Word: serbian
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Hashim Thaci is on unfamiliar ground. The Albanian guerrilla leader, once the bane of Serbian forces in Kosovo's hinterlands, has arrived triumphant in Pristina and is undergoing his first rite of passage as an aspiring politician: dinner with TIME. Looking out across a table laden with the best postwar cuisine available--three platters of chicken franks, canned tuna and tomatoes--the 30-year-old rebel answers questions with a voice at once shy and calculating. Trying his best to toe the Western line, he assures us repeatedly, "We will live up to the obligations given...
...Thaci grew impatient with political conspiracy as a way to kick Slobodan Milosevic out of Kosovo. In June 1993 he and his compatriots turned to military action. Along with his two most trusted associates, Kadri Veseli and Fatmir Limaj, he launched one of the first armed attacks against Serbian forces. By the time Kosovo's rebellion gained traction in 1997, Thaci had survived Serbian reprisals and was at the top of the disparate guerrilla force...
...rural traditions--"a Drenica person opens his heart to no man," says a longtime friend--have given Thaci a secretive, lone-wolf personality ill suited to democratic politics. At dinner that reserve undercut his every attempt to sound Western and humanistic. When asked what his plans were for the Serbian civilian minority that remains in Kosovo, he assured us its inclusion was important to rebuilding the province. "We're not interested in building parallel, segregated elements," he said. But when pressed repeatedly for an explanation of the retaliatory violence against the Serbs by rebel Albanians in recent days, he flashed...
...Albanians joyously streaming up the rolling green hills. After nearly a week of pushing fitfully northward through Greece, Macedonia and Kosovo, the leading edge of the corps's force had finally reached its destination. And the locals--at least the Albanians who had endured more than two months of Serbian terror--wanted to make their new overlords feel welcome...
While only a few people in Moscow were privy to the plan, it seems to have been well known and warmly welcomed in Belgrade. The Yugoslavs went out of their way to facilitate the convoy's movement, Russian military sources say. Serbian state officials secured the convoy's route through Serbia and ensured that a road into Kosovo was kept free of refugees and retreating troops. To allow the convoy to travel at top speed as much as possible, a Yugoslav military officer rode in every third vehicle, ready to navigate if the convoy was broken up in traffic...