With no plans in Western capitals to send NATO ground troops into Kosovo, increasingly people inside and outside the province are talking about arming the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). “We need anti-tank weapons and ammunition, nothing else,” a contact close to the KLA told me Wednesday night from Albania. He’d just spoken with his cousin, a woman currently in a prosperous neighborhood of fine blond stucco homes called Dragodan in the Kosovo capital. She told him the situation in Pristina was “Rwanda-like,” that Serbian forces were killing many people, and going door-to-door in her neighborhood rounding up people.

“The international community must arm the KLA because of the carnage that is going on in Kosovo,” the KLA source told me. “The Serbs do not respect the rule of law. If the KLA is armed quickly, it can protect civilians.”

But arm-the-KLA rhetoric isn’t coming just from KLA supporters in the Balkans. “People in Congress are starting to talk about arming the KLA,” said one U.S. official in Washington who is familiar with U.S.-Kosovo policy. “But as a long-term policy — not next week.” He mentioned Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., as one lawmaker increasingly vocal in his support for the idea of at least a train-and-equip program for the KLA.

There are questions, of course, about supporting the KLA. Would it help alleviate the humanitarian crisis and slow down the killing of ethnic Albanian civilians? Or would it create a Taliban-like force in Kosovo that the international community would be unable to control in the future? At this moment, the KLA might be the best hope for protecting civilians threatened with killings by Serbian forces. Over time, a major degradation of Serbian military assets by NATO air forces, plus the ability of KLA fighters to defend themselves with anti-tank weapons, might allow them to defend territory. In the short term, they could save lives, although even supporting the rebels sufficiently to accomplish that goal would take time.

Some argue that if NATO doesn’t arm the KLA, someone else will. As in Bosnia, some worry that Islamic fundamentalists will step in where the West is afraid to tread, and the KLA could wind up beholden to Iran, Afghanistan or Osama bin Laden, the Saudi Arabian millionaire blamed for the African embassy bombings and other terrorist attacks. But at the moment, NATO controls the skies over Yugoslavia, and it seems impossible that a non-NATO government would be able to enter airspace over Yugoslavia.

The debate probably won’t be settled soon enough for KLA commanders, who are trying to hold ground against better-equipped Serbian troops and hoping for airdropped supplies much more quickly than Washington is likely to provide them. An international aid official here, who asked not to be identified, said his office had gotten a call from a satellite phone in Kosovo a few days ago. “We need airdrops of food, medical supplies and blankets,” pleaded the Kosovar Albanian on the other end of the line. Who was it? Reportedly, “Remi,” the 27-year-old commander of the KLA for the Llap region, in northeastern Kosovo.

The Kosovo Crisis Center reports that “Ceni,” the KLA information officer in Llap, said Wednesday, “The KLA is resisting with all means the offensive by Serbian forces and trying to evacuate civilians. This latter task is becoming more difficult because virtually all settlements of the region are under attack; many have fled into mountainous areas.”

Some 60,000 internally displaced people are in need of humanitarian assistance in Llap alone. Thousands of people are reported to be stranded in the town of Podujevo, which is under siege by Serbian forces.

- – - – - – - – - -

While KLA commanders like Remi say the best bet for stopping this flood of killing lies in arming them, many in the U.S. human rights and foreign policy community are still hoping for NATO ground troops to go into Kosovo. Several senior U.S. foreign policy experts, including Morton Abramowitz, Frank Carlucci, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Helmut Sonnenfeldt and William Howard Taft IV, called for deployment of NATO ground troops to “end the genocide being carried out by Serbian forces” at a press conference in Washington Wednesday.

Though NATO officials say they are stepping up their air campaign against Yugoslavian military targets, bad weather and heavy cloud cover have prevented them from using some of the laser-guided missiles that would allow them to take out the Serbian forces currently threatening Kosovar Albanian civilians. NATO officials also worry that their forces face threats not just from Serbian military air-defense systems, but from Serbian civilians who have been armed with rocket-propelled grenades and other equipment that will make it dangerous for low-flying A-10 planes and Apache helicopters to target more dispersed Serbian military assets on the ground.

