[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 72 (Tuesday, May 18, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E996-E997]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


   CRISIS IN KOSOVO (ITEM NO. 4) REMARKS BY TONY ELGINDY DIRECTOR OF 
           RESEARCH & TRADING, PACIFIC EQUITY INVESTIGATIONS

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. DENNIS J. KUCINICH

                                of ohio

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, May 18, 1999

  Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, on April 29, 1999, I joined with 
Representative Cynthia A. McKinney and Representative Michael E. 
Capuano to host the second in a series of Congressional Teach-In 
sessions on the Crisis in Kosovo. If a peaceful resolution to this 
conflict is to be found in the coming weeks, it is essential that we 
cultivate a consciousness of peace and actively search for creative 
solutions. We must construct a foundation for peace through 
negotiation, mediation, and diplomacy.
  Part of the dynamic of peace is a willingness to engage in meaningful 
dialogue, to listen to one another openly and to share our views in a 
constructive manner. I hope that these Teach-In sessions will 
contribute to this process by providing a forum for Members of Congress 
and the public to explore alternatives to the bombing and options for a 
peaceful resolution. We will hear from a variety of speakers on 
different sides of the Kosovo situation. I will be introducing into the 
Congressional Record transcripts of their remarks and essays that shed 
light on the many dimensions of the crisis.
  This presentation is by Tony Elgindy, Director of Research & Trading 
for Pacific Equity Investigations. Mr. Elgindy is not a professional 
aid worker. He is a dedicated and committed individual who has adopted 
a personal role in helping his fellow human beings who have been 
brutalized by this ongoing tragedy. Mr. Elgindy shares his observations 
and experiences with us, speaking in graphic and moving detail. He was 
instrumental in bringing 30 refugees out of the Kosovo area to the 
United States, the first group of refugees to arrive in our country. 
Among these displaced families were Skefkije Ferataj and her 2 year old 
daughter, Besarta. Both of them appeared at this second Congressional 
Teach-In. Following his presentation in a May 1, 1999, article from the 
Chicago Tribune that describes what the Ferataj family encountered when 
they reached Chicago. These documents give a very real, human face to 
the Crisis in Kosovo.

    Presentation by Tony Elgindy to Congressional Teach-In on Kosovo

       I'd like to first apologize, having just gotten here in the 
     States from Macedonia. I don't have prior prepared remarks. I 
     would like to thank everyone for having this opportunity to 
     share what I've seen, and to assist me in trying to define 
     some sort of forward momentum here.
       Upon my arrival in Skopje, Macedonia which is approximately 
     23 km. south of the border, I saw my first camps. We went to 
     the border, saw Serb activity on the border, and talked to 
     refugees.
       It's difficult to know from my standpoint exactly where to 
     start. I don't know if it's with the random torture, the 
     beatings, the sadistic mutilation of women, their unsafe 
     enslavement, the taking of eyes of women and children, the 
     cutting off of ears, the burning alive of males, castration 
     of young boys, I just don't know where to start. What's 
     happening in Kosovo is a tragedy beyond anything you could 
     ever watch on TV. There is no way for any of us to sit here 
     today and understand what they are feeling, what they are 
     seeing, or what they've endured. You cannot smell it here, 
     you cannot here it here. The Serbs are systematically burning 
     evidence, destroying all traces of the atrocities, 
     pulverizing ashes. There were flashes in the sky at night 
     when we were trying to sleep from the NATO bombing. All of 
     the relief workers that I met would be there during the day 
     and leave there in the evening, leaving the camps to the 
     Macedonian police. The crying and the grief intensified at 
     night. And I don't know how anyone could tolerate it.
       This is a Holocaust, undoubtedly. Holocaust Number Two. I'm 
     not a politician; I'm a trader. I work on Wall Street, been 
     doing it for 11 years. I deal with numbers. I've been 
     fortunate enough to be able to help various relief 
     organizations in the United States with money donations, 
     connections, support, one of which is the Mother Teresa 
     Foundation in Skopje. So I can't sit here and tell you what 
     the results will be and what it will be like if we didn't 
     bomb, or we stopped military action or we sent in ground 
     troops or we never sent in ground troops. All I can testify 
     is what I saw in my two weeks at the border of Kosovo.
       Right now in America our markets are at an all-time high. 
     We are swimming in money. The Internet, Dow Jones, and NASDAQ 
     markets capture our focus, our imagination. And--I say this 
     without trying to offend anyone--our greed has blinded us to 
     what's happening elsewhere. And it became apparent to me 
     that somewhere down the line their lives don't meet our 
     standards for valuable commodities to protect. We are 
     remote control-happy. We click through our channels one 
     after another, and we all say yes, that's terrible and we 
     go on to the next channel and we find a sitcom that we can 
     sit down and watch for the rest of the evening. These 
     people don't have that luxury. The cannot turn it off. 
     They cannot switch channels.
       Of the 30 refugees [he is helping to evacuate to the U.S.], 
     six of them are family members--two close family members and 
     four distant family members--of another U.S. citizen who 
     accompanied me on the trip to find her family. The other 24 
     have no connections here in the U.S. It's a very difficult 
     ordeal to obtain their visas, since the U.S. Embassy when we 
     arrived wasn't allowing any refugees to come. And I used 
     whatever

