The Next Balkan War

By Massimo Calabresi

It doesn't take much to start a war in the Balkans.

The shot that pierced the leg of Bahri Krasniqi, an 11-year-old ethnic Albanian who lives in the tiny village of Vojnik, may have been enough to set fire again to the depressingly familiar tinder of ethnic hate, violent temperament and political oppression.

The village lies 32 miles beyond the dusty downtown streets of Pristina, capital of the rebellious Serbian province of Kosovo, due west across the bleak Field of the Blackbirds. The Turks slaughtered Christian forces here in 1389 on their way to 500 years of rule in the Balkans. Even now, flocks of shrieking, cackling blackbirds fuel a local legend that they are reincarnated Serb warriors.

A rutted dirt road leads to Vojnik, a farming village of 200 houses and 2,000 ethnic Albanians. Devoutly Muslim and speaking a complex, ancient language derived from Illyrian, the people here are the most doggedly independent of the approximately 2 million Albanians who inhabit Kosovo. Their houses, resembling modest forts, are hidden behind high walls of brick if the owners are well off or crude fences of woven sticks if they are not. Out on an isolated bluff, behind a particularly high brick wall, sits the compound of the village hoxha (religious leader), Abdyl Krasniqi, 67.

"I was inside when they started shooting," says Qerim Krasniqi, 51, the blond, thick-set eldest son of Abdyl and father of the wounded child. "A girl was screaming, and I went out and saw my son lying on the ground. I grabbed him by the belt, and beneath him there was blood everywhere." Sipping Turkish coffee, Qerim glances at his wizened father. The crackling fire in a small cast-iron stove fills the silence as the Krasniqi men, sitting on cushions around the edge of the dark, bare room, consider the violence that followed.

Kosovo is the historical and cultural homeland of Serbs, and the estimated 100,000 who live there dominate the 2 million ethnic Albanians by force and repression. But that rule is crumbling. During the late-November fire fight that wounded Bahri Krasniqi, rebels drove Serb process servers and their police escorts out of the village. When heavily armed Serb reinforcements returned next day, angry rebels ambushed them outside town and drove them back. Serb authorities have not dared return since, and the shadowy Kosovo Liberation Army (K.L.A.) has rallied to the region and patrols its rural roads by night. Intentionally or not, the area around Vojnik has been made Kosovo's first "no-go zone" for the Serb regime and the center of a growing war of independence from Serbia.

The Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevic, bears primary responsibility for the coming conflagration, as he does for the war in Bosnia. He is behind the repression visited on the ethnic Albanians by the ruling Serb minority, which has a fondness for torturing confessions out of the rebels. Sitting in his family's small apartment in downtown Pristina, Alban Neziri, 23, coolly, methodically narrates his harrowing story. He says he was arrested last February as a suspected founding member of the K.L.A. and during his 10 months in prison was repeatedly tortured. "At the beginning, they beat me with plastic batons on the bottom of my feet," Neziri says. "That lasted 15 to 20 minutes. After that, they began to hit me on my kidneys. They do that with the point of the baton. After that, they began on my hands." By the end of the two-to-three-hour "interrogation," Neziri says, the police had made their way over most of his body and finished up with electrodes to his wetted testicles. At that point, he passed out. Neziri finally agreed to "confess" when his captors said they would torture his father next, but a month ago, he received a surprise acquittal from a Serbian-controlled court in Pristina. Now, Neziri says, he wants peace but is ready to fight for independence.

Bosko Drobnjak is the regional Serbian information official in Pristina. His ostentatious office is protected by a minor official playing video games on a dirty, out-of-date computer. Those who make it past the flunky to see Drobnjak get a curt summary of the Serbian position: "I don't know why people are so concerned about the treatment terrorists are getting," he says, chuckling.

But the more offhand and random the brutality of the Serb rulers, the stronger the support for the emerging nationalist K.L.A. The Vojnik uprising looks like the start of a bloody, protracted guerrilla war that could spill over into the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, where 350 American troops are stationed and where ethnic Albanians also seek independence.

The more immediate danger is of a brutal bloodbath in Kosovo. Since 1991, when Milosevic cracked down in the province, some 200 ethnic Albanians have died. Now the Serb death toll is rising in step. On both sides, even the most devoted seekers of peace--and there are fewer and fewer of them--see little chance of avoiding a war. In Vojnik, where Bahri is home from the hospital and recovering from his leg wound, the villagers are already there. "The Serb authorities have lost control," says hoxha Abdyl Krasniqi. "But you can't say we are liberated." Yet.