Kosovo Independence. BBC: "Celebrations have begun in Kosovo's capital Pristina ahead of an expected declaration of independence." I confess that after some two years covering their plight and four years following the dissolution of the Balkans from conflict to conflict ... I guess I have felt this was inevitable. It's the one issue I've rejected website ads on, having spent so much time covering this conflict and seen so much suffering and turmoil on all sides of it, I couldn't accept them. (Here's an affecting summary from the NYT's Andrew Testa and Nicholas Wood).

Among those searing experiences, reporting with a Russian journalist, Masha Gessen, and her photographer in Drenica in 1998 after touring the site of a massacre, being asked by a young Kosovo Albanian mother in hiding from Serb forces in the hills to please take her baby, who was ill ... (we gave her medicine, and now I remember, drove her and her baby to seek help someplace); ... and witnessing the tens of thousands of refugees crossing the border into Macedonia a year later after Nato air strikes had begun, an exodus sadly all too familiar from recent news. (More dispatches here, here, here, here, here and here; from one:

The 53 ethnic Albanian inhabitants of the village of Donji Prekaz in the central Kosovo region of Drenica lay newly buried under wooden sticks in a field behind their family compound. The killing was so fresh when I went that many of their abandoned farm animals were still alive. Since then, Kosovo has exploded into a war, and the scene from Drenica has repeated itself in dozens of villages, whose surviving inhabitants have fled for their lives. Others have come back to fight. The KLA, only rumored to exist in March, is now reported to control 40 percent of the province, including much of the main east-west highway connecting Pec with Pristina. Its recruits are mostly men whom the fighting has driven out of their villages.

The Serb officials giving us Western journalists this tour of their work don't see it that way. They say the Albanian terrorists--as they call the people who have taken up guns to protect their homes--have brought this on themselves.
"Now you are invited to see the consequences of our artillery against the facilities of the terrorists!" says Gen. Sreten Lukic of the Serb police force, pointing to a group of destroyed homes that formerly made up one village. In a show made absurd by the absence of any local people, Serb police dressed in navy blue camouflage drop to their bellies and take positions on a hill, their automatic rifles pointed, to "cover" us from potential Albanian terrorists.

Meanwhile, plainclothes thugs, clearly Serbian secret police, surround us to make sure we don't slow down to take the wrong photograph or kick around the fresh dirt near the side of the road. We are not to venture off the carefully choreographed path they have chosen to show us. To deter us from exploring on our own, they warn that the "terrorists" have mined the area after burning their own homes. The Serb officials' propaganda is so primitive, it is hard to know if they believe it themselves. ...

Our tour guide Lukic was later indicted on war crimes charges, and sent to the Hague.

One wishes the peoples of that tumultuous and heartbreaking region good luck.

Posted by Laura at February 16, 2008 09:12 PM