Medicine International

These are the faces of war that haunt Dr. Mark Stinson: the silent stares of infants who have gone days without mothers' milk; the anguished brows of parents who lost children in the pell-mell panic of escape; the pained lips of women, telling and retelling how their men were marched off to unknown dates by Serb soldiers. Stinson, 41, returned Friday from nearly two weeks in Albania, where he worked with Relief International to provide medical help to tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians fleeing the war in Kosovo. As a supervising emergency room doctor at Contra Costa Regional Medical Center in Martinez, he deals daily in life's heartbreaking vicissitudes. The Oakland resident has traveled to other disaster zones, including Bosnia and Honduras. But he's never seen such wreckage from human cruelty a seething sea of humanity in utter distress, sans homes, sans loved ones, sans hope. "I started to cry," Stinson recalled. "I'm a tough guy. I've seen a lot." But, he added, "These people were so innocent. They had nothing. They were so far from home, and the situation seemed hopeless." Mothers unable to produce milk fed infants strained porridge. "These people cared for them so much, and there was nothing they could do. If we had known, we would have tried to bring powdered formula. But we had no idea." Time and again he was given the universal sign for slaughter, a hand slicing across a neck, by untold survivors who said they witnessed others getting throats slashed and skulls crushed by Serbian soldiers. Stinson arrived shortly after NATO began bombing Yugoslavia and the forced exodus of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. He brought with him $10,000 in donated medical supplies. In Albania, Stinson helped set up a tent clinic, began a measles vaccination program and worked on a sanitation project. Two other colleagues from the medical center, which often sends physicians abroad on humanitarian missions, are now volunteering in Albania.

The refugees, who escaped with little more than the clothes covering their bodies, wore stunned expressions. They huddled on the side of roads, in unfinished schools, stadiums and even public swimming pools emptied of water. Some had mats to sleep on. Others lay on the bare concrete. "They had the 1,000-mile stare," Stinson said. "There were women, children and old men and old women." Missing were young and middle-age men. He traveled through different provinces of Albania, a nation of abject poverty, of dangerously pothole-pocked highways and incomplete building projects a country now absorbing a flood of refugees. Stinson arrived in the capital city of Tirana, in the central part of the country. He moved through other cities, Durres, Berat and Kukes, a border town of 20,000 that swelled to 100,000. He encountered convoys of buses, taxis, dump trucks all carrying refugees and thousands of tales of heartbreak and horror.

At each stop, Stinson heard, over and over, stories now familiar in the Western media: People ordered out of towns, stripped of identity papers and dignity. Those allowed to take vehicles had their automobile licenses removed. "These were people who were stripped of identity so whoever ends up governing Kosovo, presumably, the Serbs, they'll say, There is no proof you are from Kosovo. Go back to Albania."

Stinson, like the refugees he encountered, firmly believes NATO's attack on Yugoslavia is the right policy. The refugees did not blame NATO or the United States for their plight. Indeed, he said, they told him ethnic Albanians in western Kosovo had been expelled from their homes long before bombs began dropping. In the end, the physician is not disheartened by the atrocities occurring in Kosovo. He considers that the handiwork of a small cadre of hate warriors, not the majority of Serbs. And, paradoxically, it is those with so little hope that gave him the most hope. The refugees, stripped of all they knew, continued to care for each other and hold up under ineffable suffering. "The people were so strong," said Stinson, lanky and upbeat in his green scrubs late Friday noon. He was about to begin a 10-your shift, just hours after landing at San Francisco International Airport. "They were able to live in plastic tents. These are tough people. It shows me the resiliency of people." Just before Stinson left Albania, humanitarian food rations began arriving from the United States. Previously, the refugees were subsisting on bread alone. "Sometimes," the physician said, "we would hear them say, Thank you, America."