and perish, in the name of nothing.

So, does it come out to that then? Fight in the name of religion and God, or fight because you owe it to your motherland, whatever that means. Fight for freedom, therefore you are called "freedom fighters", fight against tyranny and evil, therefore you are called "rebels", or fight against nafs, therefore you are called "Muslims" or in a more direct term, referring to "those who fight those (infidels) who attempt to (wreck) the religion of God", "mujahedeen?".

Deep into enemy territory the awful truth was about to emerge.

Another Albanian mother with a child and a husband on duty at the front-line. One of them could be somebody I met later (at the front-line) but I would not possibly know who.

I started to walk, and in the claustrophobic environment of the bunker realised for the first time that for this moment in time, nothing else matters. What matters is that we are all soldiers –– me included –– and that we are facing an enemy, seen or unseen, and that when we perish, we would all perish together.

Nothing at that moment, distinguished us. I was carrying a small Nikon camera, Khairul Anuar, a humanitarian relief worker from Sarajevo, was carrying a Sony camcorder and Dr Milton Zeneli, 28, was carrying a small walkie talkie. But the sense of comradeship, that we were facing danger, that they knew they had to protect us at all costs, pervaded the dark atmosphere symptomatically.

Yet I noticed everyone was in high spirits. There wasn’t a twitch of nervousness carelessly emerging through their faces. But there was a noticeable feeling of concern, apprehension like when you are awaiting the arrival of your first newborn in the visitors waiting room, and this I think came from their constant vigilant of wanting to be the first to render aid to their injured comrades.

As probably the first Malaysian correspondent on the danger line, I knew I was facing the greatest risk to my life and sanity. I had to be strong and at best I must show a degree of normalcy. It wouldn’t be good to the soldiers and medics around me to show I was nervous. To them, this was their life. They were used to hearing explosions and they were used to be shelled -- sometimes as close as within 5 meters from them. They were used to blood, gore, senselessness. For nothing but survival and liberation of their beloved motherland matters now.

Another lady with a child whose husband is at the front-line and uncertain whether he will return.

It was another day to them. It wasn’t to me. And then the walkie talkie cracked. A quick exchange of words. Quiet. Response. And Dr Zeneli rose. In an instant, everyone had jumped from their makeshift seats, made from used boxes of mortar grenades, and they skipped down the bank, carried a folded stretcher, and hurried into the forest.

I was looking for signs as to what was happening. I sensed that this was an emergency because from the walkie talkie I could hear the frantic shouts of a soldier, a commander, somebody like sergeant because UCK fighters do not have a rank –– they are all generic and are classified according to "soldiers" and "commanders" (somebody more important than soldier). But the sounds in the background were telling –– they were under attack and one of them was hurt.

It was barely three minutes later that the medic team arrived, this time with a casualty. Shouts, mostly incoherent to me were everywhere; this was an emergency. They were no panic, and as the medic team climbed the cut slopes, they pushed me aside. "No pictures, no pictures," somebody shouted but I thought it came from a soldier who was sweating and heaving. His face was red, and he appeared angry. I stepped aside as he shoved past me into the bunker.

Dr Ismet Audimeas, 31, coolly attended to the patient. The medics held the stricken soldier. A sharp cry, groans and I noticed sobs. I put my head inside the bunker and was asked to move out. "No pictures, no pictures," came the shouts, this time I discerned with a slight consternation or first warning. I pulled my head back and held my camera tightly. I wasn’t about to let this incident go, even if they were going to wrestle my camera off me.

This crying son in the warm hands of his mother would be proud of his father.

And then, the miracle happened. Suddenly I heard, from the commotion, somebody shouting. "Take picture, take picture" and in my uncertain situation, came inside the bunker to shoot. But somebody again shouted, "No picture, no picture", twice, like it was one phrase, that I drew back, but not without shooting a part of what appeared like a bandaged hand with little blood. I stepped out.

Later, I was to find out that the apparent commotion in communication was because the patient did not know where his family was, and he didn’t want his picture to appear in any publication. In fact, he was shouting not because he was in pain but because he was protesting that he did not want to be treated: He just wanted to go back to join his friends who were still fighting the Serbs –– which appeared to be converging on the offensive.

At that moment, I began to sense the real meaning of danger. That each one of us were in real danger. The Serbs were simply too close. He was shot barely three minutes away (to and from) from where we were hunkering. Is this for real?

Dr Zeneli was to tell me the truth later. His hand was shot there was a clean hold in the middle right through his palm between his right thumb and his index finger. "He’ll survive," as if reassuring me as well as himself, "maybe lose a finger or two," with his closing words said matter-of-factly.

The medic team gathered the patient, and hastily ferried him to the ambulance, one or two of the vehicles seized from the Serbs about two weeks ago. The other one was nowhere to be seen –– I remembered the other one easily as it had plastered a Red Cross sign –– in a minute he was gone. There seemed to be relief from everyone, and it seemed they, including the soldiers who were on duty at the bunkers –– were somehow involved with the patient.

This unconscious show of support and feeling overwhelmed me. Did they know that what happened to their comrade-in-arms could also happen to them? Have they seen worse things? Were they frightened? How did they feel when the injured was being administered and he was shouting like a delirious man?

I wouldn’t know. All I know was that these were soldiers-by-chance. Many of them were trained in a rudimentary fashion –– first the enlistment, then the transportation to an undisclosed training camp somewhere near Durres, a port town thirty kilometers south of Tirana, and within two weeks, they were transformed into full fighting men, boys included. This was a war where idealists are welcome. Including teenagers. Boys and girls.

That they wanted freedom for Kosovo was ominous. That they were willing to die (and die again, if possible, like the injured fighter who was treated by Dr Ismet) was compelling and moving. That they fought for their motherland and that they did or did not intend (niat) their fight to be God's war became irrelevant at that moment.

What mattered was that they lived and that they became fighting men again, fit to do battle. Next day or the day after the next, they would return to the front line, risked their lives, risked their physical bodies, risked their sanity. This was a war where only victory mattered. Could jihad make it any different?

I don't know. To me, as a passing journalist, I could only pray that the injured soldier survived with his hands fully functioning and his mind and body fully recovered and that he goes out to the front line fighting with his comrades.

This time, I hope, he will blow a hole in his enemy's heart.

~ Onn Ibrahim, Special Correspondent to Kosova, Mission of Hope & Mercy

From the moment I met him, I knew we were going to have a special relationship. A brief and intense relationship but nevertheless a special one.

Khairul Anuar of Malaysian Relief Agency was my liaison officer while on tour of voluntary duty in Kosovo. Pictured here is his first cradle of a young baby who was born at the makeshift encampment near Kukes.

I was right. Was it instinctive or was it fortuitous? Was our meeting pre-arranged, destined, fated or was it plain and coincidental? As I was thinking about this little man, slightly bigger than me because he had a 32" waist size (mine is 28") that made him heavier than my weight of 110 pounds, I heard Alias’ remark: “Where were you, we couldn’t see you?” and I almost heard myself answering, “where were you guys? I couldn’t see you, too”.

