The Next Balkan War

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.