Rob Mank

The Macedonian government did announce one offer of good will, though not without a warning. In response to the current overcrowding in the camps, the government has agreed to enlarge two camps, Senokos and Blace, and has authorized the construction of one additional camp. “After that, no more building,” said Boris Trajkovski, Macedonia’s deputy foreign minister.

Before Wednesday’s closing, a recent influx of refugees swelled the number of Kosovar Albanians in Macedonia to nearly 250,000, according to UNHCR. In this small, land-locked country of 2 million, the ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo represent roughly a 12 to 13 percent increase in population. According to Kljusev, “The world experience shows in these situations, if a country faces a 5 to 8 percent increase, destabilization is possible.”

Macedonia has been accused of using refugees as a bargaining chip to get more aid from the West. The relief community reacted strongly to Wednesday’s border closing, condemning the Macedonian government for leveraging refugees for aid money, and expressed concern about the security and conditions of the refugees caught inside Kosovo.

“We’re alarmed; this is the first time since the earlier disaster,” said Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the UNHCR, referring to the earlier border closing, when thousands of refugees were stuck in “no-man’s land,” a muddy, fetid field without food, shelter, or sanitation. A representative from the UNHCR met with Macedonia’s interior minister Thursday in an effort to resolve the border dilemma.

Macedonian officials do have cause to worry because this former Yugolsav republic has its own ethnic tensions, which have only been heightened by the influx of refugees. Official government sources list ethnic Albanians, the country’s largest minority, as 22 percent of the total pre-crisis population, with ethnic Macedonians as 66 percent. Ethnic Albanians in Skopje dispute those figures, and say the government has routinely undercounted their population.

“They push me to work more,” Odeh says of the gory pictures hanging across the room from his desk. He gestures to one particularly horrific shot of a man’s head so mutilated that parts of his brain spill out: “That man sacrificed his life.” The graphic photos, and the boost in motivation Odeh gleans from them, have less to do with charity than with politics.

That conflation highlights the difficulties surrounding U.S.-based Muslim and Arab humanitarian organizations working in contested areas like the West Bank and Gaza. Several, including the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which raises millions of dollars each year, have been under investigation by the U.S. government for links to terrorist groups, according to documents filed at Federal District Court in Washington. No charges have been filed against the group. But the investigation itself has spawned two unusual lawsuits.

The first accuses the Holy Land Foundation and five other organizations with ties to the Middle East of aiding Palestinian terrorists responsible for the slaying of an American teenager in the West Bank in 1996. The lawsuit, filed by the parents of David Boim, a 17-year-old yeshiva student in Israel at the time of his death, seeks more than $600 million in damages.

It charges the Holy Land Foundation and the other organizations with being “fronts” for Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement. The suit, which relies heavily on information gathered by the U.S. and Israeli governments, alleges the American-based groups raise and channel money through an elaborate global network to Hamas, which uses the funds to engage in terrorist activities.

The State Department lists Hamas as a foreign terrorist organization, and Israel holds the group responsible for a series of fatal attacks on civilians, including suicide bombings. In 1997, Israel closed the Holy Land Foundation office in East Jerusalem because of alleged ties to Hamas.

The Holy Land Foundation denies any association with Hamas or its representatives, and the group condemns any acts of terror. “If Hamas is killing, if there is any terror being done, we’re against it,” says Dalell Mohammed, a spokeswoman for the Holy Land Foundation. “We’re in the business of saving and preserving life, not destroying life.”

Which leads to the second suit. The Holy Land Foundation in April filed a libel suit against the Dallas Morning News, its corporate parent, Belo, and four reporters. The foundation accuses the paper of an “organized campaign” to defame it, citing a series of articles by metro reporter Steve McGonigle. Reporting from Gaza City and Jerusalem, McGonigle wrote about orphaned families supported by the foundation, including one whose father was a renowned Hamas military commander.

Complaints about the paper’s coverage extend beyond the Holy Land Foundation. Many Dallas-area Muslims have been critical of the paper’s take on their growing community. More vocal members held a series of protests at the Dallas Morning News headquarters through the spring, and a group calling itself “Muslims Against Defamation” set up a Web site to counter what they perceive as the paper’s anti-Muslim bias.

