Protecting Internally Displaced Persons in Kosovo

Abstract

In early September 1998 a New York Times correspondent in Prishtina reported: As many as 40,000 ethnic Albanians, mostly women, children and old men, were trapped today on a dirt road south of here in western Kosovo as they tried to flee an advancing Serbian armored column, a United Nations official said. These images, and the subsequent ones of tens of thousands of Kosovars literally camping under sheets of plastic or branches in the forests of Kosovo shook all observers. Then followed the images of massacred families, and an eyewitness account by a survivor of one of these massacres prompted the major powers to take some stronger political action.