Fleeing fear: Refugees find safety in U.S.

The knock on the door cracks like thunder. Hamdi's stomach tightens. He knows the sound. Serbian soldiers.

It has happened before. They arrive in the middle of the night. Guns drawn, teeth bared. Why? No reason. Any reason.

Hamdi's wife watches from the doorway. A neighbor saw her husband hauled off the same way months earlier. He never returned. They said he beat himself to death.

The police station in Gjilan, Kosovo, reeks of torture. Serbs run the building. The blood of ethnic Albanians decorates the interior. Rust-colored stains cover the walls and the floor.

They push Hamdi into a cell. The butt of a rifle slams against his head; he falls to his knees. A metal chair smashes across his back; he drops onto his stomach. His ribs absorb the blow of a polished black boot. Then another, and another.

When it is over, they grab Hamdi by the shoulders and throw him out on the sidewalk.

"Go!" one barks.

Hamdi staggers into the street. He cannot seek medical help -- Serbs punish any ethnic Albanian who checks into the town hospital. He limps home, collapsing at the threshold. For one week he barely moves.

In time his body heals. The family -- Hamdi, his wife and their three children -- tries to forget. They eat dinner together, attend church, visit with friends. They talk quietly of the future. They even laugh.

Then the knock comes again.

'Sounds like a holocaust'

Soldiers raping women in front of their husbands, then butchering the men. Children shot in the back as they run away. The wombs of pregnant mothers slit open with bayonets and their fetuses impaled.

Words, photographs, TV footage -- none fully captures the atrocities committed during seven years of "ethnic cleansing" in Yugoslavia and neighboring countries. When those who have escaped tell their stories to Carlos Cantu, he wonders whether much hope exists for humankind.

"You listen in horror," he said. "I can't even imagine going through something like that. It sounds like a holocaust."

Cantu serves as director of immigration services for Catholic Charities of Southern Nevada, the state's largest provider of refugee aid. The Las Vegas diocese operates one of the nation's biggest voluntary refugee resettlement programs within the U.S. Catholic Conference, the Washington, D.C.-based umbrella organization for Catholic Charities. The Catholic Conference and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society run the largest resettlement programs nationwide.

The Serbs' ethnic and religious crackdown has fueled a massive exodus from Yugoslavia and its surrounding former provinces, deepening demand on U.S. refugee services. Consider: From 1983 to 1992, the year that war exploded in the Balkan region, a total of 73 Yugoslav refugees fled to the United States, according to federal immigration records.

The number in 1998 alone, including refugees from Yugoslavia's successor republics, is 30,823.

Chances are good that the figure will rise this year in the wake of the Balkan conflict's latest full-blown eruption two weeks ago. Led by U.S. military forces, NATO has unleashed a daily barrage of airstrikes to halt the Serbs' yearlong siege of the ethnic Albanian majority in the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo.

As the violence intensifies and more refugees depart the region -- leaving their native soil for perhaps the final time -- they will scatter around the globe in pursuit of a new life. Hundreds will discover one in what may seem an unlikely place: Las Vegas, a city that stands, in a literal and figurative sense, a world apart from everything they have known.

Catholic Charities expects to resettle 600 refugees this year, more than half of them from Yugoslavia and the bordering nations of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Albania and Macedonia. Episcopal Migration Ministries, the only other similar program in the state, will handle 75 to 100 refugees.

The journey to Nevada for most refugees begins after they flee their homeland under political, religious or ethnic persecution to enter a refugee camp in another country. In the past month hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians, whom Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has sought to purge from Kosovo, have crossed the border into nearby Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro.

Once inside a camp they will wait to receive refugee status from the United Nations, which enables them to seek asylum in the country they have entered or another. Those looking to come to the United States must obtain approval from the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

In 1999 the United States will accept a maximum of 78,000 refugees, who become eligible for permanent residency after one year and for citizenship after five years. Last week Defense Secretary William Cohen said the United States would admit 20,000 Kosovar Albanian refugees on a temporary basis and house them at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Congress has allocated $435 million for refugee resettlement services this year. Ten national volunteer agencies, working with local affiliates, determine where to send refugees based on assorted criteria: whether they have a sponsor -- a relative or friend already in an area who can help them; the strength of a city's job market; and space availability within an affiliate program.