After the lawsuit was filed, the paper ran a series of follow-up stories about the Holy Land Foundation’s activities in the Palestinian territories.

“Those articles were fair but long overdue,” says the Holy Land Foundations Mohammed. She contends the legal action led to more sensitive reporting from the paper and from McGonigle. “The only thing that prompted him was the lawsuit.”

McGonigle says he can’t comment about the Holy Land Foundation or his reporting on it because of the libel suit. But Dallas Morning News executive editor Gilbert Bailon dismisses the idea that the paper’s coverage responded to the suit. “It didn’t change the kind of coverage we did,” Bailon says. The paper did hold a workshop with area Muslim leaders to educate its staff on Islam and aspects of the faith community, he says. The Dallas Morning News has no Muslim reporters.

Bailon says it’s not uncommon for the Dallas Morning News to send metro reporters abroad to follow up on stories that began locally. He sent McGonigle to the Middle East so that the paper wouldn’t have to rely so much on “third-hand” information in its reporting on the region.

As the U.S. looks into financial or logistical ties between the Holy Land Foundation and Hamas, the larger question concerns the near impossibility of isolating humanitarian aid from politics. The issue has come up in U.S. ties to other parts of the world as well. In the 1970s, the British government accused the New York organization Noraid of funding arms for the Irish Republican Army.

Established in 1989, the Holy Land Foundation generates funds in Arab and Muslim communities nationwide through mosques and cultural centers. Odeh coordinates the group’s East Coast operations from his New Jersey office. The group’s humanitarian efforts focus on the West Bank and Gaza, where it builds and funds hospitals and sponsors education programs. Currently, the group provides $55 monthly stipends to nearly 2,900 orphans and $100 to 360 families, according to Motaz Hindawi, director of social services. The money is distributed locally from offices in Hebron, Jenin and Gaza, he said.

The Holy Land Foundation has worked in other regions, as well, with projects in Chechnya, Turkey and the Balkans. Odeh recently delivered ambulances, flour and a bread-making system to Kosovo. A food bank at the organization’s East Coast office in New Jersey feeds more than 100 families. The foundation also has a Chicago area office, as well as offices in Beirut, Lebanon, and Amman, Jordan. But it’s the organization’s Palestinian focus that draws criticism.

Most controversial is the organization’s financial support to families of Hamas members who died during acts of terrorism. “Some of the orphans we are supporting are the children of Hamas martyrs,” Odeh says. “But I have nothing to do with their fathers.”

Supporting these families isn’t a political act, according to Odeh, because the Holy Land Foundation has no knowledge of or involvement in the activities of Hamas. “The kid shouldn’t pay for the father’s mistake,” he says.

But critics charge that politics and charity are conflated in such instances. Evan Hochburg of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a group that monitors anti-Semitism and terrorist activity, is one of many who believes that any humanitarian organization that provides financial support to a family whose breadwinner died while committing a terrorist act is promoting terrorism.

“If you’re going to say to families of suicide bombers, ‘He’s a martyr,’ someone who’s killed innocent civilians, and give them a pension,” Hochburg said, “that’s giving an incentive. It rewards terrorism.”

A Washington attorney for the parents of David Boim, Thomas B. Carr, agreed: “Anyone who gives money to a group who in any way, shape or form, in any of its facets, supports terrorism is responsible for that terrorism.”

While the Holy Land Foundation supports families who are affiliated with Hamas, it doesn’t support Hamas itself, Mohammed said. And the group doesn’t screen aid applicants for background or political affiliation, she said. “We don’t ask,” she said of a family’s political leanings,” just like social welfare here doesn’t ask.”

The Holy Land Foundation’s Palestinian focus or sympathy is not a valid basis for criticism, argues Hussein Ibish of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a Washington civil rights group. Such attacks are “based on a guilt-by-association model which does not focus on the specific criminal behavior of an individual but rather on their view and associations,” Ibish said. “It is abhorrent to democratic processes.”