Though the stunning brutality of Serbian forces in Kosovo has helped keep the 19-nation NATO alliance united in support of continued airstrikes against Serbia, the airstrikes also drastically accelerated the pace of killing and displacements on the ground in Kosovo that they were intended to slow.

It is not clear that by the time NATO finishes decimating Serbian military targets that there will be much of Kosovo left at all, or many Kosovar Albanians still living there. Whole cities — Pec, Prizren, parts of Pristina — are being systematically “cleared” of Kosovars, according to statements by numerous refugees and human rights observers.

After turning around a trainload of Kosovar Albanians yesterday, the Macedonians let a train containing 2,000 refugees cross Wednesday afternoon, and another large group entered Wednesday morning. But a few kilometers east of the main border-crossing at Blace, the Macedonian military prevented a group of about 2,000 Kosovar Albanians walking from the town of Kacanik to enter the country, because it was not a legal crossing point. They also kicked out a humanitarian organization that was trying to provide medical relief to that group of displaced people.

Hashim Thaci, a leader of rebel ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, told
Germany’s ZDF television that Serbs had created three concentration camps,
including one in a Pristina stadium, which, he said, was holding 100,000
people. German defense minister Rudolf Scharping told a news conference:
“We have serious reports that there are concentration camps like there
were in Bosnia.”

Some 2,000 people from the southern Kosovo city of Urosevac (Ferizai in Albanian) made it to safety in Macedonia Wednesday afternoon. One 80-year-old blind man was led by his grandson on the four-hour walk. He sat cross-legged in the long line of Kosovars registering in a tent for refugee status in Macedonia. Another woman, whose passport showed her to be 96 years old, sat almost entirely covered by a head scarf. Refugees coming from Urosevac told me Wednesday that residents of the Dragodan neighborhood of Pristina had been rounded up in the last few days by the military, and while some were known to be staying in other parts of city, others were reported to have been killed.

Several of the refugees said Serbian police had destroyed their passport and identification papers before they reached Macedonia. NATO forces said destruction of Kosovar birth certificates, marriage licenses and other identity papers was being conducted systematically by Serbian forces to make it impossible for ethnic Albanians to return to the province after the conflict ends.

As NATO spokesman Jamie Shea told reporters in Brussels, “This attempt to rewrite history reminds me of George Orwell’s ’1984,’ which I used to believe was fiction but which now seems to be happening in reality.”

Kosovo is a province of Serbia, the larger of two republics that make up the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The smaller republic in Yugoslavia is Montenegro.

The Maryland-size province of Kosovo has 2 million people, the vast majority of them — 1.8 million — ethnic Albanian, and primarily Muslim. Kosovo is also home to some 200,000 Orthodox Christian Serbs, as well as some of Serbian Orthodox Christendom’s finest medieval monasteries and religious artifacts. Serbs refer to Kosovo as their Jerusalem. Like Arabs and Jews in Israel, both Serbs and Albanians have roots in Kosovo going back centuries.

The ethnic Albanians speak a different language, have a different religion, culture and ethnic background than their Serb neighbors, who are ethnically Slavic.

While today Yugoslavia has only two republics, from 1945 until 1991 it was made up of six: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia, and two Serbian provinces, Kosovo in the south and Vojvodina in the north. (In Serbo-Croatian, Yugoslavia translates into Union of the Southern Slavs.)

Yugoslavia has been at the center of the two world wars in Europe this century. On June 28, 1914, a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, in what is now the independent republic of Bosnia — to demand that Austro-Hungarians relinquish the region to Serb control. The assassination triggered World War I, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany and the other great powers fought to define the new power structures of Europe. Yugoslavia saw some of World War II’s bloodiest and most savage fighting in all the European theater, with the Croats allied with the Nazis, Kosovo and Albania occupied by Mussolini’s fascists and Serb partisans fighting with the allies against the fascists. A partisan fighter — Josip Broz, known as Tito — emerged as the new leader of Yugoslavia at the end of World War II.

