BALKAN CRISIS CLEANING WELLS IN KOSOVO
When Din Mehmeti returned to Kosovo earlier this summer after two months in Macedonia, he found his house in ruins and an alarming reek emanating from the well from which he and his family had always drawn their water.
Sadly, this is a common legacy of the recent conflict. Of the 20,000 wells in Kosovo, over half are believed to have been contaminated with animal or human remains or with rubbish, or have simply grown stagnant through lack of use. With many rural communities totally dependent on them for their water supply, wells are an important symbol of self-reliance.
For Din Mehmeti and his neighbours, however, there was another nagging concern: two people from the village were missing; the fear was that their bodies had been thrown down the well, as had all too often happened in other villages.
Water and sanitation engineer Glen Hanna, who heads the ICRC's well-sanitizing operation in Kosovo, confirms that their fears were well-founded. "We have taken bodies out of wells on occasion. In addition to our immediate goal -- which is obviously to clean the wells -- this allows the victims' families to bury their loved ones. And naturally we help the people relying on the contaminated wells to find alternative water sources until clean water can be drawn from them again."
The well-sanitizing team that came to Din Mehmeti's village that day arrived with a generator, a pump and a rig to lower one of its members into the well. With a protective suit and face mask covering his entire body, he went down the meter-wide shaft to a depth of about five metres. The assembled crowd watched anxiously and covered their noses against the stench released as the water was churned below. Eventually the smell's source -- the carcass of a farm animal -- was hoisted up. The well was subsequently pumped out and disinfected.
There were mixed feelings at the discovery of what lay at the bottom of the well: relief, on the one hand, but also renewed sadness that the men are still missing, with no information on their whereabouts.
There were also thanks for the team who perform this unsavoury but vital work. Since January this year the ICRC has cleaned over 1,700 wells in Kosovo. "We can do about 100 a week at the moment", says Glen Hanna. "Our aim is to restore people's pre-war water supply. We hope to expand our teams so we can double the rate at which we sanitize the wells. We want to give people quicker access to safe water."
Further information: Daloni Carlisle, ICRC Pristina, tel.: ++ 381 63 344 164 Amanda Williamson, ICRC Geneva, tel.: ++ 41 22 730 2678
New on the ICRC's public server (http://www.icrc.org):
- Fact sheets -- all dated August 1999 -- on the organization's activities in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Liberia, Somalia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and Uganda.
- Fact sheets -- all dated August 1999 -- on the work of ICRC regional delegations in Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa.
For any information you may need on Thursday 9 September (holiday) or on the weekend of 11-12 September, please call the press officer on duty Suzanne Berger, on (mobile) 41 79 217 32 37