Ibish believes that the U.S. has in effect criminalized humanitarian fundraising. “It is now illegal to express support for the lawful, humanitarian work of a group politically associated with so-called ‘terrorist organizations’ according to the State Department.”

Despite its terrorist status, Palestinians and some Arab-Americans consider Hamas a legitimate political voice in the ongoing effort to establish a Palestinian state. And while the idea of Palestinian statehood may be abhorrent to some, it’s certainly not illegal to support it, Ibish said. Banning political and humanitarian groups based on the principle of guilt by association “creates a category of political, thought and speech crime,” he said. Ibish also believes it violates free and robust political discourse guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Odeh said the Holy Land Foundation has been targeted because Israel and American Jewish organizations, including the ADL, oppose any form of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. Hochburg of the ADL calls that charge “ridiculous.” Because the group is still under investigation by the State Department, the ADL hasn’t taken a position on the Holy Land Foundation, he said.

Despite being under fire for its ideology, the foundation remains legitimate by U.S. nonprofit standards, and it continues to grow. In 1998, the organization raised more than $5 million, spending slightly more than it brought in, according to information filed on its IRS Form 990. It raised more than $6 million in 1999. The foundation far exceeds minimum standards established by the Better Business Bureau, with overhead and fundraising costs well below the 35 percent limit.

Odeh will keep responding to critics with the conviction that his organization does not exist to do harm. “They believe if I’m supporting an orphan, he will grow up and will be another fighter,” Odeh said. “But how do you want me to fight back but to do good works?”

Two polls released in the past week show Giuliani’s Senate rival Hillary Clinton with a slight edge for the first time as a result of the Dorismond uproar. Even the much-exalted drop in New York’s murder rate, which Giuliani has taken credit for, has begun to reverse. Homicides rose 13 percent between January and the end of March, making his leadership even more vulnerable to attack.

But the mayor hasn’t alienated everyone. The police department’s staunchest defender has an unwavering ally of his own — a high-profile African-American, no less. Imam Izak-El M. Pasha, spiritual leader of 8,000 African-American Muslims in Harlem, offers an uncommon assessment of Giuliani: “I think the mayor is a great man.”

With that statement, delivered the day after police arrested 27 protesters at Dorismond’s funeral, and with his unflagging support for the mayor, Imam Pasha has further cemented an unlikely, but durable, political alliance. But by standing behind the mayor, the imam has also distanced himself from most other African-American leaders, who have criticized Giuliani’s handling of the Dorismond incident.

“We have to struggle to move away from a more emotional basis to working with the mayor,” he says, implicitly disparaging Giuliani’s nemesis, the Rev. Al Sharpton. Pasha leaves no doubt about his distaste for Sharpton. “Though tragic things happened,” he says, “a respectable leader won’t blow up the whole building to get to one rat.”

Pasha is emerging as a social leader in his own right. He has become a spokesman not just for black Muslims, but for the Islamic community at large. The imam’s moderation is due in part to his shift away from the anti-white, separatist beliefs of the Nation of Islam, the controversial sect to which he formerly belonged, and his embrace of the mainstream, orthodox faith of Sunni Islam, the fastest growing religion in the United States.

He disassociates himself and his followers from the very movement that built his mosque, the Malcolm Shabazz Masjid. (Malcolm Shabazz is the Muslim name that black militant leader Malcolm X adopted just before his death.) From his bully pulpit at the intersection of 116th Street and Lennox Avenue, the imam spreads his pro-Giuliani, pro-police message.

In his conciliatory leadership style and philosophy, Pasha couldn’t be more different from Sharpton and from the militant legacy of Black Nationalism, a movement that often advocated destroying the government. “Times have changed,” he said. “Government is not actively falling into white supremacy and using religion to justify it. Government was anti-Negro, anti-black, so those things were necessary and they had a framework. And they made a difference.”

Preaching personal responsibility, the imam cautions his congregation to avoid taking an us-vs.-them attitude toward the mayor’s administration and the NYPD. “I don’t always agree with the government,” the imam says. “But you have to have a relationship with the mayor of New York.”