Yugoslavia Under Tito

From the end of World War II until 1980, Yugoslavia was ruled by Tito. Under Tito, Yugoslavia had a uniquely independent role in Cold War Europe — it was aligned neither with the West nor with the Soviet bloc. More than other Eastern European countries, Yugoslavia was remarkably ethnically diverse — with Catholic Croatians and Slovenes, Orthodox Christian Serbs and Macedonians, Slavic Muslim Bosnians, ethnic Albanians, Hungarians, Turks and a large minority of Roma (Gypsies). The common language for this heterogeneous population was Serbo-Croatian. Intermarriage between ethnic groups was common, particularly in Yugoslavia’s bigger cities — Belgrade, Sarajevo, Tuzla and Zagreb. Tito created this Yugoslav melting pot with strict repression of nationalist groups — a successful strategy, but one that helped stoke the flames of nationalist resentment that would flare after his death.

In 1974, Tito rewrote Yugoslavia’s constitution giving Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population increased autonomy. From the end of World War II until the late 1980s, an ethnic Albanian communist elite dominated Kosovo’s public and intellectual life, with the blessings of Tito. Public life was conducted in Albanian, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish (there are 50,000 ethnic Turks in Kosovo). Kosovo’s Serbs began to feel increasingly outnumbered and excluded from Kosovo society, the best jobs and other opportunities. This bred resentment among Kosovo Serbs against the Albanian elite, and their domination of the Kosovo police force and top positions elsewhere. Soon, because rural ethnic Albanians tended to have larger families than the more urban Serbs, because some Albanians fled into Kosovo from the harsh communist rule of Enver Hoxha’s Albania and because Serbs began to feel their children would have more opportunities in Belgrade and other parts of Serbia, the demographics of Kosovo shifted toward the current ratio of 90 percent ethnic Albanian, 10 percent Serbian.

The death of Yugoslavia, and the rise of nationalism

Peace in Yugoslavia came to a violent end a decade after Tito’s death in 1980. The Cold War was ending, and all across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Bloc — countries were declaring their independence from the Soviet sphere of influence. On New Year’s Day 1991, the Soviet Union itself dissolved into a dozen independent republics. Yugoslavia’s unique role — as a bridge between the East and West — was becoming less important in this new post-Cold War world. With communism discredited, its economy in decline and with large foreign debt, Yugoslavia’s new generation of politicians were groping for a new ideology to take them into the post-Cold War.

A few ambitious and ruthless politicians found it, in rampant nationalism — a nationalism that tore at the fabric of Yugoslavia’s multiethnic makeup.

One man in particular, Slobodan Milosevic, a Serbian Communist Party official, adopted a virulent strain of Serbian nationalism as his ticket to political power.

“No one will ever beat you again”

It was June 28, 1989, in Kosovo that Milosevic fully tapped into the political potential of Serbian nationalism. He was in Kosovo to give a speech commemorating the anniversary of the battle of Kosovo Polye — the Field of Blackbirds. The legend goes that on June 28, 1389, the Serbs lost a heroic battle to the Ottoman Turks on the Field of Blackbirds. What followed was what Serbs consider five centuries of subjugation by the Muslim Turks. Serbs celebrate that defeat — and their heroic but failed struggle against the Ottoman Empire — as other nations celebrate their historic victories, their independence days. (It’s an important socio-psychological trait to keep in mind, as Serbs put up an insanely bloody and doomed resistance to the superior firepower of NATO.) On that historic date (Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Ferdinand the same day in 1914), Milosevic addressed a crowd of Kosovo’s embittered Serbian minority, many of them frightened of what the breakup of Yugoslavia would mean to them, living in a province with a majority Albanian population. Catching the mood of the crowd, almost like a musician or a performer, Milosevic screamed to the crowd: “No one will ever beat you again.” The crowd went wild, hysterical. Police had to hold it back. There in Kosovo, Milosevic discovered that he could exploit Serbs’ fear of what the breakup of Yugoslavia would mean for them into a potent — and dangerous — form of political power.