In the hot, blazing, and dusty climate at Tirana International airport where I had just arrived, my welcoming committee couldn’t have done a better job. Somehow, while they were waiting for me – the flight was delayed for about fifteen minutes (although they didn’t know it then) – they decided to have “kaf” (local language for “coffee”) in the huge canopy overhanging the opposite entrance of Tirana airport, where I had emerged through the solitary exit of about four feet in length, fortunately through an automatic door, following a scraggy and silent old women who had dragged my luggage despite my protestation and reluctance.

Khairul Anuar, whom I nicknamed, “the small man with the lion heart” taking an account of the situation at Kukes, the first town, as refugees ambled in from Prizen in Kosova during the Kosova conflict in the summer of 1999 at Albania.

The Malaysian Relief Agency’s director, Khairul Anuar capturing a photo of a family refugee near the artificial lake at Kukes.

That made them totally hidden because across the canopy, still on the opposite side of the airport exit, paraded about a dozen taxis, mostly Mercedes Benzes, and mostly white in colour. The taxis here are vans as they can carry ten passengers easily and they were parked in reverse facing me as I swayed my head looking for a sign of a familiar face. No familiar face was visible in the sudden confusion which engulfed me, I thought I would suffocate.

Khairul Anuar organises his logistics from Malaysia via Sarajevo. This is his mission and for today, he shall distribute the emergency boxes to refugees that were recommended by the UAE refugee director.

A boy ran up to me and protruded his dirty fingers to me (it was dirty because it was simply black); “taxi?” he asked while holding a luggage cart. I nodded my head negatively (it was a big mistake I was later to find out because the sign convention here is opposite to natural practice: a “no” when you nod your head, and a “yes” when you sway your head) so much so that I immediately attracted another two men, one holding a ward of currencies, I imagined to be Lek, the Albanian dollar. He was expecting me to exchange for Leks (for my United Stated Dollars which is hot currency here) and he was waiting for a signal from the other man, who was now beginning to interrogate me.

Khairul with a refugee family at the UAE camp.

I moved away basically telling them that I just wanted to make a phone call. The man-without-the-name insisted that the boy-with-the-cart kept my bags and as I struggled, the party – without the man-with-the-ward-of-currencies, followed me. I protested no, and he recanted, this time he said, bring one bag (I had two suitcases) and finally relented waving to the boy to bring both suitcases with him: which he did instantly and loaded the suitcases.

I gave the old lady five dollars and she refused to accept the note because it was a pre-1972 note and very soiled and crumpled. But I pointed with an amateurish wave that it was the visa clerk who gave me this money – waving my hands showing the direction of where she was located – and she finally accepted the money.

I was nearing giving up as the heat was killing me. I had with me an Italian silk jacket, slightly tight against my frame as this was bought in one of London’s boutiques on Bond Street sometime in 1975 about 14 years ago, but still wearable because then it was trendy to wear oversized jackets, and I was moving sluggishly, first because of the tightness and secondly because of the weather. Just as we were haggling and making our way towards the nearest phone, located at right angles to both only visible structures at the airport – the middle was occupied by a square now inhabited with locals, tourists, street urchins, currency dealers and of course, taxi men – the airport terminal and the huge canopy overhang, I heard a shout from Klodiane, Alias’ driver. He shouted my name, although I didn’t see him, or was it Khairil who shouted for my name when Klodiane spotted me; all the same I was thankful for the rescue.

I was beginning to feel worried as I didn’t have any Lek coins to make the phone call and the familiar call made that moment almost sacred.

Welcome to Tirana, I said to myself, and as if echoing my inner voice, I heard Alias say the same thing.                                      

“What took you guys so long,” I was trying to conjure up a conversation, trying to dissipate the extreme discomfort I was feeling and trying to pep up my mood. Alias, who was trying to appear concern said something but since I couldn’t see his eyes – he was wearing a dark pair of sunglasses, Rayban, I think – I looked at him and tried to decipher whether he was commenting on my condition or the slight commotion just before the “committee’s” rescue of me.

“You shouldn’t have layan (Malay language meaning “entertained”) these people – just ignore them,” said Khairil and I said to myself, “Huh! That’s easy for you to say.” Anyway, I told them about my experience with the women visa cashier at the immigration counter. I had to pay five dollars for the visa which they had stamped on my passport, she took the five dollars and kept quiet, I imagined for pretending to have a “lot of work” (she was only receiving cash and she was writing out receipts, if you asked for them) and I hesitated for a moment. Then I said, “But I gave you five dollars not knowing whether she understood what I said,” and she continued to be “busy”. I called her, pointed to her drawer, and made a frantic sign which said something like “where’s my change”, my sign that is. It seemed to work, I was relieved, and she proceeded to pull out her drawer and took out ten dollars. “Ten dollars!” I said to myself, “where’s the remaining thirty-five dollars”. She saw I was making a small protest and she started to raise her hands, in effect telling me she had no more dollars to spare. By this time, I was almost angry, and she sensed that and opened her drawer, all the time I could see a ward of notes, and she pulled up some dollars, counted and quickly passed to me. Then she went “busy”. I counted, thirty dollars, and remembered, five dollars for the visa charge, and concluded, it was alright, I was forewarned by Kamal, a friend of Khairil when I met him in Kuala Lumpur, “expect to pay a lot of bribes in Albania,” and off I went, grateful, I thought for having managed to retrieve some of the change, though not all. Grateful that I wasn’t detained like Kamal the last time he came to Tirana.

“Oh, you should have asked them for a receipt,” Khairil reprimanded me when I narrated him my fresh experience. “Did you get a receipt?” We were along one of the many unfinished tarmacs on the way to Durres and I opened my passport and found the receipt. “Hey, I got the receipt, and it says USD5.00" so that means I only “lost” fifteen dollars, I said trying to reassure myself that I wasn’t a “sucker” while all the time feeling “suckered”. I wanted to feel benevolent, for after all my trip was sponsored, but I couldn’t also help feeling rotten for not “fighting for my rights!”.

Our return flight to Tirana from Kukes was delayed and, in the steaming, hot sun, we became hungry. Our UAE hosts attended to our primal desire and brought us a plate of Arabian meal. Everybody tucked in with their fingers as is customary among the Arabs.

“Welcome to Albania” I said silently as we thundered across the dusty road leading to Durres, about fifteen kilometres away for a seafood lunch. My thoughts lingered on the expansive scenery, so beautiful, so refreshing, so pristine. It was only later that I discovered that the visa clerk could make as much as the prime minister in a single good month, and I knew that I had a lot of re-educations to undertake if I were to remain an objective and sincere journalist visiting Albania for the first time.