[[Page E997]]

     resources I had in the financial markets to contact the 
     people--whatever little bit of influence I had--to have them 
     appeal to the Embassy. Well, we ended up using up all the fax 
     paper and jammed the phone lines and we prevailed in getting 
     the very first 30 refugees' visas approved. And a few of them 
     are with us today.
       I don't know if America could have learned anything in 
     Bosnia why it wasn't applied here. We knew what the man was 
     capable of doing; we knew how brutal he was; we didn't take 
     into account the retribution he would show the people of 
     Kosovo. I don't know if we should have evacuated the country 
     or been better prepared before we took aggressive steps.
       For us to allow him to stay in power, for us to idly sit by 
     and let him continue, is also another matter for debate up 
     here on Capitol Hill, which is something that I have little 
     control over. However, I don't know that we can idly sit by 
     and let a madman run around doing the things that I saw. Out 
     of the 24 refugees that will be coming to the States in the 
     next several days, there are 20 children who are all children 
     of three brothers. These three brothers are all gone, and 
     presumed either dead or missing in Kosovo. All three mothers 
     are missing and presumed dead in Kosovo. The adults 
     accompanying the children are the sister of the brothers who 
     is in her late 60s, and the grandmother who was born in 1908, 
     who is currently sleeping on a wooden pallet in the camps. 
     So, for her to have lived through World War I and World War 
     II, Vietnam, Korea, and to be now facing the final years in a 
     camp, are beyond anything I've ever seen or expected to 
     encounter.
       While we were there we did meet up with several refugees--
     medical students, doctors, lawyers. It's interesting when you 
     meet a lawyer who talks about his practice and he's wearing a 
     suit and tie and he lives in a tent and he's in bare feet. 
     He's walking around in the mud without shoes because the Serb 
     police took his shoes. These people, aside from living in 
     denial and shock, need help ever so desperately.
       If everyone is captured today by the top story, which is 
     the Columbine High School tragedy, imagine that happening 
     five times a day, every day, for five years. That's what's 
     happening in Kosovo. It's that multiplied 10,000 times. And 
     for some reason we as Americans have placed a value on an 
     American life higher than that of any other. It could be 
     because Americans are more photogenic, better groomed, live 
     in nicer homes. Whatever it is, it's not right. These people 
     are as valuable as we are. And to discount them, or to shrug 
     them off--as I read in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, 
     that markets are up and doing well and apparently have 
     shrugged off the Kosovo crisis--enrages me.
       While we were there I met a medical student, a female, 23 
     years old, who was in the camp right next door to another 
     camp. She knew where her family was: in the other camp. Yet 
     she was forced to stay in that camp for 16 days. I gave her 
     my video camera, my jacket, my backpack, and we smuggled her 
     out of the camp. All we did was drive a few short miles to 
     the next camp to reunite her with her family which she hadn't 
     seen in over two months. But she'd been in this camp for 16 
     days after finding out where her family was. The Macedonian 
     police are in my opinion not helping the situation. They are 
     pro-Serb for the most part. And the U.S. needs to take as big 
     a role in the humanitarian side of things as they have in the 
     military.
                               __________
                               

                [From the Chicago Tribune, May 1, 1999]

                  Two Who Fled Kosovo Land in Chicago

                          (By Julie Deardorff)