Milosevic revokes Kosovo’s autonomy
He rose quickly to become Serbian president. In 1989, Milosevic engineered the revision of the Yugoslav constitution, revoking the autonomy Kosovo had enjoyed since 1974. Overnight, ethnic Albanians became second-class citizens in a province in which they made up a 90 percent majority. The Serbs took over all of Kosovo’s state jobs: the courts, the police, the university, the schools, the businesses. In effect, the entire province was “Serbianized.”

Kosovo’s Albanians protested the loss of their autonomy with a mass boycott of the Yugoslav state. The Serb authorities helped their marginalization by firing them from their jobs, kicking them out of the Kosovo university and adopting a set of laws under which ethnic Albanians became de facto outlaws for wanting to have a university education in their own language.

Exiled from state institutions, universities and jobs, the Kosovo Albanians created their own, parallel, private Albanian-language university, health care and tax systems. In 1989 they elected the Sorbonne-educated Shakespeare scholar Ibrahim Rugova to lead them in resistance to Serbian rule. Rugova’s movement, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), advocated nonviolent resistance to their oppression.

For a decade, Kosovo Albanians peacefully protested their repression under Milosevic. While the international community praised their peaceful resistance, the fact that Kosovo was relatively quiet compared with neighboring former Yugoslav republics kept Kosovo off the international radar screen.

Yugoslavia dissolves: war in Croatia and Bosnia
In 1991, with the end of the Cold War, and nationalist tensions simmering, the Yugoslav republics of Slovenia and Croatia declared independence; they were soon followed by Bosnia and Macedonia. Both Croatia and Bosnia had large Serbian minorities. Backed by the might of the Yugoslav National Army, Milosevic led Serbia to fight for a “Greater Serbia,” to include Serb-populated territory in Croatia and Bosnia. Those wars, from 1991 to 1995, killed almost 300,000 people, many of them Bosnian Muslims and Croats killed in massacres, concentration camps and by “ethnic cleansing” — the deliberate use of terror and violence to drive ethnic populations out of territory another group wanted to keep.

A series of horrible killings in 1995 finally triggered NATO to intervene in Bosnia with airstrikes, to try to bring the war to an end. Finally, after three years of war that killed 200,000 people and displaced almost 2 million, U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke brokered the Dayton peace accords, under which 60,000 NATO-led troops would implement a peace agreement for Bosnia, that awarded Serbs 49 percent of Bosnia, provided it stay part of a nominally multiethnic Bosnia Herzegovina.

Kosovo Albanians, who had been conducting a nonviolent campaign of resistance to Serbian oppression, watched the results of the Dayton peace accords, and saw that the use of force by Bosnian Serbs was rewarded with territory. Still, it took three years before armed opposition really took hold in Kosovo.

Peaceful resistance gives way to war
Finally, it was the outbreak of fighting in March 1998 that compelled the international community to pay attention to Kosovo. It was then, in a small village called Donji Prekaz, in the central Kosovo farming region of Drenica, that Serb forces brutally killed 53 members of the Adem Jeshari family — men, women and children — in their farmhouses. The Serbs suspected Jeshari of leading a group of armed rebels called the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Until the massacre in Donji Prekaz, few Kosovo Albanians even knew about the Kosovo Liberation Army. But the killings mobilized the entire population to take up arms — or to at least support those who did — in a new, militant phase of resistance to Serbian repression. A year of conflict has ensued and killed more than 2,500 people and displaced some 500,000 Kosovo Albanians.

Last October, U.S. envoy Richard Holbooke negotiated a cease-fire for Kosovo. It collapsed in February. U.S. and European mediators summoned ethnic Albanian and Serbian negotiators to Rambouillet, France, that month for peace talks. Three weeks later, the ethnic Albanian delegation signed the agreement while the Serbs balked. Shortly thereafter, Milosevic moved 40,000 Yugoslav army troops and his best tanks into Kosovo and began a major offensive aimed at wiping out the KLA. NATO countries — after months of threatening — launched airstrikes against Serbian military targets March 24. On Monday, Serbian forces assassinated one of the ethnic Albanians who signed the Rambouillet agreement. Fehmi Agani was murdered in Pristina, after attending the funeral of a slain human rights lawyer, Bajram Kelmendi, along with four other Kosovo Albanian moderates.