As to Khairil, I turned to him in the car, and noticed that this is the guy I will be dependent on for the next few weeks. And I was so looking forward to knowing him, Malaysia’s “Lion Heart Man”, as I would nickname him later, just as he was about to leave for Lubjlana en route to Sarajevo where he lives, on the very day I was sending him off at Tirana International Airport.

~ Onn Ibrahim, Special Correspondent, Mission of Hope & Mercy

Rrasa e Zagut, Koshare, Kosovo, June 5, 1999 –– Arlinda Avdimetaj became two years today and her father, a doctor with the regular army of Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves (UCK) the local name for Kosova Liberation Front or KLA, which is popularly used by the media, smiled broadly.

The UCK medic team having a light chat with us.

He was sitting on an exposed single-bed foam mattress and his mattress covered the stingy pines of the dried branches and stalk of the pine tree, very common in these mountainous regions, and used in superfluous quantities to cover the earth-laden bunker top on which he and I, Khairul Anuar Khalid, a project director and relief humanitarian aid worker based in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and Urhan Berisha, a medic soldier, was resting. All of us were well exposed to Serb snipers, should they want to take a shot, but I imagine they were all used to this that it didn’t matter to them anymore.

The head of the UCK medic team with his doctors and Khairul Anuar, a volunteer relief agency from Malaysia based in Sarajevo.

They all had a death wish; that somehow, they didn’t have to "rest" or take their afternoon sojourn on the top of the makeshift, logged-supported medical bunker, where below it was gruesome, because on some days, blood flowed easily.

A photo of the medical inventory so Khairul is able to determine the medic team’s requirement.

Another photo of the type of medicine that the medic team had requested from Khairul Anuar.

Berisha is a final year medical student who left his university to volunteer to serve with UCK.

But he was smiling, and I was anxious to ask him why. He hadn’t seen his daughter since they parted company more than two months ago. When they parted, it was because he elected to go and join the UCK, and he felt it was his duty to do so. From the moment I saw this doctor, I liked him, because he had a sweet smile, and I could not imagine which girl would not want to be him. He was also extremely handsome, and his eyes exuded a warm twinkle; he also tended to have watery eyes, more so when we discussed about home and family but his warm and casual manners, even though we could not speak directly but through an interpreter, made me feel relax. If I had a doctor and my children wanted to see a doctor, I would like them to see Dr Ishmet.

Beyond the door is Kosovo where the front-line is and where we would be heading.

Dr Ismet, 31, hadn’t had any war experience. He was from a small village called Dachund, somewhere in the south of Kosovo, and he had fled through the mountains to arrive at Morine, a border outpost of northern Albania, where refugees like him could still be seen streaming in. During my time with him, in the absence of my interpreter I could sense that Dr Ishmet could really be a good father and husband. He certainly was a confident and cool doctor as I had earlier witnessed how he attended to an injured soldier. I wanted him to live, I wanted to pray for him. This brave doctor from Kosovo.

Burial boxes for the dead draped in UCK’s colours; in Islam, the fighters who engage in battle with their enemy and die are considered martyrs. Martyrs are rewarded with automatic entry to Heaven according to the teachings of Islam.

We were called to lunch by Uran Berisha who was given a nickname, "medical student" because he was in his final year of examinations before he decided to join the KLA.

Uran had prepared for us a meal consisting of bread, white cheese, pickled pepper, and broth. We ate heartily as this wasn’t a place to complain about food. The people here, I know, ate once a day, and I also knew that this was not a usual meal. This was a meal which they prepared –– albeit the same recipe –– just for us, the guests from Malaysia, with Khairil Anuar Khalid and Klodian, an Albanian interpreter-cum-driver-cum-guide-cum-bodyguard.

Was it a strange coincidence that when I mentioned to Uran about my prior trip to visit a Bosnian settlement in Slovenia, he asked whether I had met his friend, and strangely enough, it was the same friend who had picked me up at Ljubljna airport, and I became his guest for two nights? 

Sometime before we begin our walk toward the front-line where we would join a UCK force at the next garrison, we were served lunch. Lunch in Islamic tradition is usually served on one plate, and everybody tucks in. One of the mercenaries is seen scooping pickled local pickled peppers while the other one, a mujahid, is assisting him.

I couldn’t think about prayers at about this time. For Muslim travellers or wayfarers, this could be postponed to another time of prayer, and I could then pray two prayers, truncated for each, in one go. It was a convenience granted by God for wayfarers like me, and while I was dipping my bread in the delicious broth –– it tasted like meat –– I couldn’t thank Him well enough because it was a pleasure and delightful experience to be eating with these army medics and soldiers. I noticed the medics and soldiers were watching us intently. Were we odd ourselves, wearing heavy grenade-proof jackets over our flimsy T shirts, did we take their turn because lunch was served four at one time on the same aluminum containers, were they hungry and salivating, or was it their first meal in the last 24 hours? I don’t know. What I knew was that during the entire course of our meal, they were just simply watching us.

After lunch, Captain Hassan from the Moroccan army, a mujahid mercenary, gave a pep talk about what to expect at the frontlines.

How I wished I could talk to them in between slurps of broth and gesticulating and chewing with my mouth full of cheese and bread. How I wished I could share with them chocolates. But I didn't have any. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a picnic together?

It was during this briefing that I began to sense the meaning of danger.

I guess, it was an odd sight for these army non-regulars. Mostly conscripts, as they were civilians a few weeks ago, they looked like usual people you and I meet in the streets, offices, or homes. That they were at the front line was not an anomaly. War had come to them. They were forcibly dislodged from their homes, villages, and country. They were expelled, evicted, not evacuated, and along the way they were harassed, beaten, captured, tortured, raped, or killed. They are the people called Kosovars. Their mistake was that they belonged to that identity. It was a good reason for their enemies to attack them.

A group shot with some of the international mercenaries who came from Sweden, Macedonia, Morocco, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Chechnya.

And yet, when I looked at them while I sipped the broth from the same aluminum container which Dr Ishmet was sharing with me, I noticed that they didn’t take any form of a soldier. They seemed tame, demure, and may be naïve for a soldier. Most certainly, they didn’t fit into our normal stereotypical profile of a soldier, or a mercenary: they appeared harmless and peaceful. The distinguishing factor, I thought then, was that when they walked or when they stood upright, they didn’t look like soldiers. In fact, they were students, farmers, construction workers, investment bankers, doctors, engineers, and even a driver. Among them, in fact, was a girl, I imagine about 15 years old, who was so shy that when I wanted to take a picture of them as a group, she rose and left. And these are KLA fighters?

Captain Hassan indicating one God.

The last time they had seen a foreigner was a day before, when a German journalist had come in. But he hadn’t stop by at this first aid medical bunker: he had come in briefly and he had left. Besides, as I found out later, he wasn’t a photojournalist like me, and he didn’t carry any cameras. As far as they knew, I was the first journalist to come into this area with a camera. And, they had never seen a photojournalist coming from our part of the world, that is Asia.

