HMS Faculty Assist Kosovars

When they finally found him, he had lost everything, his home, his job and his possessions. But all he wanted back were his patients.

A Kosovar doctor, kicked out along with his patients from the Pristina state hospital because they are ethnic Albanian, was scouring an Albanian refugee camp looking for his most seriously ill patients.

For Ruth A. Barron and Jennifer Leaning '67, two Harvard medical school faculty members in the area with Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), it was a sad but familiar human story of a conflict most Americans just watch on CNN.

"In the middle of the conversation [the Kosovar doctor] took out of his jacket a makeshift little wallet," Leaning says. "He had a picture of one of his patients... he also had two photographs of microscope slides... documenting the extent of the infection in the central nervous system."

"He said, 'You might think it's odd that I have these pictures of her, but it's very important that we try to find her," adds Leaning, assistant professor of medicine and a longtime board member of PHR.

Barron and Leaning say that his story was not uncommon among the displaced doctors in the camps. No matter how much they had lost, their first concern was for their patients.

Barron and Leaning have been to Kosovo and the surrounding area several times in the past year with PHR, an organization formed in 1986 to investigate and prevent human rights violations.

Though NATO attacks would not begin for another four months, in order to get into Yugoslavia they had to apply for tourist visas--everyone who had applied for visas as humanitarian workers had been denied.

In November, they traveled to Kosovo to document the experiences of ethnic Albanian doctors as the Serbian crackdown in Kosovo increased in intensity.

"We were there to investigate allegations of the targeting of the medical community and medical infrastructure by the Serbian military," Leaning said.

Even at that time, the situation was tense.

"It was clearly a people under occupation [with] a certain low level of harassment and low level of terrorism," says Barron, who is an instructor in psychiatry.

They returned in March to the Kosovar cities of Pristina, Pec and Prizren to hold several daylong seminars on medical ethics at the request of a number of doctors.

"They said it would be helpful for them to have a review of international law and medical ethics and dealing with terrorism and psychological trauma," Barron says. "Their sense of what was normal and proper in medicine had been so affected by the military occupation."

When they returned to Kosovo in March just before the NATO airstrikes began, the change in the atmosphere was astounding.

"In March, it had ratcheted up with troops and tanks all over and Serbian troops on high alert," Barron says.

"We could see that it was escalating and that people were in such peril. This was not a civil war, this was an armed military against just people on the street--completely uneven," Barron adds.

Shortly after their return, NATO began bombing Yugoslavia and refugees began flooding across the borders of neighboring states. Barron and Leaning returned to the Balkans in April and early May to find out what had happened to the doctors they had met on their previous trips.

"We literally went to find them among the refugees," Barron says. "We went to... find out what happened to them, how we could help them, and... how we could keep them in a network and help them feel supported and connected with one another."

Most of the ethnic Albanian doctors had been fired from their hospitals in the early 1990s, but a few who had skills that the Serbian doctors lacked were allowed to remain. Those who stayed, however, faced strict regulations, including one rule that forced them to be off of the hospital's premises by 2 p.m., according to Leaning.

On March 25, the day after the first NATO bombing, even that compromise ended.

"The medical director of the state hospital informed all ethnic Albanian physicians on staff, and directed all ethnic Albanian patients in the hospital, that they must leave that morning," Leaning said.

A few days later several refugees showed up at the border dressed only in hospital gowns, Leaning said.

Many of the doctors became refugees along with their patients, losing their homes and possessions.

Although Barron and Leaning do not know if and when they will return to the Balkans, PHR is committed to continuing its aid to the doctors of Kosovo. The organization is currently working to set up a physician's network in Albania and the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia.