Word: kosovo
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Back in the spring of 1999, Ramadan Ilazi was among the nearly 1 million ethnic Albanians forced to flee Serb ruler Slobodan Milosevic's attempt to "cleanse" them from Kosovo. It was amid the endless lines of U.N.-issued tents in the Senokos camp in Macedonia that I first met this boy, known to his friends as Dani. As a reporter covering the Albanian exodus, I would talk to scores of refugees. But Dani, who was then 14 years old and looked no more than 10, would prove to be a one-in-a-million encounter...
...different significance today. Dani embodies the frustrations and hopes of a generation of Kosovars eager for a way out not just from Serbia, but also from a dysfunctional tradition of top-down, tribal politics. At the age of 22, he has become the kind of man who can help Kosovo achieve the political maturity and ethnic comity it so badly needs. The question is whether he and those like him will get that chance...
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...