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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.
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