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Kosovo refugees line up outside Skopje's police headquarters to obtain temporary residence permits  ALSO Clinton: Yugo compliance is 'illusion' Yeltsin warns of possible world war over Kosovo Serbs reportedly planting land mines to create Kosovo 'no man's land' Britain says Milosevic 'feeling the heat'  MESSAGE BOARD Crisis in Kosovo RELATED VIDEO CNN's Lucia Newman looks at Havana's reaction to the prospect of Kosovo refugees being sent to the U.S. Navy base on Cuban soil. (April 8) Windows Media 28K 80K

Officials say many prefer to stay in region

April 9, 1999
Web posted at: 10:23 a.m. EDT (1023 GMT)

In this story: Situation has changed Door open to volunteers RELATED STORIES, SITES

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A plan to use the U.S. naval base in Cuba to provide temporary shelter for 20,000 Kosovo refugees may be scrapped because many refugees want to remain in the region and international relief efforts have improved their living conditions, Clinton administration officials say.

Earlier in the week, U.S. military planners said they expected the first wave of refugees -- a group of about 300 or 400 -- to arrive in Cuba Friday.

"It's possible it won't happen," said J. Brian Atwood, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development and chairman of the President's Council of Humanitarian Relief for Kosovo.

The heat at Guantanamo and the base's long distance from the Balkans made it a last resort to be avoided if possible, U.S. officials have said.

"We want to keep people in the region. We want to prepare the people to return to their homes. It will be a lot easier to undertake that if they are in the region," Atwood said.

Atwood said the proposal to use the Guantanamo base was first made last Tuesday, when thousands of Kosovo Albanians faced an extraordinarily difficult humanitarian situation.

Situation has changed

Atwood says refugees streaming out of Kosovo are traumatized 374K/24 sec. AIFF or WAV sound

The situation has changed since then, Atwood said, as tens of thousands of desperate refugees have been transferred out of the no man's land along the Kosovo-Albanian border.

Living conditions in the border camps have also improved somewhat, due to international relief efforts, he said.

But the problem remains serious, Atwood cautioned.

About 140,000 refugees now in northern Albania are "in bad condition (with) respiratory diseases and diarrheal diseases," he said.

"More importantly," he told CNN, "they've been terribly traumatized by the brutality that they've faced. We've seen people whose families were executed (and) watched as their homes burned."

Door open to volunteers

Atwood said the United States is still prepared to take people into Guantanamo but will do so only if there are volunteers. He added that many of the refugees apparently would prefer to remain closer to home.

At the Pentagon, Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Wald told reporters Thursday that the Guantanamo base was ready to receive Kosovo refugees. But no final decision had been made to fly any there, he added.

The Cuban government, while condemning NATO military action against Yugoslavia, said it has no objection to use of Guantanamo as a refugee haven and also offered to cooperate in providing assistance.

If no refugees are sent to Guantanamo, it could mean that none would come to the United States at all.

Earlier this decade, the base was used for refugees from Haiti and later from Cuba.

In 1995, the administration decided to resettle the Cubans in the United States out of concern about a violent uprising by the many Cubans unhappy with their situation on Guantanamo.

Officials have said there is no chance that any Kosovo refugees sent to the base will be allowed to settle on the U.S. mainland.

Senior White House Correspondent Wolf Blitzer, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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