CHICAGO The war in Kosovo left traumatized civilians on both sides, some of whom suffer depression, anxiety and other disorders more often associated with combat-weary soldiers, a study said on Tuesday.
Forty-three percent of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo surveyed in the months after the war ended in June 1999 showed symptoms of psychiatric illness, according to researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Their findings were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study found that few ethnic Albanian Kosovars escaped the horrors of war.
More than 60 percent of those surveyed reported running out of food or water in the conflict, being caught in the fighting or coming close to being killed.
More than 25 percent said that a friend or family member had been murdered, and nearly half the ethnic Albanians said they had been tortured or abused.
Fully 39 percent of those surveyed reported being repeatedly traumatized.
One alarming result of the study was that an overwhelming majority of both men and women reported hating Serbs, with 43 percent reporting they wanted to revenge the suffering they had experienced.
Of those who felt a desire for revenge, 44 percent of the men and 33 percent of women said they would definitely act on that desire.
The study also found that 17 percent of ethnic Albanians surveyed met the Criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition more often associated with soldiers. The elderly were most vulnerable to mental illness.
A second study, this one of 204 ethnic Serbs still living in Kosovo, found the Serbs scored even higher than the ethnic Albanians on measures of social dysfunction and severe depression.
In addition, the study found more than one out of 10 Serbs aged 60 or older was undernourished, most likely because they were too weak to care for themselves and family members may have fled.
About half the prewar population of 200,000 ethnic Serbs in Kosovo had fled to Serbia as of late last year, according to the study, also published in the journal.
The United Nations and NATO-led peacekeepers took over responsibility for Kosovo in June 1999 after NATO bombing forced Serb forces to end a bloody campaign of ethnic cleansing and withdraw from the region.
Similar studies have been performed on people in war-torn Bosnia and on Cambodian refugees in Thailand and the United States.
They also showed high rates of psychiatric problems among victims of war, persecution and violence.
"The high rates of poor mental health status among those internally displaced and refugees who have returned to Kosovo also raises concern for the mental health status of those who remain in countries of asylum and resettlement," wrote researcher Barbara Lopes Cardozo, who led the survey of the Albanians.
Joseph Westermeyer of the University of Minnesota wrote in an accompanying editorial that "These studies ... point to the next step: The need to design and implement effective rapid interventions to reduce the acute and chronic psychosocial consequences of armed conflict for all survivors." (Reuter)