Word: kosovo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Burying the past "Welcome to Kosovo," Dani said, once we were in his rickety red 1997 Volkswagen, heading toward Ferizaj. An early dusting of snow covered the foothills near Pristina, and Kosovo stood on the verge both of important elections and a potential declaration of nationhood. Since 1999, some of the best hopes of this 4,203 sq. mi. (10,887 sq km) territory have been on hold, as it remains legally a part of Serbia, while being administered by the U.N. The same ethnic divisions and territorial disputes that fueled the 1999 war still linger, as do the international...
Little by little, I began to ask about his situation. He had fled with his mother and three younger sisters from Ferizaj, a town of 70,000 located 25 miles (40 km) south of Kosovo's capital, Pristina. They moved from village to village in southern Kosovo before taking a train to the Macedonian border, and then an all-night bus to Senokos. When he brought me to his family's tent, his mother showed me one of the few keepsakes she'd managed to grab before fleeing: Dani's seventh-grade class photo. Her son, she told me proudly...
...month later, though, I would find out in the most unlikely way that Dani was indeed back home - and doing just fine. On Nov. 23, 1999, I stumbled upon this passage in an Associated Press article about President Bill Clinton's one-day visit to celebrate victory in Kosovo: "An eighth-grader, Ramadan Ilazi, introduced Clinton, making his first visit to Kosovo since the war ended in June. 'You promised that you will bring us to our homes safe. You kept your promise,' the boy said ... " In the silence of my office, I let out something between a gasp...
...attention and that of the world at large shifted away from his would-be nation's struggles, I never forgot Dani. A photo that I'd snapped of him holding his class picture in the tent in Macedonia still hung above my desk. In October, as the question of Kosovo's destiny became more and more acute, I tracked Dani down again, eager to know what had become of him and his homeland at this watershed moment in history. Stepping through the sliding glass doors at Pristina airport, I spotted that same giant smile I knew from eight years earlier...
...shoulder blades is a large tattoo of a snake and the initials E.I.S., for the words "Ethnic Identity Sucks." Though the entire Serb minority fled Ferizaj after the war, Dani has met many Serbs at youth conferences elsewhere in the Balkans. He'd also traveled in Serb villages in Kosovo right after the war while interpreting for U.S. troops, and he saw one old woman who'd just been badly beaten by local Albanians. "This land we have fought over is not any of ours," he says. "The universe is the owner...