Refugee Children's Drawings

Kosovar Refugee Children in Albania

www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9904/14/refugee.children/

Each day, 300 children at a refugee camp in Tirana come to a tent set up by UNICEF. They're asked to recreate in drawings what they've seen.

Refugee children draw pictures of what they've seen to help them deal with their trauma.
Mirela Kovaci, a teacher in Tirana, is trying to help children work through the pain of the present and find hope for the future. She has the children draw not only what they've seen, but also what they think their lives to come will look like.

Describing one of the drawings she says, "This is a tank, this is a dead person on the street. This is the future -- a school, a free country, you see NATO here in the middle between them."

Art of Kosovo – Refugee Children Depict Horrors of War

www.cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9905/22/kosovo.children.art/

TETOVO, Macedonia (CNN) -- As art imitates life, so it does death. In a Macedonian refugee camp, ethnic Albanian children who have been forced to flee Kosovo hauntingly illustrate atrocities taking place in their home province.

A refugee school administered by the United Nations at the camp has put together an exhibition of the students' work. The drawings and paintings reveal grisly scenes: attacking soldiers, burning houses, dead bodies.

One artist depicts his 79-year-old uncle, his body riddled with bullets.

Arcim drew a Serb policemen shooting his father in the neck. His home is ablaze. NATO Apache helicopters hover overhead, too high to help. The 12-year-old said he wants to become a Kosovo Liberation Army fighter to avenge his father's death.

Others recreated similar scenes of death and destruction. Selveta explained one of her works: "Burning houses in the village, and Serb tanks attacking them so we have to run away and spend our lives in other peoples' homes."

Dafina drew a forest, where she hid for almost a week after Serb soldiers kicked ethnic Albanians out of her village.

"There was nothing to eat or drink," said the young artist.

Serb forces have reportedly intensified attacks against ethnic Albanian rebels and civilians in Kosovo since NATO began airstrikes against the Serb-dominated Yugoslav federation in late March.

The Children's Bridge

Dr. Emil Tanay, Professor of Art at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, worked with displaced and refuge children throughout the war in the former Yugoslavia. His book, Heart in the Middle of the World documents his efforts to provide art instruction to both Muslim and Croatian children during those years. The images that Croatian and Muslim children created on their respective sides of the bridge in Mostar speak to the power of visual art to bridge differences among people. His observations suggest that continued art education is of value, even under even the most difficult circumstances.

The Psychology of Art

www.salon.com/mwt/feature/1999/06/04/art/

Traumatized by war, Kosovar children express their anger, fear and hope through art.

To one walking through this sprawling refugee camp just north of Macedonia's capital, Skopje, that chaos is not at all obvious. Children are squealing with laughter between the tents, jumping elastic tied around garbage cans and shooting hoops on makeshift basketball courts staked out in the mud. Some play elaborate hide-and-seek games between the tent ropes; others walk the paths, their arms linked, as though strolling through a Pristina park on a lazy weekend afternoon.

"They look happy, but underneath, it is something very different," says Zana Dobroshi who left her home in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, 18 years ago. Now a child psychiatrist at Case Western University in Cleveland.