Thursday, June 17, 1999

Using Phone Books, Scholars Build a Data Base for Resettling Kosovars By KELLY McCOLLUM As ethnic Albanians return to their homes in Kosovo, they may encounter yet another hardship -- re-establishing themselves in a country where many official records have been destroyed. The phone books will help "in resolving the inevitable disputes about property and inheritance, and -- very importantly -- drawing up electoral rolls for the first postwar elections," says one scholar. A group of American scholars may be able to help. They are compiling a digital data base of information from Yugoslav telephone directories, which they say may be the best way for Kosovar refugees to lay claim to the homes -- and identities -- that were theirs before the war. According to news accounts, many ethnic-Albanian Kosovars were forced to give up their proof of identification when they were driven out of Kosovo by the Yugoslav government. An op-ed essay by Sadako Ogata, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, says that "Yugoslav authorities have made a well-organized effort to erase the identity, and thus the residency and return rights, of Yugoslavia's ethnic Albanian citizens." By depriving Albanians of their identification, says Andras Riedlmayer, bibliographer at Harvard University's Fine Arts Library, "the government can say that there's no proof that they ever lived there." Now, he says, the refugees "are going back into a country where tens of thousands of people are missing, more thousands of people are dead, property has been destroyed, and so have all the records." Information contained in the phone books "will help not only in helping them settle back in, but in resolving the inevitable disputes about property and inheritance, and -- very importantly -- drawing up electoral rolls for the first postwar elections." Mr. Riedlmayer is on a board of scholars overseeing the gathering of the phone books and the creation of the data base, which will be put on a CD-ROM. News reports indicate that Kosovo's official archives may have been vandalized or destroyed, says another member of the board, Janet Crayne, a librarian at the University of Michigan who specializes in south-Slavic issues. Recent census data, although available, are unreliable, she adds, because many Kosovars boycotted the census to protest government oppression. Once the data base is ready, it will be made available to the organizations that are helping refugees to resettle. "It's really fairly primitive," says Ms. Crayne. "Someone would say, 'I was a resident of Pristina in 1988 at this address.' If they looked it up in the phone book under Pristina, they would see that this person had this address." People who had no telephones -- a large proportion in some areas of Kosovo -- could corroborate their addresses by naming neighbors who do appear in the directories. But collecting and processing phone books take time. So far the project has collected more than 20 directories for various regions of Yugoslavia, from 1968 to the present, but many holes remain to be filled. The books have been donated by university libraries and individuals, mostly from the United States, says Ms. Crayne. "The problem with finding telephone books," says Mr. Riedlmayer, "is that everybody throws them out when they don't use them anymore." Tracking down copies of the books within Yugoslavia, he adds, would be difficult because of the chaos caused by the war. Processing of the data is being handled largely by Norman Ross Publishing Inc., a microfilm company based in New York City, which is donating its time and resources to the effort. The phone books must be photographed on microfilm, scanned into a computer, and then proofread by people familiar with Albanian names and geography. Company employees handle some of the work; the president, Mr. Ross, recruited two ethnic-Albanian employees of a restaurant around the corner from his office to help check the data. Work on the data base could be completed by the end of the year, Mr. Riedlmayer says, although information from additional phone books will need to be added as they are found. Refugees are returning to Kosovo quickly, but the resettlement process -- and the need for identifications -- will continue for years, he notes. The phone books may have other uses that are not as immediate, says Ms. Crayne. They provide information about various ethnic communities within Yugoslavia that sociologists could use to analyze the events of the past decade. While the data base will concentrate on phone-book information from Kosovo, the scholars are gathering a wider range of materials that will provide information about all of Yugoslavia. "People are trying desperately to find out why this thing happened in the first place," she says of the Yugoslav government's ethnic-cleansing campaign. "In order to do that, they would like to try to interview people who were members of the same community, and find out what kind of information they had."