An American aid official said Macedonian border guards also detained hundreds of fleeing ethnic Albanians — mostly women and children — for more than 28 hours Tuesday at Blaca, the main border crossing between Kosovo and Macedonia. Aid agencies tried to negotiate with the officials to allow a heavily pregnant woman to get through more quickly, but they were still negotiating her safe passage 20 minutes later with no success. The American aid official called the detention “outrageous.”

Human rights groups and fleeing refugees say in recent days Serbian forces have gone door-to-door in several Kosovo cities, including Pec, Prizren and certain neighborhoods in Pristina, telling Albanians they have two hours to flee or they will be killed. Refugees say hundreds of people have been killed, and others, especially young men of fighting age and young women, have not been allowed to leave. Ethnic Albanians are also not being allowed by Serbian authorities to shop in the few remaining state stores selling bread and other food. Almost all private shops in Pristina are reported burned and looted.

International aid agencies say Serbian forces have forced 100,000 Kosovo Albanians to flee in the past 72 hours. Currently 20,000 Kosovo Albanian refugees are in Macedonia, 40,000 in Albania and 20,000 in Montenegro. Increasingly, refugees are heading beyond the immediate borders of Kosovo, to Turkey and beyond.

An Albanian-language television station in Macedonia showed hours of raw footage Tuesday night of hundreds of Kosovo Albanians, most on foot, some on horseback, climbing over a mountain in the rain to safety in Macedonia. Some were weeping but others looked simply blank and exhausted.

While Macedonia has not officially closed its border to the Kosovo Albanian refugees, the Macedonian government is concerned that allowing so many ethnic Albanians into their country will destabilize the country’s fragile ethnic balance. Macedonia, with a population of 2 million people, has a large ethnic Albanian minority of its own — about a quarter to a third of its population. Macedonia’s Albanians have been pressing the government for more rights — including the right to have recognition of their Albanian-language pedagogical university in the northwestern Macedonian town of Tetovo.

Radovan runs the state-run Serbian media center in Kosovo — or at least he did until NATO began bombing Serbia last Wednesday — and most Western journalists were kicked out of the country. Now he has few journalists to whom he can tell the Serbian version of events, the phones only work sporadically, and he and his staff have not been able to leave the hotel for days for fear of the chaos engulfing Pristina and the rest of Kosovo.

Radovan is Serbian — like the paramilitaries and army rampaging through Kosovo now, burning and looting ethnic Albanian villages and going door-to-door in some neighborhoods with machine guns, threatening to kill Albanians if they don’t leave Kosovo. He truly seems to believe that the conflict that has raged in Kosovo for the past year is the fault of the ethnic Albanian “terrorists,” as he calls the supporters of Kosovo Liberation Army. He has never once acknowledged to me the fact that Serbian police have also abused Kosovo Albanians. He’s a true believer in the idea that “Kosovo is Serbia.”

Though it’s day four of NATO bombing, and the strikes seem to be moving closer day by day to the town, Radovan seems as spirited as ever in his defense of the Serbian cause.

“You know what NATO bombs hit last night?” he asks, with a hint of glee in his voice. “The printing house of Koha Ditore (the leading Albanian-language newspaper in Kosovo). It burned down to the ground.”

He complains that the NATO airstrikes seem to have destroyed his access to the Internet, and the cell phone network in Kosovo.

He doesn’t mention his daughter, or the brother I know he has in Ohio. He doesn’t talk about the killing in the streets of Pristina, or the looting of ethnic Albanian shops. He doesn’t mention that the hotel has — after days of siege — started to run out of food and water. He doesn’t mention the Serbian paramilitaries that I hear have gone door-to-door in the hotel attacking Western journalists.

But Radovan, the hard-line, self-declared Serbian patriot, knows that I know that he is protecting a good friend of mine, a freelance journalist from a NATO country who, when the other Western journalists evacuated Kosovo, decided to stay behind.

