Members of the Dartmouth Kosovo Refugee Fund lit the Green with hundreds of candles last night in an effort to raise awareness about the conflict in Yugoslavia, and to show support for Kosovar refugees.
Student members lined the candles, purchased partly with the funds raised from the Candles for Kosovo project, along the paths running across the Green at 8 p.m. last night as other students passed by.
"I feel that to an extent it's almost like a responsibility," Becky Lee '01, one of the founders of the Dartmouth Kosovo Refugee Fund, said. "I'm doing this because if I were in the situation of the Kosovar refugees, I'd hope that someone would do something like this for me."
Throughout the past week, the Candles for Kosovo project, sponsored by the Dartmouth Kosovo Refugee Fund, garnered more than $2,500 from students, faculty members and community residents during mealtimes at Thayer Dining Hall and the Collis Center.
The minimum contribution was $2, and at least 1,000 people contributed to the fund.
The money raised from this fund will be sent to the Kosovar refugees through the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, Lee said.
"They will be using it to supply food, medicine, shelter and anything else the refugees need," Lee said.
Jesse Cook-Dubin '01 came up with the idea of Candles for Kosovo.
He said when he was first contacted via BlitzMail by Student Assembly President Josh Green '00 about Kosovo, he searched the Internet for information on what was happening.
"What I found were a bunch of websites," he said. "I started to look at the pictures. The pictures I saw were of people being herded on and off trains, people in tatters."
He said the pictures were reminiscent of ones he had seen of the Holocaust.
"As someone who has said 'we will never forget what happened in the Holocaust,' I could not stand by without at least trying to do something for these people, even if that only meant raising awareness," he said.
The Dartmouth Refugee Fund contacted other universities that had planned similar events, which were also held last night.
Yale University held "Candles for Kosovo" and Princeton University sponsored a political statement that featured flashlights called "Yugoslavia: Bridges to Understanding."
Dartmouth's Candles For Kosovo, however, is not a political statement, Lee said.
"We're trying to help people who need our help," she said.
She said she hopes that the event itself and student discussions resulting from it will raise awareness and support for the situation in Kosovo.