We made our way toward the garrison post where a four-wheel truck is seen. This shall be our vehicle to transport us to the front-line. The truck was only recently seized from a Serbian bunker.

So our presence, Khairil Anuar included, was something of an abnormality, but we were already sufficiently warmed up for the experience: first there was a shell fired laterally from a Serb artillery position across a small opening in the mountain (the shell landed just about ten meters away, this was our welcome greeting to Papaj); second, as we left the commander’s post, our own position received another shell; third, as we were sitting and sipping hot coffee from emptied jam bottles in an area of a special unit of the KLA, we found out that the second shell which came after us as we were driving in, hit a lone soldier walking through the same road we were taking, and he died.

A group of UCK soldiers were already at the garrison.

It was no wonder then that just as we arrived and parked our car, a bunch of medics (we didn't know it then) had jumped into a white four-wheel drive Japanese-make vehicle and was making their way hurriedly to the soldier. It was too late, I heard later. He died instantly.

We climbed into the truck and headed toward our destination. In the picture is Khairul Anuar and a UCK doctor.

"Mashaa-Allah!," (All Glory to Allah) I cried while sitting across a chair made of two logs joined together and balanced on two pillars of stone, such that the first person must sit in the middle, followed by the rest on either sides, to create an equilibrium lest you fall over because the logs weren’t fixed to the stones and you would tumble if you sat at the wrong point because of the see-saw effect. "You mean, we could have been killed?"

The captured Serbian truck that would transport us to the front-line: where there was word of intense fighting.

Nobody cared to answer me. Everyone in the group just looked their own way. None cared to look me in the eyes. I guess, that’s how it is. One minute you are in existence, another minute or another second you could be.... well, I remembered what Khairul Anuar told me once while we were making our way for the first time to the commander’s camp. "I found half a body, some fingers (fingers only?), and he couldn’t finish his sentence because I interrupted him." "That’s what happens when a shell drops?" And he replied "yes" while looking straight ahead behind the headrest of the front passenger, Rejab, a bodyguard we had hired for the trip.

Klodiane spotted a hole near the truck. This showed how the post was also under attack occasionally with mortar fire. In other words, if you are unlucky, you could be hit and dead.

Klodiane picked up a piece of the broken bullet shell -- a shrapnel. It is enough to shatter you instantly, he said.

He didn’t want to say more. The scene where a shell had dropped and exploded in the middle of a market square in Sarajevo was too vivid, too close, too real. We dropped the subject and I continued reciting ayat kerusi (a special verse in the Koran which has protective incantations) while we meandered our way to the top of the mountain where Papaj was located. The sounds of shells reverberating in the air made our journey precipitous. How could one escape anything here? On one side, there was a sheer drop of more than one thousand feet of boulders and outcrops. On another side, there were hanging cliffs and loose earth. The only way is to keep moving, and fast (on mountain roads that is) at about twenty kilometers an hour. Slower than that, we were sitting ducks for the Serb snipers. We knew we were never safe. How does one deal with death in a situation like that?

We began our journey: Rejab, our bodyguard and now, co-driver, sat in front with the UCK truck driver. He wanted to observe the controls of this captured Serb truck.

I remembered, did somebody had to die for us while we escaped? Was this some sort of a message from God? I had read somewhere that life revolves around a concept called, "reckoning". What it means –– at least to my understanding –– is that when God wants you to live another moment, somebody else had to die in your place. Did somebody sacrifice his life to spare us? Was what I was facing merely coincidental? Or was it reckoning? I could and would never know.

About one hundred metres from the font-line, the medic team stopped at a former Serb bunker. The Serbian army was pushed out about one week ago. The team was instructed to wait from the Commander at the front-line whom I shall be meeting for the first time.

I thought it a bit strange, eerie, even surreal that I was to survive three attempts on our lives within such a brief period. I calculated that by the time we left Pardashe, KLA’s command post in the area closest to the combat zone, we were in the hot zone (area of conflict and shelling), for less than 6 hours. It was also strikingly odd that while we were sitting and chatting and laughing with the KLA soldiers and officers, no shells dropped around us, although they were flying everywhere and from a distant you could see where they landed. Miraculously none, landed near us.

Dr Time was communicating with the Commander with a satellite phone. We waited for the order to arrive to the front-line. A UCK soldier was guarding the place. Khairul decided to look around in the meanwhile and wanted to see the Serb’s army bunker.

The fact that one of the shells also landed near our position while we were waiting for our papers to be cleared and to be granted special privilege by the commander’s office, was even more puzzling. We were gone for less than fifteen minutes before a soldier came to report that our position was shelled. In fact, he said, a car where a pair of Slovenian reporters were traveling in also got another hit, close to where we were sitting, and shattered part of the car.

Khairul was filming the surrounds as part of his humanitarian and relief efforts. I wanted to see inside the bunker and walked in. The UCK soldier warned me that it was dark.

Amazing? Not when you believe in God and what he could do for you. Call it supreme faith, superior confidence, absolute determination, I believed our passage to Pardashe and then to Papaj and finally to Rrass where a Serb soldier could be seen within one hundred meters away was a divine mission of mercy. For the theme of my mission, and the intention of my mission was a mission of mercy and hope or in Albanian language, misioni i mNshirNs dhe shpresNs.

The entrance to the bunker.

I walked into the bunker and was immediately blinded: it was pitch dark, so I turned toward the entrance for some light to switch my Nikon camera for another one which has a built-in flash.

But for others, I suppose, it was deliberate kamikaze!

It was so dark that the only way for me to photograph the interior of the bunker was to use flash. I noticed immediately the hurried exit of the last army force here: Everything seemed to be left behind.

There were also automatic rifles that were left by the previous occupants.

For the moment, however, it was pure bliss and mercy to me, as I heard Dr Ishmet describe his daughter and his wife, I could almost see my children and wife too. He also knew that. That was why he was smiling.

I stumbled across a sheet of paper and noticed twenty-three names of the Serb Army regulars who were holed in this bunker: along with a transistor radio and backpack. The language scrawled next to the names are Serbian language when I asked Khairul who knows a little bit about the language since he studied in Russia.

The UCK medic team.

~ Onn Ibrahim, Special Correspondent, Mission of Mercy & Hope

Rrasa e Zagut, Koshare, Kosovo, June 5, 1999 ---- "We had five bullets and we decided that should the Serbs come to get us, I will shoot Ilirina first, and then I will shoot myself," said Dr Time, a medical doctor in the Kosova Liberation Army.