“Yes, she is very scared,” he says honestly. “I was surprised, because I know she has covered several wars. But I promised her I would do everything in my power to protect her.”

When the cell phones still worked, my journalist friend told me about the terror of the first night of airstrikes. How the electricity went out in the city, and gangs of paramilitary thugs with machine guns were everywhere in the hotel, threatening Westerners. How Radovan told her to go immediately to his office, and not come out. She’s been staying in a room with three other Serbian women since then.

NATO hasn’t declared war against Serbia. But when I call to check on my friend, and I speak to Radovan and the young Serbian men and women who staff the media center, we know but don’t say that our countries are at war. It’s the white elephant on the front lawn in our conversation, as is my intense gratitude that they are protecting a person whose politics are so at war with their own. Sharing the terror of airstrikes has somehow brought them to protect each other.

I get the same feeling Saturday when I receive an e-mail from a Serbian couple I know in Belgrade. I’ve had a dozen Sunday dinners at their home in new Belgrade, many at which we’ve even argued about Serbia’s policy toward Kosovo, long before the war started. “Hi, Just to inform you that we are all fine. Last two nights we were in the shelter, but everything was OK. Hoping that this will stop soon. How are you!!!??? Big hello from all of us.”

The couple, both 30, have a 1-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy, whom I’ve recently sent denim jackets from Baby Gap for Christmas. Their e-mail is painful to read. I can imagine them in the air raid shelter with the children, wondering what kind of future the children have.

Every day, the trickle of e-mails from my friends in Kosovo and Belgrade is dwindling, and it gets harder to dial in to check on people. But sometimes what is most ominous is getting through to Pristina and having the phone just ring and ring, unanswered. As I wait for someone to answer, I wonder if the people I am calling are in the air raid shelter, or if they have had to flee their homes. I wonder, indeed, if they are still alive.

The last call I get through to Pristina on Sunday is to an ethnic Albanian friend, a human rights worker. I am terrified that when her phone rings that she won’t pick up. The Serbian police have begun targeting the ethnic Albanian intelligentsia, and I am afraid that she is on their hit list.

Her brother answers and gets her.

“I’m so scared,” she says. “We don’t go out of the house. I want to go help the refugees. I just don’t know.”

Just a few weeks ago, this woman had been planning to come to Harvard next year for a graduate fellowship in human rights. Now she doesn’t know what’s going to happen to her tonight or tomorrow.

I ask her if NATO is wrong to have bombed. “No, I think there was no choice.” We hang up.

As an afterthought, I call up a Kosovo Liberation Army contact.

“It’s a tragedy. It’s genocide,” he says, in total despair. He’s currently in Italy, on his way to Albania, and from there, he plans to go into Kosovo. “There’s no way to describe it. There’s no comparison.”

I ask him the same question I asked my friend, the human rights worker. Did NATO bombing make things worse for them?

“Once and forever, the world has to finish with this army. It has to be finished. This army commits genocide. They shell civilians. What can we do?”

 
PHOTO: AP/WIDE WORLD

Radovan runs the state-run Serbian media center in Kosovo — or at
least he did until NATO began bombing Serbia last Wednesday — and most
Western journalists were kicked out of the country. Now he has few
journalists to whom he can tell the Serbian version of events, the phones
only work sporadically, and he and his staff have not been able to leave
the hotel for days for fear of the chaos engulfing Pristina and the rest
of Kosovo.

Radovan is Serbian — like the paramilitaries and army rampaging through Kosovo now, burning and
looting ethnic Albanian villages and going door-to-door in some
neighborhoods with machine guns, threatening to kill Albanians if they don’t
leave Kosovo. He truly seems to believe that the conflict
that has raged in Kosovo for the past year is the fault of the ethnic
Albanian “terrorists,” as he calls the supporters of Kosovo Liberation
Army. He has never once acknowledged to me the fact that Serbian police
have also abused Kosovo Albanians. He’s a true believer in the idea that
“Kosovo is Serbia.”