       She is only 2 years old, but Kosovo's Besarta Ferataj has 
     already seen more suffering than most will experience in a 
     lifetime. She has watched death and dismemberment. She has 
     been hungry and has gone without sleep. And she automatically 
     says ``bomb'' when she hears the word NATO or a loud noise.
       But Bersarta could be considered one of the lucky ones from 
     Kosovo. On Friday, she and her mother, Shefkije, quietly 
     arrived at Chicago's Midway Airport, two of the first 
     refugees allowed into the United States from the Balkans.
       Stepping off an AirTran flight from Washington, D.C., in 
     her new Teletubby shoes, Besarta hugged a stuffed koala and 
     stared at the foreign surroundings. Shefkije, wiping tears of 
     joy and disbelief from her eyes, hugged family and friends 
     and held her daughter tightly. In Shefkije's purse were 
     precious six-month visas allowing them into the U.S., marked 
     No. 1 and No. 2
       Their arrival came before next week's expected wave of 
     about 20,000 refugees sponsored by relief organizations, and 
     is due almost entirely to the fierce, relentless drive of 
     Chicago beauty salon owner Ana Ferataj Mehmetaj, Shefkije's 
     older sister.
       Mehmetaj left for the Balkans on her own two weeks ago, in 
     a desperate search for her three sisters. Her childhood home 
     in Istog had already been burned to the ground. She had no 
     idea how to find all of them, let alone transport them back. 
     But she planned to stay until she did.
       ``From the first day on, I knew I had to do something for 
     my family because I know what Slobodan Milosevic is capable 
     of,'' said Mehmetaj, who came to the U.S. alone more than 25 
     years ago, when she was just 17. ``When I was watching 
     everything on television, I felt if I didn't do something for 
     my family I would never forgive myself. Now I feel worse. I 
     saw kids without eyes. I saw people taking clothes off the 
     dead and covering children. I say . . . I saw things you 
     should never see. I couldn't sleep at night, couldn't eat. I 
     felt so guilty. It's so different from watching a war in the 
     living room.''
       Remarkably, she found Shefkije and Besarta at a friend's 
     home in Macedonia. Days earlier, the two had been plucked out 
     of Radusha, a refugee camp, thanks to money Mehmetaj supplied 
     to pay off the guards.
       Their journey to the camp had been an ordeal in itself. 
     They traveled at night to avoid Serbian patrols. Eventually, 
     they made it to Macedonia. ``Every time I talked to her on 
     the phone I thought it was the last,'' Mehmetaj said. ``As 
     soon as I arrived, we just hugged and both started crying. 
     She knew she was safe.''
       Initially, Mehmetaj said, the U.S. Embassy in Macedonia 
     would not issue visas for the two because the official 
     refugee program was not yet in place. But a friend, 
     California commodities trader Tony Elgindy, worked the 
     Internet--contacting friends and politicians, including Sen. 
     Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.), asking for help. About a week 
     later, Mehmetaj received a call from the U.S. Embassy. She 
     said Pat Walsh, the head of consular services at the embassy, 
     told her she could take her sister and her niece back to the 
     U.S. immediately, and several other Kosovar Albanians at a 
     later date.
       Mehmetaj is also sponsoring a family of four, paying for 
     their transportation to the U.S., their housing and food.
       ``It's still a dream,'' said Shefkije. ``I feel happy, but 
     I also feel so bad when I think of my people in Kosovo. They 
     need clothes; they need help. I am OK. But my people are 
     not.''
       During the grueling, emotional two-week journey, Mehmetaj 
     managed to locate a second sister, Sofije, who had trudged 
     through mountains, eaten snow and was living with her family 
     in an abandoned cigarette factory in Skorg, Albania. The 
     factory was crammed with refugees, and Sofije was located 
     by a friend who spent hours roaming through the nine 
     stories of the building, calling out her name.
       ``I was so frightened for the first time in my life,'' said 
     Mehmetaj, who made the dangerous eight-hour trip to Albania 
     alone and in the dead of night, against the wishes of her 
     husband. ``When I found Sofije, I tried to separate her 
     family and take them away, but there were only about 30 
     people left (alive) from her village and they didn't want to 
     be apart. So I promised to help them too.''
       Though she was unable to bring Sofije, her husband and 
     their five children back to the United States this time, 
     Mehmetaj rented two apartments for the family and other 
     Kosovars from the village of Skorg. She also bought them food 
     and clothing.
       A third sister and her family are still missing. But 
     Ferataj said the minute she finds out where they are, she 
     will be on the next plane to Greece.
       ``We were all scared for her safety--it was highly risky, 
     but she has her own mind, thank God,'' said Alenna Hiles, one 
     of Mehmetaj's closest friends who greeted her at Midway 
     Airport. ``It's a miracle she made this happen. She not only 
     found them but got them back here before the refugee program 
     was in place.''
       Most of the Kosovar refugees will begin arriving in 
     Chicago, Detroit, Boston and New York--cities selected 
     because they have substantial Albanian populations--as early 
     as Wednesday, according to a State Department spokesman. The 
     State Department has encouraged people with relatives to 
     assist in refugee resettlement.
       The second oldest of nine siblings, Mehmetaj owns the 
     European Touch salon and day spa in Dearborn Station, her 
     seventh salon, and drives a car with the license plate 
     ``KOSOV A M.'' Friends and family describe her as tough and 
     fearless.
       Most of her family has left Istog, the town where they were 
     raised. Six months before the war, Mehmetaj convinced her 
     mother, Gjyle, to leave Kosovo and move in with a brother in 
     Switzerland. When Istog fell to the Yugoslav army, more than 
     15,000 refugees fled to Rozaje, Montenegro.
       ``(My mother) is very determined to get what she wants,'' 
     said Mehmataj's 20-year-old daughter, Linda. ``Either way she 
     was going to do it, whether the United States was going to 
     allow it or not.''
       Mehmetaj, Shefkije and Besarta arrived in New York on 
     Wednesday and spent Thursday in Washington, D.C., meeting 
     with several senators and briefing politicians about the 
     situation in Kosovo. Friday, they were weary but overjoyed to 
     be together.
       After stopping at the salon to see family members, they all 
     returned to Mehmetaj's South Loop condominium. There, 
     Shefkije gazed at the stunning view of Chicago from the 25th 
     floor. Both mother and child looked curiously at all the 
     things in Mehmetaj's apartment.
       ``We're so happy for them to be here. They'll have 
     everything they need from all of us,'' said brother Rich 
     Ferataj, 37, who also owns a salon and lives in Oak Lawn. ``I 
     think for now we'll just try to laugh and talk about old 
     times.''



     

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