The relationship between Giuliani and Pasha has been fruitful for both men. It dates back to at least 1994, when the imam helped settle a dispute between the city and vendors on 125th Street in Harlem. He had assumed leadership of the mosque the previous year; with that settlement he emerged as an advocate of racial harmony and local economic development. The vendors eventually relocated to a market on 116th Street. More recently, the imam has been instrumental in the development of a 240-unit housing complex now under construction across the street from the mosque.

Recognizing Pasha’s mollifying influence in Harlem, and his loyalty, Giuliani rewarded him with an appointment as New York’s first Muslim police chaplain in June 1999. It coincided with another difficult, race-tinged chapter in the Giuliani administration — five months after the shooting of Amadou Diallo, and during the closing days of the trial of police officers for the torture of Abner Louima.

“You want somebody who doesn’t predict floods,” Police Commissioner Howard Safir told CNN after the imam’s appointment. “You want somebody who builds arks. And Imam Pasha is somebody who builds arks.”

But now, in the wake of Dorismond’s death, the imam is increasingly alone in his loyalty to Giuliani. Even moderate African-American leaders have joined Sharpton in criticizing the mayor’s handling of the case.

Rev. Michael Faulkner, a longtime backer, withdrew his support for Giuliani’s Senate bid last week. Appearing on CNBC’s “Hardball,” Faulkner labeled the mayor’s ongoing problem “a dysfunction in his relationship to the African-American community.” And the Rev. Floyd H. Flake, who supported Giuliani in the last election, signaled his discontent in a sermon the day after the funeral.

But Fred Siegel, a political analyst at the Cooper Union, downplays the impact of the defections. “The anger and the hysteria have grown, but I think those votes were lost long ago,” he says. Though the mayor increased support among black voters in the 1997 election, anger over the Diallo shooting cost him those gains. Siegel predicts Giuliani will probably garner less than 10 percent of the black vote, with results similar to the 1993 election.

Citywide, the mayor’s approval rating dipped to 45 percent, according to a New York Daily News/NY1 poll last week, down from 54 percent six months ago. The dissatisfaction with his response to the Dorismond shooting crosses ethnic and racial lines, and is especially strong among voters who traditionally voted for Democrats but have supported Giuliani in his two mayoral victories.

The road jogs right, putting the Kosovo border and the farthest section of no-man’s land out of view from Blace, in Macedonia. The most recent refugees are often held there, out of sight from journalists and relief workers on the Macedonian side, and just a few feet from Yugoslav police. With often spotty communications between Macedonian border officials and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the only way for relief workers to find out if refugees are waiting in no-man’s land is to go look.

Redmond set out with a half dozen colleagues, including an official from the British embassy in Skopje. Journalists aren’t usually allowed to visit no-man’s land, but I tagged along. Refugees who had crossed earlier told of thousands more behind them. We walked in silence for several minutes, not knowing what to expect on the other side.

And suddenly, there they were. As we rounded the corner, the scene before us was as familiar as it was alarming. About 1,500 Kosovar Albanians were huddled together on the asphalt, so tightly packed together it was difficult to distinguish where one family ended and the next began.

A dozen Macedonian border police stood over the refugees, ensuring the crowd remained still in its position near the Kosovo border. As Redmond and the other relief workers approached the group, the enormous, indistinguishable mass splintered into a thousand different lives. Many had arrived sick or battered. All were hungry and exhausted.

Small emergencies popped up one after another. One man pushed through the crowd and rushed forward, explaining that his anemic son urgently needed medical attention. Several women had given birth in the previous 48 hours. A young girl had had an epileptic seizure. And those with diarrhea had to continue waiting; there are no toilets in no-man’s land.

Relief workers scrambled to meet the refugees’ needs. A Macedonian Red Cross nurse and doctors treated the most ill, but they were stretched thin. The medical workers had been on duty for two days straight, treating the previous wave of refugees.

A team of young men wearing vests emblazoned with “Action Against Hunger” handed out bottles of water and boxes of crackers. Minutes later they brought out diapers, baby food and wool blankets.