Though it’s day four of NATO bombing, and the strikes seem to be moving
closer day by day to the town, Radovan seems as spirited as ever in his
defense of the Serbian cause.

“You know what NATO bombs hit last night?” he asks, with a hint of glee in
his voice. “The printing house of Koha Ditore (the leading Albanian-language newspaper in Kosovo). It burned down to the ground.”

He complains that the NATO airstrikes seem to have destroyed his access to
the Internet, and the cell phone network in Kosovo.

He doesn’t mention his daughter, or the brother I know he has in Ohio. He
doesn’t talk about the killing in the streets of Pristina, or the looting
of ethnic Albanian shops. He doesn’t mention that the hotel has — after
days of siege — started to run out of food and water. He doesn’t mention
the Serbian paramilitaries that I hear have gone door-to-door in the
hotel attacking Western journalists.

But Radovan, the hard-line, self-declared Serbian patriot, knows that I know that he is protecting a good
friend of mine, a freelance journalist from a NATO country who, when the
other Western journalists evacuated Kosovo, decided to stay behind.

“Yes, she is very scared,” he says honestly. “I was surprised, because I
know she has covered several wars. But I promised her I would do everything
in my power to protect her.”

When the cell phones still worked, my journalist friend told me about the
terror of the first night of airstrikes. How the electricity went out in
the city, and gangs of paramilitary thugs with machine guns were everywhere
in the hotel, threatening Westerners. How Radovan told her to go
immediately to his office, and not come out. She’s been staying in a room
with three other Serbian women since then.

NATO hasn’t declared war against Serbia. But when I call to check on my
friend, and I speak to Radovan and the young Serbian men and women who staff the media
center, we know but don’t say that our countries are at
war. It’s the white elephant on the front lawn in our conversation, as is
my intense gratitude that they are protecting a person whose politics are
so at war with their own. Sharing the terror of airstrikes has
somehow brought them to protect each other.

I get the same feeling Saturday when I receive an e-mail from a Serbian
couple I know in Belgrade. I’ve had
a dozen Sunday dinners at their home in new Belgrade, many at which we’ve
even argued about Serbia’s policy toward Kosovo, long before the war
started. “Hi, Just to inform you that we are all fine. Last two nights we were in
the
shelter, but everything was OK. Hoping that this will stop soon. How are
you!!!???
Big hello from all of us.”

The couple, both 30, have a 1-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy,
whom I’ve recently sent denim jackets from Baby Gap for Christmas. Their e-mail is painful to read. I can imagine them in the air raid
shelter with the children, wondering what kind of future the children
have.

Every day, the trickle of e-mails from my friends in Kosovo and Belgrade is
dwindling, and it gets harder to dial in to check on people. But sometimes
what is most ominous is getting through to Pristina and having the phone
just ring and ring, unanswered. As I wait for someone to answer, I wonder
if the people I am calling are in the air raid shelter, or if they have had
to flee their homes. I wonder, indeed, if they are still alive.

The last call I get through to Pristina on Sunday is to an ethnic Albanian
friend, a human rights worker. I am terrified that when her phone rings that she
won’t pick up. The Serbian police have begun targeting the ethnic Albanian
intelligentsia, and I am afraid that she is on their hit list.

Her brother answers and gets her.

“I’m so scared,” she says. “We don’t go out of the house. I want to go
help the refugees. I just don’t know.”

Just a few weeks ago, this woman had been planning to come to Harvard next
year for a graduate fellowship in human rights. Now she doesn’t know what’s
going to happen to her tonight or tomorrow.

I ask her if NATO is wrong to have bombed. “No, I think there was no
choice.” We hang up.

As an afterthought, I call up a Kosovo Liberation Army contact.

“It’s a tragedy. It’s genocide,” he says, in total despair. He’s currently
in Italy, on his way to Albania, and from there, he plans to go into
Kosovo. “There’s no way to describe it. There’s no comparison.”

I ask him the same question I asked my friend, the human rights worker. Did
NATO bombing make things worse for them?

“Once and forever, the world has to finish with this army. It has to be
finished. This army commits genocide. They shell civilians. What can we
do?”