The U.S. Catholic Conference has resettled 1 million refugees since 1975 and will welcome another 20,000 this year. Among the group's 110 dioceses nationwide that provide resettlement services, Las Vegas ranks among the largest along with those in Atlanta, Grand Rapids, Mich., Lincoln, Neb., and Louisville, Ky.

The Las Vegas diocese also aids those who seek asylum but lack refugee status, having arrived in the United States illegally or, as in Hamdi's case, with a visa. Catholic Charities assists "asylees," as they are dubbed, to file paperwork with the INS to secure work authorization and residency.

Hamdi, 41, moved to Las Vegas in December with a six-month visa that his friend, Bekim Poliku, a fellow ethnic Albanian from Kosovo, helped him obtain. Poliku migrated to Las Vegas in 1995 after marrying his wife, Laura, a U.S. citizen of Albanian heritage, in Kosovo.

Hamdi, who knows little English and spoke through Poliku, asked that his last name not be used because he has yet to receive asylum. Like thousands of other potential asylees, he traveled to the United States in hopes of gaining residency, which would allow him to sponsor the rest of his family as refugees.

He also came to save his life. The three brutal beatings he endured inside the Gjilan police station convinced Hamdi he might not survive a fourth.

But waiting for word from the INS has become another kind of agony. Hamdi, who lives with Poliku, watches TV throughout the night for news from home, his brain wired from Marlboros and coffee. Every time the phone rings his body tenses. Even though his family now lives in Macedonia, away from the harshest fighting, he braces for the call that no husband, no father ever wants to receive.

"My body is here, my mind is over there," Hamdi said. "I'm going crazy. I don't know what to do anymore. I'm losing my hope."

Nothing to do but run

Serb soldiers stood outside the apartment, banging at the door. They suspected Ilir Shpendi's father of belonging to the Kosovo Liberation Army, a small rebel group fighting for the province's independence.

"Go to the United States," he urged his son. "Get as far away as you can. Live your life. Disappear."

The banging grew louder. There was no time to argue or to say goodbye to his mother and sister. Shpendi took the $4,000 his father offered -- the family's entire savings -- and slipped out a bedroom window. He glanced back once, in time to see the soldiers burst through the door.

Shpendi, 24, has had no contact with his family since their frantic parting three years ago. He figures he never will.

"My father is probably dead. I just don't want to think about it," Shpendi said. "I don't even try to reach them because I don't want bad news.

"You want to know -- but you don't want to know."

Shpendi realizes he could not have stayed -- in Kosovo, ethnic Albanians are the hunted and the Serbs are the hunters. A few years ago, as a young Shpendi walked along the streets of his native Pristina, the Kosovo capital, a Serbian soldier overheard him speaking Albanian. The man wrenched the teenager's arms behind his back as punishment, dislocating both shoulders. Surgical scars mark where a doctor cut Shpendi open to repair the damage.

So after escaping his parents' apartment, Shpendi obeyed his father and disappeared. He sneaked into Albania, hopped a couple of trains and planes and found his way to New York. A friend there gave him the phone number of Petrit Vata, a Kosovar refugee who already had emigrated to Las Vegas, and Shpendi landed in the desert in mid-1996.

Back then Shpendi spoke no English, had little money and knew only Vata. Today he works as a poker dealer at the Bellagio hotel-casino, rents an apartment with three pals and has a steady girlfriend. He is living his life, as his father had hoped.

Still, the past chokes Shpendi at unexpected moments. Last month he and a group of friends went to a nightclub to celebrate his birthday. As the Beastie Boys blared over the sound system -- calling on everyone to "fight for your right to party" -- Shpendi broke down.

