This small Balkan country won its independence from Serbia 15 years ago, but still waits for justice for wartime victims and global recognition as a new nation
everyone has a story that is almost too painful to recount—except here they are, alive to tell it, and insistent that the world listen. So it is that in the parliament building in the capital city of Pristina, I step into the office of the National Assembly’s 36-year-old deputy speaker, Saranda Bogujevci, whose warm smile and firm handshake do not altogether succeed in deflecting attention from the deep, pale scars on her forearm above her disfigured left hand.
Seeking revenge after the war, Kosovar Albanians destroyed Serbian Orthodox churches. The 14th century Church of St. Nicholas, in Prizren, was unscathed but in 2004 was vandalized in an outbreak of anti-Serbian protests, the only widespread violence since the conflict ended.Bogujevci tells me about a group of women she met while visiting her family’s grave site in Podujevë.
To be sure, the infant country has made progress. When NATO troops landed in Kosovo in June 1999, one of the eyewitnesses to the country’s liberation from Serbian control was an 18-year-old war refugee named Vlora Çitaku, who served as an interpreter for the international media. Nine years later, after serving in parliament, as Çitaku tells it, “I was literally handed a piece of paper and told, ‘You’re deputy foreign minister.’ I literally had nothing: no computer, no staff, no office.
To be a citizen of a country like Kosovo that is not universally recognized means an inability to travel freely, even to other European countries, without a special visa. But Kosovo’s fraught relations with Serbia hamper its progress in more insidious ways. As Berat Rukiqi, the president of Kosovo’s chamber of commerce, explained to me, “The key for investors is predictability, which is related to political risk. Here, we fail. Because for them, Kosovo is an unfinished story.
This vest and shoe were unearthed from mass graves of Kosovar Albanians killed by Serb forces. Items not linked to a victim, like these, are stored at the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Pristina.Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.: Jasmina Jovanović holds the only photo she has of her father, Paun Živković, a Serb who was the head of a technical school in Ferizaj. After the war he returned to retrieve files but disappeared.
In 2018 she returned to Pristina and appeared before a nationally televised audience. Though it was well known that some 20,000 ethnic Albanians—most but not all of them women—had been sexually assaulted during the war, no survivors had openly told their story in a public forum, until then. Vasfije Krasniqi-Goodman became widely recognized in Kosovo. Two years later she ran for parliament. At home in Texas, she learned she’d won.
Lindita Sejdiu-Rugova is dean of the Faculty of Philology at the University of Pristina. She led efforts to restart a program on Balkan languages in which Serbian will again be taught. Among the goals: to improve translations and to foster communication between Kosovo’s Albanians and Serbs. Both Albanian and Serbian are official languages.Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
Members of Ashikët , a band from Gjakovë, gather for a CD photo shoot. They have played together for decades. In 1999, the band’s leader appeared with a men’s choir to sing the Albanian national anthem at the funeral in Reçak for 45 unarmed Albanian Kosovars killed by Serbian security forces.The stalemate between the countries sparks flare-ups with alarming regularity.
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