AAAS Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program

Survey Project on Refugee Flow Patterns in Kosovo,
March-May 1999

In mid-April 1999, the Science and Human Rights Program was invited to design a survey of Kosovar refugees in Albania in order to describe the patterns and magnitude of war crimes and gross human rights violations occurring during the past 18 months. The project was the initiative of the Tirana-based Institute for Policy and Legal Studies (IPLS), and was co-organized by the Human Rights Center of the University of California-Berkeley, Human Rights Watch, and the East-West Management Institute.

SHR Deputy Director Patrick Ball made two trips to Albania, assessing possible projects, drafting proposals, and organizing the work. We were assisted by Dr. Fritz Scheuren, vice president of the American Statistical Association and Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute. The project pilot included 80 interviews selected by probability sampling in two camps; the camps were previously sampled from among all camps in Albania. The pilot went smoothly and was complete in early June 1999.

However, just as the first phase began sampling and interviewing (in mid-June), the refugees left Albania and returned to Kosovo.

We recognized that the original project design was no longer feasible: we could not interview refugees who have already left Albania. It would not be operationally possible to survey people as they are moving between their refuges and their homes in Kosovo, nor do we have the offices, vehicles, personnel, or funds to redeploy in Kosovo.

Therefore we restructured the project to focus on data collected in preparation for the survey. This data includes

• our census of 1837 households in 18 camps
  
  
• our in-depth interviews with 80 households selected in four camps (the pilot project)
  
  
• a database we created from the records maintained by Albanian border guards in Morini, on crossings between 27 March - 27 May 1999, containing 19,126 records in which more than 272,000 people are registered (note: many people crossed without being registered, but most of these people were counted by other means - see below)
  
  
• the daily total border counts of refugees entering Albania reported by the UNHCR totalling more than 402,000 people (note: these statistics were reported in UNHCR's daily news briefings held in Tirana during the conflict)
  
  
• a population-based survey of 1180 refugee households in camps in Macedonia and Albania conducted by Physicians for Human Rights.

By combining information from these different databases with statistical and geographic information methods, we can map how many refugees left each point in Kosovo. This creates a statistical history of refugee flow over time. The project is nearly complete: we are in the last stages of data analysis and drafting.

The final report, Policy or Panic? The Flight of Ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, March-May 1999, was presented in Pristina (in English, Serbian, and Albanian) in mid-April, 2000.