Washington, D.C., April 12, 1999 --
The Voice of America's Albanian Service has received more than seven hours
of phone calls from Kosovar Albanians since beginning its Refugee Hotline
last Friday, April 9. On Sunday, April 11 the Service's program devoted
solely to the hotline was expanded to 30 minutes (1430 to 1500 UTC).
"We launched the Refugee Hotline
to make it easier for Kosovar Albanians to locate family members in this
chaotic expulsion from Kosovo," says Elez Biberaj, Chief of VOA's
Albanian Service. "By providing a phone number that they can call
and leave recorded messages, we hope to reunite families separated by the
sudden expulsion from their homes in Kosovo."
Calls continue to come in and are added to the material already received. Messages will be broadcast on the 30-minute Refugee Hotline program from 1430 to 1500 UTC.
In an earlier initiative, VOA's Albanian Service began to read on the air names provided by the International Red Cross so that Albanian refugees who had registered with the IRC could locate family members. This is another effort the Service is making to ease the plight of refugees in the region.
On March 24, VOA added 15 minutes of additonal programming in both Albanian and Serbian to provide in depth news coverage of the Kosovo crisis. On April 8, Broadcasting Board of Governors Chairman Marc Nathanson announced the start of a combined VOA-Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty 24-hour FM programming stream into Serbia.
The Voice of America broadcasts to the Balkans in Albanian, Bosnian, Croatian, English, Macedonian, Serbian, and Slovene. These are just seven of the 53 languages that VOA broadcasts to an estimated weekly worldwide audience of 83 million listeners.
Contact: George Mackenzie
Phone: (202) 619-2538