In July 1998, a week after bombing stopped, a delegation of key staff headed by CAMBA Executive Director, Joanne M. Oplustil, Board President, Beverly Morris and Director of Refugee Services, Eileen Reilly, traveled to Macedonia and Kosovo to expedite the processing of refugees who needed asylum in the US. CAMBA had previously assisted over a thousand Albanian Kosovar New Yorkers to file affidavits of relationships on behalf of their relatives, who as a result of the war became refugees in Macedonia.
Because of the rapid escalation of refugee crisis, there were no sufficient resources or practical operational systems in place to find and track the location of individual refugees approved by the USRP among the hundreds of thousands of fleeing Kosovars. CAMBA staff, in cooperation with IOM, went from camp to camp on the Macedonian Kosovo border to locate and expedite the processing of refugees headed to CAMBA.
As a result of these efforts, we successfully reunited and resettled over eight hundred refugees with their local relatives in New York City in a three month period during the summer of 1998.