By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, April 7, 1999; Page A1

VLORE, Albania – Arhmi Isufi, a businessman in this port city in southern Albania, was waiting outside the municipal soccer stadium at dawn last Thursday when a bus arrived carrying refugees still wearing the mud of Kosovo on their clothing. He didn't know any of them, but that hardly mattered.

By 7 a.m., 15 members of the Hazhius family – exhausted by five days on the run from the Kosovo city of Pec – were eating breakfast at Isufi's home, and he was busily turning every room in the single-story dwelling into a bedroom. The Hazhius family will stay, Isufi says, until Kosovo is free.

Without pausing to consider the cost or the commitment, Albanians have opened their homes and hearts to nearly a quarter-million refugees who have arrived from Kosovo in the past 13 days. In doing so, Europe's poorest nation – an otherwise beautiful country blighted by poverty, lawlessness and the legacy of an austere communist past – has addressed a major humanitarian crisis more quickly and effectively than some of the wealthiest nations in the world.

According to the Albanian Information Ministry, more than 130,000 refugees have found shelter in the homes of Albanians. The government estimates that there are 122,000 refugees in the northern Albanian border town of Kukes, 32,000 sleeping in tents or fields. An astonishing 90,000 have been welcomed into local homes – nearly five refugees for every resident of Kukes, a town with a normal population of 20,000.

Elsewhere in the country, 40,000 refugees have been put up in Albanian homes, and 70,000 are in tent cities or sports stadiums. And – unlike in neighboring Macedonia, where refugees have been shunned by both the government and the population – every day more Albanians show up at shelters to volunteer a place in their modest homes.

"It is part of our tradition," said Ardjan Musliu, spokesman for the Albanian Socialist Party and a member of parliament. "And, also, we have blood relations with the Kosovars."

Albanians share language, religion and culture with the refugees from Kosovo. Yet, along with that deep identification there is an innate generosity here, a willingness to cut a loaf of bread into 20 slices if there are 20 who are hungry.

The pictures of a ragged, traumatized mass crossing the border haunted Isufi. The image resonated with his family history. As an 11-year-old girl, Isufi's mother, along with thousands of other Albanians, was expelled from Greece, and she spoke often of the ordeal.

"We know what suffering is," Isufi said. He said he remembers stories, recounted with pride, that during World War II, Albania had sheltered Jews from Italy.

Isufi has told the Hazhius that they can stay with him until the war ends and they are able to return to Kosovo, which is their fervent wish.

"This is a good place," said Edmond Hazhiu, 27, who fled the Kosovo city of Pec with his parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and brothers. The Hazhiu family had lived for five centuries in Pec, a clan of carpenters going back generations. They were driven from their home by Yugoslav and Serbian security forces.

Jafur Duda, 60, owns a small hotel in Tirana, Albania's capital. It has 16 rooms, and he has turned over five of them, rent free, to three refugee families.

"I have not received any aid from the state, and I don't want any," said Duda, who also is feeding the families and using the hotel's laundry service to clean their clothes. "A great injustice is happening, and we have to help. I am sure that in America if there was such a catastrophe you would help each other. We are no different."

Because of family ties linking Kosovo and Albania, some expelled families had relatives here. Myrtezaj Rodoni fled to Albania in 1962 after spending seven years in Yugoslav jails for advocating independence for Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians outnumbered Serbs 9 to 1. After NATO began bombing, he lived in fear for the fate of his cousins in Pec. A week ago, they called him from Maminas, a town 20 miles from Tirana. He immediately hired a truck to bring them to his home in the capital; now, 18 cousins, ages 2 to 77, have squeezed into a three-bedroom apartment with Rodoni's family of six.

"I will keep them until they go to their own houses again," said Rodoni, 69, a retired elementary school teacher. "It's a strain, but we will share our last piece of bread. We and the Kosovars are the same people, the same blood. If they are in Albania, they must be with us."

Of course, not every Albanian is a humanitarian.

When the Hazhius reached Morina Pass, the principal border crossing into Albania from Kosovo, Emin Hazhiu, 56, was feeling faint and nauseated. Two other relatives also were on the verge of collapse. The area around the border crossing, a high, green plateau, was crowded with refugees, and there was a long line waiting to board buses to continue the journey.

A private taxi driver with a small bus offered to take the family the 18 miles to the local town of Kukes, but he insisted on a $60 fee, fleecing the family of the last of its money.

And in Vlore, the center of illegal alien smuggling from Albania to Italy, criminals who use powerboats to cross the Adriatic Sea at night have raised their price from $400 per person to nearly $900 for the Kosovo refugees, according to reports here.

But kindness has a thousand faces here – from the doctors treating the sick in stadium dressing rooms to senior citizens making sandwiches for the displaced.

Marinela Lika, 20, a student in Tirana, went to a refugee camp at a city park with five other students to find young women from Kosovo to take out for a stroll and some coffee. "They are so confined in this place," she said. "This is a small way of showing our solidarity with their suffering."

Such gestures will be long remembered, said Valdet Nila, 35, whose family of seven is living in two rooms at Duda's hotel. "I can't find the words to describe how thankful I am," he said. "One day we will do something good for this kindness."