"My people are fighting just to live," he said, his eyes again welling with tears as he recalled the incident. "It's so sad. I get so angry, you know?"

His frustration sometimes boils over. He rails against "the devil (Slobodan) Milosevic," the president of Yugoslavia; against Serbs living in Las Vegas and across the United States who protest the NATO bombings; against his own helplessness. He weeps for loved ones who for him live only as memories.

"I am not a killer," Shpendi said. "But I wish that all the Serbs could feel what it's like to watch your whole family executed in front of you the way my people have. Then maybe they would know what we feel."

Getting a new start

Las Vegas has emerged as something of a refugee haven for the same reasons it attracts other residents: abundant jobs and the promise of a new beginning.

Catholic Charities pays for refugees to stay in an apartment for one month and provides them with groceries and clothing. The new arrivals apply for a Social Security card and food stamps, and they undergo a medical checkup through Clark County health services. The diocese also teaches them English, job-hunting skills and other cultural tricks that will smooth their assimilation.

After their first month is up, refugees must find a place to live. Under federal guidelines they receive cash and medical assistance for another seven months. When that runs out, they're on their own.

Linda Faulk, assistant resettlement director for Catholic Charities, estimated that three-fourths of the refugees entering the program become self-sufficient within three months. Most initially find entry-level work in casinos as housekeepers or kitchen help, eventually clawing their way up the career ladder to better-paying jobs.

The local diocese spends an average of $2,000 to $3,000 on each refugee and has seen a steady increase in the number coming out of both Yugoslavia and Cuba. Despite the federal mandate to cut off aid after eight months -- in the early 1980s, refugees received financial assistance for up to five years -- Faulk said that's plenty of time to school them in the American way.

"We don't seem to have a problem getting people on their feet in eight months," she said.

Yet critics of U.S. refugee policy argue that the nation's melting pot has rusted, owing to the push for a balanced budget and smoldering anti-immigrant sentiment. One piece of evidence they offer: This year's refugee cap of 78,000, while up 2,000 from last year, falls well below the 120,000 refugees allowed annually into the country earlier in the decade. (The Clinton administration has proposed raising the ceiling to 80,000 next year.)

The overall decline disturbs Mark Franken, executive director of migration and refugee services for the U.S. Catholic Conference. He pointed out that Germany has admitted more than half a million refugees from Yugoslavia and its neighboring countries over the last seven years.

Meanwhile, the United States -- with threefold the population and 26 times the land mass -- accepted 84,000 refugees from the region during the same period.

"Frankly, we've not done nearly as much as we should, especially when you think of the leadership role the U.S. should be playing in helping refugees," Franken said. "It's unbecoming of a nation of immigrants."

Wondering why

The Serbian police arrested Bekim Poliku outside the home his parents were building in Feriza, Kosovo, eight years ago. He was 17. He thought he was about to die.

The soldiers drove him to a jail and shoved him into a cramped room with 30 other ethnic Albanians. Bloody fingerprints dotted the walls. One by one the prisoners were removed from the cell. The others listened to their screams.

Poliku remained on the floor when they finished with him. His side felt numb from the nightsticks and fists.

"Get out of the country," they said, "before we find you again."

His mother wrapped lamb skin around his torso to mend his cracked ribs. Poliku had trouble drawing a breath. But at least he would live to tell his story.

A few weeks after Poliku's arrest, Serbian police pulled his friend's car over. When he got out, they shot him in the back. Dead at 17.

Now, safe in Las Vegas with his wife and son, Poliku, 25, wonders why. A war over ethnic origins. Over religion. Over nothing.

Poliku's parents and two siblings live in Macedonia. When he's not working at Bally's as a food server, he sits in front of his big-screen TV. He watches entire villages burn as the Serbs drive his people out. He cheers NATO. He curses Milosevic.

Then, sometimes, the sight of his homeland going up in flames becomes too much. Poliku shuts off the TV. He plops down on his knees to play with his 2-year-old son. The boy giggles. His name is Lilidor. It is an Albanian word that bears a simple meaning.

"I love peace."

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