Soupers exploit traumatised refugees

The clinic is only a couple of minutes from St Clement's Orthodox Church in inner city Skopje, the waiting room is packed with…

The clinic is only a couple of minutes from St Clement's Orthodox Church in inner city Skopje, the waiting room is packed with ethnic Albanian patients - Muslim to a man and woman - and the medical director is 100 per cent Serb. A startling combination by Balkan standards and one surely made in heaven. At last, a heart-warming story out of this benighted place.

And this, folks, is Dr Bill from Oklahoma, one of several Americans here to heal the sick and comfort the needy. So, Dr Bill, what made you pack your bags for the Balkans?

Dr Bill looks blank. An uncomfortably long silence elapses.

"Jesus told me to come," he drawls finally. As in a vision? Another long pause.

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"What can I say?" he shrugs, massaging one shoulder like a slow, disturbed child, "Jesus told me to come."

The medical director seems more in touch with the planet. Dr Irene Vitanovska describes herself as "100 per cent Serb and third-generation communist". So how did a Serb end up working in the service of Kosovan Albanians? "Jesus told me: `this is your field of work'."

How did he do that?

"He wake me up in the night and I saw big light with fine eyes and he said `Holy Spirit comes' - in Latin. It was wonderful, it gave me peace in my heart and taught me to serve without prejudice."

Crucially, however, when the Holy Spirit came, it was not from the Orthodox Church but from the Pentecostalists. They gave her a hard time in Serbian Lebane when they found out. She was threatened with a gun at one point. "But the Lord protects me. People in Macedonia are very open to Jesus Christ. Serbia is darkness. The people are very proud. Pride - that is their biggest problem and sometimes the Lord must punish a nation, leave them without everything. And then they will not be so proud."

In this clinic, Dr Irene has found a rich seam for mining folk in her particular image. With the support of Dr Bill et al and funding from a swathe of American Christian churches, medical services are free. But there is a catch.

"We speak to them about Jesus Christ," she says dreamily. "They say `but we are Muslims' and we say `no, no, not Mohammed, but Jesus Christ' - so they repent and believe in Jesus Christ."

Simple as that.

"They are from Kosovo so they are more free-thinking. And they are frightened so they are open to new thinking. This is a new chance for sharing the Gospel. And every day we get more and more patients. There were 100 here yesterday."

It's just another but significant undercurrent of Balkan life, another piece in the jigsaw of distrust and outright hatred that seethes between countless different groupings.

Just as religion has been used in Northern Ireland as a cover for ethnic hatred, so it is in the Balkans. Macedonian Serbs identify with Yugoslav Serbs; the common link is the Orthodox religion. Drivers from different taxi companies take turns weekly to head for Belgrade to donate blood for their "Serb brothers". Serb passport-holders crossing the borders into Macedonia hiss and curse at the media, without a glance at the wretched shadows of humankind sitting sweating in the refugee buses alongside.

Similarly, Albanian Muslims tend to identify with Islam, wherever it might be and whatever form it might take. The regard is reciprocated. The extraordinarily generous support from Arab countries - the marvellous "five-star" camp in Albania run by the United Arab Emirates for example, with its satellite telephones and state of the art recreational facilities - is testament to this.

But that isn't to say that within the ethnic Albanian community there is sweet harmony. One widely travelled Albanian refugee, Ismet Goveri, is a miserably unhappy inmate at a camp in a solidly Albanian sector of Macedonia. Yet he has refused the offer of lodgings with a local family. Why? "Because their culture is almost as alien to me as it is to you." The culture of closely wrapped headscarves and the long, layered, intolerably warm garb for the women, the deference to the man as head of the family, behind high-walled residences; the regular calls to prayer and the mosque for the men. Where people like the Goveris are seen to have fallen for "easy" Western morals, the pressure in the villages is to start conforming.

Where they resist, further pressure might emerge in the shape of the two main Albanian parties in Macedonia - who are said to hate one another nearly as much as they hate the Serbs - through whom much of the aid for refugees living with host families is channelled. Such is the competition between them that in some villages, precious resources are split and two shelters have been erected.

Some zealots have been known to tell traumatised Kosovans that the reason they are being punished by murder, torture, rape and exile is because God is angry with them for their loose ways - just as Dr Irene believes that all Serbs deserve what's coming to them "because they worship icons".

Just a few kilometres down the road from where Ismet Goveri spins out his haunted days and nights, if you climb high up on a hill crawling with Macedonian police, you can look directly into Yugoslavia behind the Jazince border crossing. Parked below are hundreds and hundreds of cars and tractors, the one thing of value left to countless desperate refugees as they fled for their lives. The tractors - each worth about $6,000 - probably constituted a life's savings for families who had lost everything. In a final act of savagery, these too were confiscated at the border before their owners were imprisoned in refugee camps or scattered like seeds to every corner of the world. A Macedonian Serb looked down at the row upon row of cars and tractors and shrugged: "They and the KLA - they started it."