The most vexing question that stared into my psyche is that why in my human condition, I am given food, when my mortality is temporal: “Would I live the next moment after curing my ritual lunch?” This thought escaped me as I thanked this moment when the hosts -- a team of UCK medics -- served me food. Their hospitality to ignore the battle raging outside of my illusory bunker more than outweighed any other concerns: I am their special guest and I don’t even know whether any of these medic soldiers had ever been granted this privilege. I felt guilty and thankful simultaneously and this seemed to overcome my desire for instant physical gratification. I posed this question to my inner psyche who didn’t appear hungry: Is existing for this moment a pleasure or a pain in its own right? The helmet and upright rifle seemed to remind me that life, albeit existence itself, is a strain on the human condition: either we make the best of it, or we shall regret because we missed that one moment in life when we could have made a difference to anything, especially to the Self.

This startling revelation appeared just as I was about to take more photographs of the captured Serb bunker, which now housed a temporary field medical clinic. Inside the bunker, I could hardly see anything, it was pitch dark and it appeared ghostly.

My thoughts dwelt in the present: there was no use thinking of death because death is a morbid conclusion of life. Instead my eyes began to scan the bunker for any sign of anything that would allow me to distract my gloomy thoughts. This tree branch struck me as a masterpiece of art that could be hung in an art gallery. It could be the branch itself as exhibit, or it could be a photograph. The most striking thing about this exhibit are those of the etched words which are then rested upon with a hanging rifle. Does the words mean that there is hope for humanity or does the rifle foreshadow its very own forecast?

I decided to concentrate my attention on Dr Time K (last name withheld for security reasons). "You would pull the trigger?" I asked, almost disbelieving myself for asking the question as it was on hearing Dr Time.

Each moment that is available to you is an opportunity to watch and reflect. When we reflect -- and if we are lucky to be able to reflect because reflection is a conscious decision -- we could start off with existence and ask: “Why am I in this bunker? What is the meaning of my mission? Are the objects hanging and resting against the tree stumps a way of nature telling me that every living thing reaches its end someday, some time, some moment? Am I vulnerable to events? Will I be always afraid of asking because I am not satisfied with what I have watched and experienced so far? What am I looking for? Will I be prepared for what awaits me if I do find out?

"Yes", she said and explained the reason for their desperate action. She said she knew of another medical doctor in a nearby village who was captured by the Serbs and died but not before they had cut off both of his hands and gouged his eyes. "They said to the doctor before they killed him: 'You use your hands to help the injured, you use your eyes to see who you are treating, now we have to punish you because you help them and the KLA and with that they started to chop his hands and gouged his eyes out."

The boots, the gun, the hands, the army uniform, the macaroni box, the aluminum standard army-shaped canister and the helmet held by the unseen soldier: life is delicate; nothing ever should be taken for granted, it is real and surreal at the same time. Why?

We wait for the injured to arrive as the sounds of bullets increased in frequency.

The ray of light that reflected on this soldier-medic’s face equates to a ray of hope that things will go well for the soldiers battling it out at the front-line: one can only hope and pray.

A jerry cooking can is indispensable for a quick chai while waiting for the injured.

Uran Berisha’s gentle smile and universal peace sign.

A UCK medic-soldier as sentry for the bunker.

All waits are ominous: thoughts of what lies ahead occupy these young volunteer medic-soldiers.

It must be painful to hear that, and I can't even begin to imagine the barbarity of the killings. I had heard of terrible accounts of torture and mutilations before when I visited the camps in Kukes but this was different: This involved a doctor who treated patients and sick people. I thought they would be spared. But Dr Time's account of his killing changed all that. She said Serbs considered "humanitarian" workers like her, a doctor, as prized spoils of war, "It's worth more than 10 ordinary Kosovars", she remembers a Serb saying.

The crackle of radio was the first sign of trouble.

Just at that instant, I glanced at Khairil Anuar Khalid, himself a humanitarian worker from Malaysian Relief Agencies based in Sarajevo, Bosnia, did not hear what Dr Time had just said, but I figured he already knew the risks after being a survivor of wars and conflicts as an aid worker for the last 15 years. Anyway, I didn't want to spoil his day as he was busy videotaping the Serb bunker.

The medic team awaiting the latest word from the sergeant on radio with the forward party at the frontlines.

Something happened and everyone is riveted to the Commander Dr Milton Zeneli’s reaction.

But taking your own life. And not before you take somebody else's life. I reminded her that she was a trained doctor, and it was her professional duty to save lives, "not take them, right?" posing the obvious question too her. "My village was under heavy shelling, and we got word that the Serbs were fast gaining ground. At one point, they were about one kilometer away from our clinic, and that's when we decided to kill ourselves," said Dr Time whose answer didn't really answered my question. So, I suppose the reason they wanted to end their lives wasn't so much about the real possibility that they would die a slow and painful death -- but by virtue of being doctors familiar with blood and wounds -- they would rather die in honor instead of seeing their own physique being tormented by their captors in a rather humiliating and despicable way.

A UCK lieutenant, on radio for further instructions on how to bring the injured soldier in from the frontlines.

As if on cue, I thought I caught a glimpse of Dr Time's state of mind when I asked her what she was doing with a pistol, and whether she had ever fired a single shot. "We are soldiers first and medics second," she said. She remembers fighting against the Serbs when she was trying to collect the injured from the front lines. "We had no choice, if we didn't fire back every one of us would be killed anyhow -- including the injured," she said.

Commander Dr Zeneli went out of the bunker to expect the arrival of the first injured soldier.

Commander Dr Zeneli instructing his medic team to be on alert for the first sign of appearance from the forest.

Paramedics carrying the injured soldier.

Ambulance attendants watching the doctor’s actions as patient was brought in.

Patient in a stretcher quickly brought into the bunker.

Bandage to stop internal bleeding.

A bullet went through this patient’s palm.

A quick examination of the bandage performed in the forest by paramedics.

Dr Time said the fighting was bad about two months ago. "Now, we have regained a little ground and can use these bunkers as temporary clinics -- we just give emergency treatment and then we send our fighters to Papaj where we treat them further and then we send them to Baram Curri," the nearest government hospital. She however belabors the inadequate medical facility there -- Baram Curri is northern Albania's only decent government hospital but still woefully short of essential emergency equipment and personnel -- that many times these fighters must be transported to Tirana, about one hour's flight by helicopter.

This patient seemed disoriented and was calmed down before treatment.

A quick jab before treatment with patient reacting.

Dr Ismet carefully peeling the bandages for replacement.

"Helicopters are not easy for us to get as we depend on the charity of The Red Cross to fly our injured. They have been too many cases of our fighters dying while on the way to Tirana or on the way to Baram Curri". Traveling to this medical outpost, just barely two kilometers away from the border of Albania, I could imagine how anyone could "live" through the roads: they were simply impassable except for tough four-wheel military trucks, two of which they captured from the Serbs two weeks before this and now are being used for transporting the injured from the field medical clinics.

I asked how they get their fighters from the front line itself to which she replied with a slight candor: "We go in with bullets blazing past us, and we don't think of our lives at all but the lives of the fighters."

Medics swabbing the wound with iodine.