In a scene that, under different circumstances, would have been reminiscent of a weekend outing, one family of eight sat together on a wool blanket. But instead of a grassy park underfoot, their blanket lay on wet asphalt. Behind them, coils of barbed wire were illuminated by floodlights. They had arrived at the border the day before, they said, and Serbian police at the last stop, in the village of General Jankovic, had held them on the train for 10 hours.

A man standing nearby said his neighborhood in Pristina had been completely emptied of ethnic Albanians. He had traveled to the border with another family, which included friends of his children, and hoped to be reunited with his wife, children and mother-in-law, all of whom were living in the Cigrane refugee camp. He had spent the previous two nights holed up in an empty house in General Jankovic. He also said one woman and a young child weren’t as fortunate — they had died on the overcrowded train.

The refugees wore expressions of patience, and quiet resignation. They had made it, for the most part. As mothers breast-fed, and small children struggled to stay awake, they continued to wait for the Macedonian border officials to take down their names before they were ushered into tents in the Blace transit camp near the border. Mercifully, the authorities processed the newcomers quickly. Within a couple of hours of Redmond’s arrival, the initial 1,500 were moved past the Macedonian border.

In the empty road where they had been, the detritus of 1,500 beleaguered lives lay scattered about: dozens of empty plastic water bottles; stray clothes that had been dropped and forgotten; packs of cigarettes crushed under 1,500 pairs of feet. But minutes later, as soon as that initial group had filed through, 1,000 more Kosovars poured in, a hundred at a time. A column of refugees could be seen stretching back into the darkness beyond the border checkpoint, as far back into Kosovo as could be seen from no-man’s land.

And it all started again.

Of the quarter million or so Kosovar Albanians who have fled to Macedonia since the beginning of Slobodan Milosevic’s “ethnic cleansing” campaign, more than 82,000 continue to be housed in camps here. Young Maliqu said the mood of the camp was elevated because the refugees had gotten word about their famous visitor. He watched over a group of children, who splashed about gleefully in a stream near the gate, before Clinton arrived.

To the ethnic Albanians occupying these vast, dusty tent cities, just as important as the politics and kindness of these visits is the ceremony and the excitement they bring — for even on the best days, when the temperatures remain bearable, food lines aren’t quite as long and the vast bureaucracy of the place doesn’t overwhelm, life in the camps is unspeakably boring.

Waves of staff and security preceded Clinton’s arrival. Press sections were cordoned off, and refugees who didn’t live in the area she was to visit were kept behind fences. Workers in the camp had been preparing for days. “I spent three days excusing myself, entering tents and explaining the importance of this visit to people here,” said Aurvasi Patel, a UNHCR field manager.

Shefqet Qerimi, 45, an elementary school teacher from Gilan before he left Kosovo, stood nearby and surveyed the preparations for Clinton’s visit. He said he believes celebrity visits are important to the refugees’ morale. “The atmosphere changes at the camp,” he said, “It’s a thrill.”

Clinton stopped over at the camp for just about an hour Friday, visiting with Kosovar refugees as well as with the relief workers that run Brazda. She toured a small section, paying a visit to camp B-214; briefly its inhabitants were the focus of world media attention.

After the First Lady’s departure, Sadik Prunaj, who lives in B-214 with his family, was grateful for their famous visitor, and her message. “I thank Mrs. Hillary for visiting us in this hard circumstance,” he said, “She gives us hope about going back to Kosovo.”

Surrounded by a group of refugees, the first lady emphasized the need for empathy from those who experience the Kosovo crisis only though the media. “It’s easy when we see these pictures [of refugees] … to get immune to what it’s like … I keep putting myself in the faces and the stories … we all should,” she said.

Meanwhile, the relief community took pains to welcome her, as it has the rest of its high-profile visitors. The UNHCR’s Patel admitted the relief organizations need the attention brought by celebrities as much as the refugees. “That’s where we get our funds,” she said. The UNHCR is a media-savvy organization, she added, “well aware of how public perception is shaped.”