INTERVIEWER: Did you have any special task that you were performing or were you just helping out in any way you .....

PRYOR: At first I was a little bit depressed because I felt like I was in everyone's way. I felt like they didn't quite know what to do with me, and the group that I was associated with -- I went over there by myself, but I was a volunteer with, as I said the International Rescue Committee. And I would go in each morning and every time I would go in, the office was growing by leaps and bounds. It went from about 4 people to about 75 - 80 people by the time I left in just a matter of 3 or 4 weeks. We were hiring contractors to go out to the camps. We were dealing with doctors who were going out and establishing temporary clinics.

That's actually what I ended up doing, is helping a group of wonderful people from the United States. They call themselves the Flying Doctors of America, and they're fabulous. Most of them were from the Atlanta area, and they were 7 doctors, I believe and 2 nurses. And we got from the International Rescue Committee a couple vans and a couple drivers and 2 translators from Albania, who knew the territory. We would go out each day and set up a clinic in one of the camps. It was kind of my responsibility cause I had been to those camps previously to negotiate with so-called the leaders of the camps and those people who had responsibility for security in the refugee camps, to allow these doctors and these nurses to set up their clinics.

INTERVIEWER: So was this....what were they trying to help with. Was it malnourishment........

PRYOR: Everything. It was not so much malnourishment. Not only was it mental, a lot of it was mental, but there were a lot of small children. Very few men from age, let's say 20 to 50. Very few men in that category. Mostly women and children and old men and older women in these camps. They had special needs. The needs that any elderly population would have, or any young population. There was some malnourishment I think, with some of the very smaller children, and all these doctors had sufficient medicines that they had brought from the United States - donated, I might add from hospitals and HMO's in the Atlanta region to the group, the Flying Doctors of America. They left some of these medications behind.

We also found a Lutheran organization right at the last that we felt we could leave the leftover medicines with. It was over $100,000 worth of medicine that they had brought with them from the States to Albania. And in the process of establishing the proper people to leave the medications and medicines with - antibiotics and et cetera. We wanted to make sure that these medications would not get into the black market or into the wrong hands, so we had to pick and choose and sort of interview people along the way because they could not go - they wouldn't want to go back to the United States and take all the medication with them. All the medications, I should say, with them.

INTERVIEWER: Did you hear stories of brutality and barbaric treatment from these refugees you were working with?

PRYOR: I heard it every day. And one story that I have related in private and public was a woman, probably in her early 50's, who had a young daughter, who is evidently 19, 20, 21, along in there, who had been raped. She said all I want - she was forced to watch her daughter raped by the Serbs. And she says "All I want to do now is sit in the corner and cry."

The barbarism was so ferocious and so brutal that its hard to imagine how people - how humans can do this to other humans. But this is a process of warfare. This is a part of warfare that has been practiced for many generations. And it is something that is - especially in the area of rape or sexual molestation of females that it is of great disadvantage, I would say, to say the least, to have had even a relationship with a man before marriage, and not to have been a virgin at the time of marriage and the Serbs would force entire villages to watch mass or gang rapes take place. And we heard this constantly, and what this was, was a ploy. It was a way to divide families. It was a way to divide communities. It was a way to demoralize populations. And they do this.

Another young man that I had the opportunity to interview through translators, and we put his message down in a computer, hoping that Amnesty International and others will take care to look at stories like this. He was taken from his school. He was 16, and he - they called him up in front of the entire school. The moved the whole student body outside. They put a gun in his mouth in front of everyone else, and they say "Ok, now you will dress yourself in a Serb uniform, and you will swear allegiance to Milosevic." And in the process of doing so, thank goodness, a NATO bomb or a NATO tank had come close by and fortunately had broken up the crowd, and everyone had kind of fled.

But the young men and women from the school were put into trucks, and they were being taken to the Kosovo border. And before they got there they were stopped or something, and they all jumped out and ran through the woods for 4 or 5 days. They were separated from their families and they didn't know if their mothers and their dads back in Kosovo were alive. Nor did they know in Albania if their children had survived.

But we helped from time to time, place people who were lost, with their families. And to sort of re-engage them and reunite them so to speak as family units. International Red Cross did a good job, under the circumstances, trying to do this. But you've got to remember that the burden was so tremendous that hundreds of thousands of refugees coming across the border in Macedonia, and into Kosovo. And many times had been split away from their families. They did not have any idea if their loved ones or their family members were still alive. And still today I think, they're going through - I keep reading stories about mass graves and digging up members of their family, and still it's a remembrance of the brutalities of war. And it was a sad time.

I tell you, whether people believed our involvement in that war was correct or not, whether the bombing was correct or not, I myself, think that is a question for another generation perhaps even to answer. I think it was right, myself. And I think we could not continue to look the other way, and to have these barbaric acts take place. But my trip to Albania, even though I may not have helped very many - there may have been one or two across that time period of three or four weeks that maybe I did help.

