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For the Kosovars Lacking Homes, Not Enough Aid

Serbs expelled them from this little village near Pristina on March 9. For the past six weeks, the 10 members of the Sllamniku family have been living in a tent they brought back with them from a refugee camp in Albania.

They have no furniture of any kind, just a few filthy cushions, some plastic dishes and cheap utensils. The Sllamniku family's possessions are gone, stolen or burned.

But with the first chills of Kosovo's long and miserable winter just two months away, Ali Sllamniku has given up on getting reconstruction help from the Western powers that drove the Serbs out of Kosovo. Borrowing from friends, he has scraped together the $2,300 he needed to buy the timber and roof tiles to shore up the shelter.

''Tell the Serbs, 'The Albanians are building again!''' his brother, Hashim, shouted, picking up a corner of the flag.

But not enough are, and not quickly enough, because the money, the materials and the promised aid are not here.

From 300,000 to 400,000 people in Kosovo do not have homes that are habitable and ready for winter, said Dennis McNamara, the regional head of the United Nations' refugee agency.

While it is unlikely that many will freeze to death, the United Nations also is unlikely to meet its goal of having at least one warm, dry room for every Albanian family, officials now admit. A recent UN internal report called shelter the ''greatest challenge.''

Aid officials are scrambling to find winterized tents and host families and to rehabilitate buildings for collective housing where the most vulnerable people can live until the spring.

''This is a real race now with the winter,'' said Dan Philpott, the field manager in Pec for Goal, an Irish agency working to rehabilitate houses and schools. ''The Albanians are adaptable and have a marvelous spirit. But I don't think the penny has dropped with the international decision-makers about what we will face in the winter.''

The nations that banded together to fight the war in Kosovo are entwined in the inevitable problems of bureaucracy, rivalry, staffing, funding, logistics and politics.

In Pec, the city with the most damaged housing, and the surrounding towns of Istok and Klina, only the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has begun any emergency work. The Americans are still signing letters of intent with their aid agency, and the Europeans, one local official said, ''haven't done anything at all.''

The quick end to the war surprised many officials and aid workers, who were thinking about how to get the refugees through the winter in camps across the border. The desire of the Albanians to return to Kosovo as quickly as possible also seemed to surprise the officials, whose admonitions to remain in the camps were ignored.

More than 740,000 Albanians poured back by the end of July, straining every unvandalized or unbombed resource, from water to electricity to telephones.

''There was a massive movement of population,'' Mr. McNamara said. ''We have a massive challenge ahead of us, and we're talking about two months, just 60 days.''

Emergency shelter kits of plastic, window frames and tools, promised and designed early on, are very slow to arrive and also are now considered inadequate. The United Nations has distributed the partial shelter kits to only 3,600 families. At least 40,000 more kits are expected, but no one knows when.

The agency has ordered at least 15,000 winterized tents with stoves and 30,000 wood-burning stoves. But given the paucity of good roads and trucks, the likely time span between orders and delivery is worrying everyone.

Matters were made worse by problems with customs and duties at the Macedonian border, just resolved Friday after the Macedonians gave up their demand for a $350 ''inspection fee'' for all trucks and rail cars carrying assistance.

Extensive surveys of buildings in Kosovo, completed only at the end of July, showed considerably more damage than had been estimated.

The survey showed severe damage to 67,326 buildings, compared with an estimate of 28,346 made in December, after a harsh summer offensive by the Serbs but before the three-month bombing war that began in March. A European Union survey of 1,383 villages found damage to 120,000 homes, with 78,000 severely damaged or destroyed.