Does it mean that the fighters' lives are more valuable than yours? I asked. "We are all soldiers so you can see why we don't see ourselves different than them", to which I asked whether it was a bit abnormal that they should want to serve on the front line when they could be at a safer area and requested that they did not interpret my question as sexist.

Dr Time's answer was quick and abrupt. "Women have their advantages over men; besides many of these men here are from our village, they know us, and they trust us," and went on to describe how the villagers often sent them food while they were treating patients in their former villages.

A quick jab before treatment of the wound.

To a question as to whether they had any rest or breaks in their routine, Dr Ilirina H replied that they were on call 24 hours a day and they work 24-hour shifts. "We have a doctor in another area who has asked not to be replaced," she said, "because he wants to go into the next 24-hour shift. Over here, our objective is to help patch those who have been injured quickly and try to stabilize them as much as we can, but without a field ambulance, without a proper medical hospital, we can do only as much professional job as we can administer without losing too many lives."

And indeed, the enthusiasm and dedication which these doctors have put into their job ("It's more than patriotism or humanitarianism", said Dr Ilirina, "it's our desire to free ourselves from Serb rule that drives us relentlessly") was reflected in the soldiers who passed by us. "They are the best hardworking doctors we have here," many of them would openly acknowledge when they see me talking to them.

Dr Time and Dr Ilirina however managed to flee from their village. "But I still have my mother and sisters in Kosova," she said, and asked that her full name not be revealed. "I don't know where they are and I am afraid of their safety," she continued.

Dr Time and Dr Ilirina were two of six doctors I had interviewed during the 24-hour period I was in Papaj and Rrasa. Papaj (pronounced as "Pa-peye") was only about two kilometers from the border to Kosova and Rrasa was about fifteen kilometers from Papaj, deep into enemy territory and is the place where the heaviest fighting between KLA and Yugoslavian Army Serbs were occurring.

Commander Dr Zeneli explaining how the medical box fits into a backpack so it can be brought closer to the soldiers during battle.

There is a total absence of news reports emanating from the area as journalists are usually turned away from the area. Besides, it is a high-risk area with constant bombings and land mines spread over a wide area undetected most of the time.

“Some handy medical supplies”, said Dr Ismet.

During our return journey on our last day, we had to stop at several places and gauged our courage whether to continue. During the night, Serb air forces had dropped "packet" bombs. These were tiny little shiny objects which attracts passersby and especially children. When opened, they will explode. We were stopped at least twice by villagers who pleaded with us not to continue the journey until the Albanian bomb detection specialists came. But Klodiane insisted we took the risk (another story on this follows). How we survived without stepping on any packet mines was simply miraculous!

I was on a personal mission of mercy and hope the idea being that as a Malaysian I had to offer my support in a direct way to the cause of the Kosovars (the people of Kosova). Through a myriad of challenges along the way, I managed to find my way into the hottest fighting area in Albania, somewhere near Tropoje in northern Albania.

Dr Ismet showing the low stock levels of the medical supplies.

From intelligence sources, I discovered that the KLA had built one of two safe "corridors" which will allow them to mount an offense against the Serbs from within Kosova and return to their sanctuary just across the border into Albania. To them, Papaj was their main operational headquarters and it was of no small wonder that while I was in Papaj to get the necessary papers and permission for my stories, no less than six shells landed in my vicinity; the closest one being on the very spot I was sitting and next to the commander's post came minutes later after we had just left -- the fragments almost destroyed another vehicle parked close by which was carrying two Slovenian journalists -- and another one came half an hour later killing one unfortunate lone soldier who was walking the same road and exact spot we were traveling on the way to Papaj.

Dr Ismet demonstrating a collar support and how this was another item the medic team wanted more.

Providence was with us all the way and this I mentioned to Khairil Anuar Khalid of Malaysian Relief Agencies, based in Sarajevo, Bosnia. "It seems like Allah wants us alive, and it must be for a reason". Khairil nodded, in tacit agreement, uncertain that I may have said it prematurely. Because on the next day, when we were to cover our assignments, we had to traverse the same roads, the same risks, another barrage of shells.

Indeed on the first day we got to Pardashe, the second base from Papaj base headquarters, and closer to the first base near Tropoje, we had to show proof of our identity and purpose: the commander escorted us right to Papaj but not before we were shelled not more than 10 meters away from where we were traveling -- in a Jetta Volkswagen driven by Klodiane, an Albanian from Tirana who acted as our driver-translator-guide and of course, bodyguard.

Commander Dr Zeneli opening one of the medical packages.

Klodiane was carrying a TT, a pistol with eight bullets in its magazine; the gun itself was incredibly old, a 1962 model, but deadly because as Klodiane told me, he oils it regularly and is still accurate within five hundred meters. With his Made-in-China black TT tucked securely at his waistline, the commander, upon realizing that we were under fire, shouted, "Speed! Speed!" And for the first time in my life, I could sense fear as danger confronted us.

Discussing with Klodiane about the need for more bandages.

Klodiane shot the car into second gear and within less than a minute had raced the car -- with its tyre about half a foot from the road's edge -- about thirty meters. My heart dropped. "If not the bomb," I said to myself, "these sheer cliffs will kill us anyway".

I suppose that was the first time since I started my trip from Kuala Lumpur International Airport that I felt a surge of adrenaline. In any case, we entered the shadow of a cliff and as we slowly meandered the curve, I thought that it must have been one lucky shave. I began to realize for the first time that this is a dangerous area. It began to dawn on me that I could die in this place. And I had to face my own death; about when I was about to reach my destination, I said to myself. I didn't even have enough time to recite any verses from the Koran at all, I thought.

Commander Dr Zeneli opening one of the medical packages.

I remembered that on the journey towards Tropoje on the second and final day of our assignment, I was crouching on the floor of the Jetta because I was exposed directly to Serb sniper fire: and I couldn't take the risk of being shot while I had to complete authoring my stories and sending my pictures. It was this decision which prompted me to leave one day earlier because I couldn't take another risk of being injured or killed. It was too much for me and I had to come out of this area alive to tell the story.

Prudence was on my side as I later discovered that during the time we were at Papaj, artillery fire was at its highest: at its height while I was interviewing Dr Time and Dr Ilirina near the KLA captured Serb bunker, we counted a frequency of 5 seconds per shell being fired from Serb artillery. As the shells passed overhead, it gave out a stirring swishing sound like a firework on display. Eerie, I thought to myself.

Like Khairil Anuar who has a slightly different mission, we believed we were the first Malaysians to have arrived at the closest point between enemy and friend; two warring parties whose main objective is total annihilation of the other.

Commander Dr Zeneli examining one of the dressing pads that were brought in by Khairul Anuar.

