Word: serb
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...middle of an election process that will reveal how much more national identity its citizens are willing to shed as they head into the future. Will they opt for an ultra-nationalist President willing to put up a struggle over Kosovo, the so-called historic heartland of the Serb nation that is now dominated by ethnic Albanians about to declare the province's independence? Or will they opt for a President who will not kick up too much of a fuss in order to smooth the country's long but lucrative journey into a European Union adamant that Kosovo...
More than eight years after U.S. planes bombed Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic out of Kosovo, the small Balkan territory is still legally a part of Serbia. But the province--which has been under U.N. administration since clashes between Serbian forces and secessionist rebels sparked an international crisis in 1999--took another step toward independence this month when the U.N. failed to negotiate a settlement between the two sides before a Dec. 10 deadline. Differences between Kosovo's ethnic-Albanian majority and Belgrade, which opposes full independence for the province, proved too great to bridge. So too did the gulf between...
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...
...through all of this, Dani maintained his keen awareness of what's at stake in his troubled homeland. Between his 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...
...four days together, Dani took me to a nearby village named Talinovic, which historically was split between Serbs and Albanians. Here, on July 2, 1999, after Belgrade's capitulation, Greek peacekeeping troops told some 300 Serb villagers that they could no longer guarantee their safety. They fled en masse, and every home was subsequently burned to the ground by Albanians from out of town. Last year, the first 40 brick houses were rebuilt on the land, and a few of the mostly older Serb residents began to trickle back from their exile in Serbia...