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PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Nov 21 (AFP) -- Hundreds of new-born babies in Kosovo face a winter of cold and hardship if maternity wards are not equipped with basic facilities soon, the executive director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) Nafis Sadik warned during a visit here this weekend.
Kosovo has Europe's highest infant mortality rates -- officially 35 per 1,000 births, but experts fear it could be closer to 54. The situation is being aggravated by the lack of heating, inadequate water supplies and broken windows in many clinics, Sadik said.
But Olivier Brasseur, a UNFPA representative in Kosovo, said the problem could be solved in just 15 days and with 1.5 million dollars if all international groups coordinated their efforts.
In Pristina hospital women have to "trudge up five flights of stairs when they are in labour and bleeding" because the lift to the maternity ward does not work, said Sadik, who arrived here Thursday for a four-day visit.
Brasseur said hospital staff often had to work in "difficult if not to say heroic conditions in rooms with temperatures at just six degrees centigrade."
In the maternity ward of Srbica in the central Drenica region, one of the areas worst hit by the conflict between Serbs and ethnic Albanians, doctors often have to deliver babies by candle light, said Dr Osman Veliqi.
Women are frequently sent home one or two hours after giving birth as the hospital is too cold to stay in, he said.
On Saturday Sadik visited a ward in Srbica heated by a tiny wood stove supplied by a Western charity where four mothers slept on plastic covered mattresses with only their own coats as covers.
While the problems mainly stem from 10 years of neglect after Belgrade scrapped the Serbian province's autonomy, the situation worsened in the March-June war which deprived many pregnant women of adequate nutrition, swelling the number of premature births.
The UNFPA delivered three ultra-sound scanners to Pristina maternity clinic on Monday, but many hospitals outside the provincial capital are in dire need of basics such as stethoscopes and heaters.
The primitive conditions also take their toll on mothers, who have the highest maternal death rate in Europe at 24 per 100,000 births.
The UNFPA's mandate does not cover repairing the general infrastructure of the hospitals in which the maternity wards are located, so numerous organisations will have to work in tandem to tackle their share of the problem at the same time.
"I am going to make a strong case for simple health systems which will give a clear amelioration," said Sadik.
She said that while the UNFPA usually supplied equipment directly linked to maternity wards, hospitals need washing machines more urgently than hi-tech hardware which the local staff might not be qualified to use.
Rizah Malaj, head of the Skenderaj maternity ward, said he had incubators but that he and Veliqi -- the only two doctors delivering around 30 babies a week -- were afraid of harming the infants by using them wrongly.
Ethnic Albanians were largely denied the opportunity to upgrade their skills during the last 10 years, he said.
Despite the spartan conditions in Srbica, it is an improvement for Veliqi. He spent a whole year in the mountains after being driven from his home by Serbian forces in mid-1998 and delivered more than 100 babies in the open air.
"I had good luck, all the babies and women lived. Our women are very strong," he said.