We were lucky to come out of the area alive, but this did not mean we were safe. As soon as we left the vicinity of Papaj, we had to pass through a small opening in the valley between two mountains, and on this stretch of extremely dangerous narrow meandering mountain road, we were suddenly exposed: on the left flank were two mountains perched with heavy Serb artillery its silhouette clearly etched against the wide open blue skies and on our right, loose yellow mountain earth and protrusions of solid granite such that we were totally vulnerable to Serb artillery fire and most frighteningly, Serb sniper fire.

By the time we reached our destination -- a quiet village on the outskirts of Tropoje, we were so relieved and grateful I almost immediately wanted to make prayer to offer thanks to God. Just then, as I removed my shoes, and was about to sit down in the verandah -- Khairil had already found a seat -- I heard a long swishing sound. Bang! Rang the explosion. That was close, I thought to myself while facing Seyed, the owner of the house. Khairil was uttering a few words himself, quite used to the sound of shells passing overhead. And then, another swish and bang! This time the house almost shuddered. I saw a frightful look in Seyed's eyes, this man of 50 years old who was so used to Serbs shelling his village ("What could it be different this time?") "What, I thought! The Serbs are now following us. I didn't even have time to sit down. And there it was. Seyed's concern turned grave. I could sense that this wasn't a typical worried look. I headed quickly into the front room and threw myself on the bed. I told myself, if it was time for me to die, I'd like to die while I was sleeping.

Patient being ferried to the waiting Red Cross truck.

It was a few minutes later before I heard Klodiane and Khairil creep into the room. Thinking I was asleep they spoke among themselves. "The neighbors just told us the explosion was nearby and the shell hit the middle of two houses. Let's look", said Klodiane.

Khairil didn't follow them. I found out later that evening when I woke up for prayers that a Serb shell had indeed careened through the clean mountain air and hit their village puncturing a huge gap on where it landed: precisely between two farmhouses and about eight hundred meters from our house. Was this a bad omen? Was this a signal for us to pack our bags like Dr Time and Dr Ilirina? Was this the ghost of Serb cruelty and tyranny? I would never know. All I know was that I had the most frightful sleep in my life, and I never did go to Papaj again the following day, even though we had a special pass.

Into the ambulance to Papaj and from there to Tirana by helicopter.

I remembered feeling scared -- "Did they know about us coming and wanted to get us?" -- and just before I went to sleep, I did ask Klodiane whether he could bring in his Kalashnikovs, or Kalash as they are called here. It was merely a false sense of security; a self-pretense of trying to feel safe and secure, Kalashes were no match for Serb shells such that their bronze casings make beautiful flower jugs in Bosnian homes -- but being a first timer in the war zone, I was naturally fearful.

A thumbs up from Dr Ismet of his recovering patient.

All Klodiane did was bring in his TT, muttering "It's okay!" I suppose it's okay for him as he was used to gun fires when Tirana experienced a civil war about two years ago but for me, with two days of shells raining around us, the sound or mortar fire, the rap-tap-tap-tap of a typical Kalash shot, and the sight of blood as the shot fighters were carried onto stretchers: This was quite overwhelming and I had to summon strength through whatever little iman that I have with me.

The thought of a Serb lurking in the shadows didn't alleviate my tension, and I knew my nervousness was also compounded by images of Serb butchery and the too many close misses which we experienced, including the last one where we thought we could be safe from.

I knew that it was time for me to leave Tropoje. We packed our bags early the next morning and hit the road to catch the only ferry out of Tropoje at Fierze where the streams reflected waters of turquoise color -- the color of water in heaven I thought -- and we shot off en route to Tirana.

A handshake from two brave doctors, Commander Dr Zeneli and Dr Ismet just before we made our way back to Papaj, the garrison base.

But not before we glanced over our shoulder to see the crater made from the shelling the previous evening. And Khairil, as usual, made my day. He said in a monotonous tone: "Did you know an artillery shell can travel as far as 30 or 40 kilometers?" Oh well, I said to myself, if I were to die even while we try to make it out to Fierze, about twelve kilometers away, then I guess let it be then. How can I ever escape them? With that it was plain "tawakallah!" (My life and fate rests in Your Hands and Protection, God!).

Too close for comfort? Dr Time and Dr Ilirina knows the feeling. They are still there. Fighting their worst fears and fighting for time. These courageous fighter doctors from Kosova.

End.

Postscript and notes to stories, post-Kosova 1999 project.

Authoring stories is a risky business.

Some historians believe that stories are the dominance of those who win power. They select the narrative for future generations to judge.

I have long suspected that many stories in the past cannot be verified conclusively by experts. We have, for example, an absence of authentic oral history that changes each time the narrator presents their story. In most instances, it depends on the narrator's subjectivity as they interpret what transmission occurred in the past.

Even religious texts fall under the category of inaccuracies. Therefore, there is an urgent need to review all religious texts. However, this may be impossible as all believers cannot believe in a script or message that is not divine.

Against this backdrop, the assignment in Kosova took upon a multitude of challenges; primarily, because I had no training in being an embedded war journalist, and second, the preparations needed to jump into the targeted area were fraught with dangers, as I was surreptitiously smuggled to evade NATO forces.

A view of the UAE Refugee Centre from the window cockpit of the UNHCR on my return trip.

I could not hold the excitement of adventure, and with spiritual forces as my firm guide, I grabbed the opportunity.

Goodbye Kosova The mountains that divide Kosova and Albania.

Past narratives have always been controversial.

In this assignment, my focus was on immediacy.

My heart became the instinct for reporting, and even as I didn't have the chance to research or fact-check at that moment, I knew the better of me -- the conscience and searing over-logic -- caused me to write instinctively even if it may be slightly inaccurate then.

I do not follow the customary practice of believing what other people say or letting them persuade me with their books.

I have been a skeptic because facts and reality many times do not match as claimed.

In hindsight however, during the assignment, I realized that quick and straightforward notes in my reporter’s notebook proved critical.

Post-Kosovo June 1999, the world's media has since shifted dramatically, and in place, we debut social media reporters.

In this context, the role of traditional media agencies and their operatives has altered immensely.

Enter the disinformation/misinformation and controversial/confusing age, and propaganda is heightened at levels never experienced in the world's media reporting industry.

Symbols sometimes depict the world in a kind of reality that only means something to the holder, believer, follower, faithful’s and fated.

It is now riskier and more unprecedented by itself to investigate any truths.

Saying goodbye at Baram Curri, near the border of Albania and Kosovo.

Onn Ibrahim, The Kosova Assignment ~ Mission of Hope & Mercy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFkmRp_G2uo

Note: For reasons of practicality, I have used English either as UK English or US English interchageably. I have also used interchageably the term Kosovo, Kosova and Kosovar to denote perceived nationalities and individuals as per the context in the stories and the effects I wish readers to interpret themselves.

Side story: A day in the life of a humanitarian relief agent

Khairul Anuar of Malaysian Relief Agency continues his work from the UAE Refugee Centre. In today’s assignment, his task is to deliver and co-ordinate with other relief organisations, including the UAE Red Cross, to three designated places.