I just got a letter from one of our translates the other day. It arrived in Little Rock. I don't know if I liked it or not - she referred to me as her grandfather. She was Albanian, and she thanked me for coming. And I'm going to frame that letter. That was nice. And she also made mention of the doctors - the Flying Doctors of America, the International Rescue Committee assisted in going through the countryside. That's an association that for the rest of my life that I will never forget.

Now I'll tell you another great thing - there's sort of an international group of people out there, when there is a disaster, they show up. They just drop what they're doing. They may be doctors or lawyers or they may be well-diggers, they may be geologists, or whatever. But they drop whatever they're doing and they'll show up in Albania. They'll show up after the hurricane season, into these disaster areas to assist and to give of themselves and they truly live a life of fulfillment.

I roomed with a couple from Australia. A man, a doctor, who had been a doctor, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins. And his wife, Christina, who was Australian. She was educated in Australia as a physician. And the two of them, they go all around the world. They go to Cypres, and they've been to Honduras, and you name it, and they've been there. And they were in Albania. And they go out into places that most people would not dare to go, and try to prevent disease. They try to really make certain that the waste from the refugee camps is properly disposed of, and things of that nature - not to cause - not to allow disease to occur. So those people I hope someday will have a special star in their crown, and I think they will.

INTERVIEWER: You might tell that story - you know you and I talked yesterday. I understood you to say that the Serbs sometimes split families, they'd take the children maybe to the Kosovo border and the mother and father maybe to the Albanian border or something, so they could never find each other. You might tell that one cause that was a weapon of war...

PRYOR: A weapon of war that was employed by the Serbs, and I must say effectively. Because of the mass exodus from Kosovo, many of the times the Serbs would make a point and putting everyone in the trucks in the villages. They would separate the families. They would send one family to the Macedonian border, and one family to the Kosovo border and make 'em get out and walk the last 3 or 4 miles. They would separate these families, and thus it would add to the confusion. It would add also a tremendous burden of the International Red Cross trying to relocate families. And it would take armies of people trying to match the families back up, and it was once again a weapon of war. It was a weapon of war and a way of creating division, and a way of creating chaos. A way of creating confusion, and it was a horrifying experience.

I know I've worked several times going to international rescue - International Red Cross committeee in Toronto, sometimes usually every 2 or 3 days, trying to unite a woman with her 2 children who were in Macedonia, but she did not know if they had got to Macedonia. She did not know if they were alive, there was no way for the computers to match up people we didn't have that system. And to this day - I left before I ever knew if she was ever united with her 2 children. She had pictures of them.

Ultimately I think Bill Gates and a group of people - he sent a group over there - a huge team of people, in order to devise a computer system with pictures of people,parents and children, and try to show them in the camps, in an attempt to reunite families, but it was a real weapon of war that was used effectively.

INTERVIEWER: Are there ways other than separating families that refugees can be used as weapons of war?

PRYOR: Well, the separation of families, that was used in - and I heard so many stories about that. Not only the gang rapes that took place in the villages, trying to ostrasize their own daughters from the rest of the communities, that occurred. Trying to demoralize psychologically the familiies and the communities out there because of their customs, also using - I think that Milosevic was pretty clever in using - in the bombing, the nightly bombings we did in Yugoslavia in Belgrade - I think he was pretty effective in using, almost human sheilds. And shielding say, secret military attachments and secret military anclaves right in populated areas.

I think the televsion stations in Belgrade were right in downtown Belgrade and they were very very centeralized with in the population, has population, the dense population areas I should say. But he used them and refugees themselves they would sit in those camps day after day and week after week and, with nothing to do and without ever knowing if their parents or their children or their brothers or sisters or uncles or whoever, were alive. That was a very demoralizing situation.

Too, refugees, several instenses there in Albania of young women being kidnaped from the refugee camps by groups and taken to Italy and taken to Greece and sold into prostitution. These were young girls, twelve, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years of age, and once again these were refugees and once again it was a - I don't know if it was a weapon of the Serbs or a weapon of war, but it was a result of what had happened with this maniacle desicion to try to cleanse Serbia of the ethnic Albanians.

Oddly enough, Albania may be cleansing itself the other way now. It may be cleansing itself of all the Serb population. Only time is going to tell that, but I don't think there is - I don't think there is a focused effort to cleanse the Serbs out of Albania as Milosevic had such a focus on cleansing -- I meant to say Kosovo. I think the focus to cleanse Kosovo of all ethnic Albanians to cleanse it and it was Hitleristic, it was almost identical to what Hitler was doing to the Jews and other races during the World War II era. But it took some pages from Hitler's book. But those people always over-reach, they always over-reach.

And they always never quite, or they never quite give the, especially the American public, quite enough credit. We will take so much and then we will do something. Sometimes we move quite late. But I think we moved, I think NATO moved, I think general Clark did a great job in facilitating a victory there with his troops. He had the respect of all those troops that I had any knowledge of in Albania, and I just - We all debate whether or not a superpower like America can keep doing things of this nature and intercede in events like this.

I guess I am getting older, but I think wherever there are barbaric acts against innocent people, especially children, I think the United States has to respond. The degree of response, that is a question. I think we were correct in this response and was glad I had a very, very small role in the refugee population until this was concluded.