Word: pristinae
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Dressed in a grey pinstripe suit and burgundy tie, Hashim Thaci smiles and rolls his eyes as the power blinks out again in his office in downtown Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. "Some government," he groans. Following elections on Nov. 17, the former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, is expected to be sworn in soon as Kosovo's Prime Minister. If he and other Kosovo Albanian leaders declare independence from Serbia by early next year, as is widely expected, Thaci will become the Prime Minister of a newly sovereign state. The former guerrilla leader dismisses fears that...
...Serbia has emboldened Kosovo's Serbs, who still make up just under 10% of the province's population. Their leaders in northern Kosovo are threatening to secede themselves if Kosovo breaks away. "Albanians don't want to be ruled from Belgrade; we don't want to be ruled from Pristina," Milan Ivanovic, head of the hard-line Serbian National Council in the northern town of Mitrovice, told TIME. "There is an impression," he added ominously, "that Serbia will not make any radical moves if Kosovo declares independence. That is wrong. If they try to kick us out by force, Serbia...
...Back in Pristina, where preparations for independence day are under way, Thaci is putting the finishing touches to a personal makeover from irascible rebel leader to buttoned-down politico. In Kosovo's recent election campaign, he focused not on questions of independence but instead on energy supplies (those power outages), road-building and economic development. "I made mistakes in the past. But I've changed," Thaci says. After all the blood that's been shed there, let's hope that's true of his native land...
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...
...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, now with a little scruff of a goatee beneath...