Khairul Anuar’s team for the day. It includes military personnel from UAE, volunteer Albanians who are residents of the UAE Refugee Centre, UAE Red Cross and other volunteers from different relief agencies.

In the first place of drop off, a UAE military personnel pushes an electricity cable that was hindering the movement of the military truck carrying the shipment of food and other essentials for the refugees here.

One of the relief volunteers -- a charitable Islamic organisation from Saudi Arabia -- sits atop one of the military food relief trucks of the UAE.

A truck backs up into a storeroom while being monitored by a UAE military personnel.

It was already midday when we arrived so the sheer sun created sharp shadows as some of the residents watched on.

Unloading from the truck with the assistance of volunteer relief agents.

Some of the volunteers have never done this work before but they were willing to help; it was heavy work.

It is backbreaking work but the spirits and morale were high; as high as the midday and unrelenting sun as the sharp shadows show.

Some of the volunteer agents engaging with the residents to determine the location of earmarked families who will get their allocated rations.

Each relief agent representing their own organisation discussing with the local refugee residents. In the foreground is Khairul Anuar of Malaysian Relief Agency.

In this photo of a UAE personnel engaging in a friendly gesture with local residents, it wasn’t difficult to ascertain that this group of people were from one family tree; their features were so distinct they could have been forever-twins. I liked especially their ginger expressions which -- to me -- showed how people are impervious to difficulties when good news, such as food relief, comes to their doorstep.

Food rationing begins.

Sugar is an important food item on the emergency food relief but each family gets a quota to be fair to the greater number of families in the locality.

Some local residents -- refugees from Kosovo as well as Albanian residents -- came to watch the activity of the aid relief agents.

Some of the Kosovar refugee children came with pots to collect their rations while another one, a Kosovar women had already gotten her rations.

Khairul Anuar pointing a Kosovar refugee mother who had just received a donation toward the camera. Poses like this are an essential part of all relief organisations who depend on charity and donations to get their supply.

Another donation received by a Kosovar refugee mother carrying her child. I was impressed with the lady’s nail polish which were emerald blue and I thought that it is always fortuitous to dress well as it is an encouraging sign of hope. On the right are the relief agents busily attending to their tasks followed by children of the area. The six young trees also caught my attention and I was wondering what species they were as they were planted neatly.

While I was filming, the elders joined in, and I took another shot of this family.

Just before we left to the second location, some of the aid relief agents requested a group shot with the local refugees. In the photo is also two UAE military personnel. The strong shadows beneath their eyes belie a strong spirit of endurance that I found intriguing.

The second stop, I was impressed with this photo. First, the group of people showed ethnicity that could have come from anywhere in our planet. Second, the activity of discussion including the gestures, and finally, the shades of sunlight that filtered through the deciduous trees creating patterns on anatomies suggests that life is kaleidoscopic and colourful. I love this picture. It shows our humanity at play.

Discussion with Kosovar refugees ensured. There was active interest on how the relief food aid would be distributed. Paperwork plus some last minute judgement meant that sometimes the organisers had to make adjustments to their food allocation.

A line of dispatch was formed to transfer the relief aid to a spot where it would be handed to an appointed head of the group. Most of the boys from this group of refugees volunteered promptly.

One of the co-coordinators of an Islamic relief organisation standing by to watch the dynamic activity of the teenage boys transferring aid out of the trucks.

The line of aid: Kosovar refugee teenage boys carrying the packages.

A shot of where the Kosovo refugees’ camping area.

Khairul Anuar recording the activity of aid relief effort. On his left, is the Adjutant of UAE, the military officer responsible for our affairs (he looked after myself, Khairul Anuar, Rejab - bodyguard, and Klodiane - driver).

Khairul Anuar giving instructions in broken Albanian language (he knows a little bit of Serbian language but is fluent in Russian language) about how to collect their packages.

An unnamed Islamic charity co-coordinator assisting with the relief effort in progress using sign language.

Some Kosovar children having a chat with a UAE military officer.

The parcel from Malaysia Relief Centre, an NGO from ABIM which is Malaysia’s Islamic youth organisation, being distributed to Kosovar refugees.

A recipient of the parcel from Malaysia Relief Centre reading the label.

As more Kosova refugees came, Khairul Anuar eventually had to take leave because he had to make his last drop of the day, the third location.

Arriving at the third and last location of the day, we were already greeted by a large crowd who had heard about our coming.

The relief parcels were quickly loaded into platforms of a mobile carriage and the plan was to distribute the parcels according to the priority set by the local Kosova representative. This was arranged earlier by Khairul Anuar who had a day earlier, discussed with the Sallahaj family he first made contact at the UAE Refugee Centre. It was easier to work with people you were already acquainted.

Khairul Anuar getting off the UAE military aid relief supply truck. I was fascinated with this scene. Against the minaret overshadowing the activity, I saw a generic identity; people were lost in their own interests, national garments were covered over by practical ones, accessories such as a military inducted cap and a relief emblem cap took on a different meaning, and of course, the sweat on the backs of these people -- refugees, aid agents, locals and just boys -- spellbound me to one distinct human connection: connection across compassion.

There were a lot of Kosovar refugee children and teenagers.

I saw some Kosova women and it was rare among the crowds presently there so I took a shot.

As I moved my camera toward one of the trucks because I saw Klodiane perched at the open side, I noticed more Kosovar children who were hoping they could get a hand-out (but they couldn’t, of course) and seemed to notice three flags fluttering in the background: the UCK red flag with the black crest, the multicoloured Albanian flag with the different coloured bands, and the European Union flag with its distinct blue.

Crowds were still expecting to collect the parcels from the truck but this was not possible as the plan was to ship it to the storeroom nearby. Meanwhile, I noticed the gentle and sloping mountains of the Albanian skyline: The Accursed Mountains. It all seemed blue when mixed with the garments of the Kosovars and even compared well with the blue band of the relief aid agent in the truck.

The crowds followed the drop-off point: the storage area.

Khairul Anuar near the drop-off point seen here after conferring with the Ameer (Arabic for leader of the group) and a UAE military escort.

There was full of expectations as the canvas covers were drawn up.

Transfer of the parcels taking place.

The pace was hurried as the team didn’t want to have the crowd to wait long.

Anxious crowds wait expectantly while the UAE Red Cross representative came to inspect the progress of the transfer. I noticed the windows of the apartment: They looked the same but what is profession of each dweller? Could they be the same or different?

A view outside of the load entering the storeroom facility.

A view of the UAE relief supply trucks waiting their turn to unload their cargo.

More crowds gathered outside but as the parcels were offloaded, there was gradually an air of excitement surrounding them.

The aid team of the day.

Muhammad, the UAE’s Adjutant carrying a Kosovar child refugee as we were about to leave the place.

Khairul Anuar of Malaysia Relief Centre posing with his group of Kosova refugees before saying farewell.