Dear friends,

I saw a Prishtine-style Hamlet production at the National Theater last night. After the ‘play within the play’ ends, Hamlet addresses the audience: "I want to share with you an experience I had during the bombing. I went out one night looking for food, and two Serb policemen stopped me, and put a knife to my throat. They told me ‘You are a terrorist’, and I said ‘Im not a terrorist, Im a student.’ Then they told me that they were nice Serbs, so they were going to let me choose how I wanted to be killed. They asked me if I wanted my throat to be cut, if I wanted my eyeballs to be pulled out, or if I wanted to be shot. Then they said that I should make up my mind because if not they would take me to the police station, and there I wouldn’t have a choice of how I wanted to be killed. Then I pushed one of them away, and ran. And here I am."

The following article was published in Zeri, a local daily, as a front-page editorial. Albin Kurti, student activist, was the major force behind what was known as the ‘active nonviolence’ movement in Kosova, which lasted about one year, from 1997 through mid 1998. Kurti later altered his nonviolence philosophy to what he told me was a "mixed strategy" philosophy, which led him to his involvement with Kosovo’s armed struggled against Serbia. This change took place only after western states failed to intervene in Kosovo, only after Serbia increased its military and police activity in the region, and only after many rural and urban Albanians became anxious to strike back not as pacifists, but as martyrs defending their homes and families.

Kurti has been sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment in Serbia. No local Albanian politician has seriously advocated for his release. After all, when Kurti comes back to Kosova, he will undoubtedly change the political climate, which would mean bad news for the people who are currently in power. Please read:

Albin Kurti

By Zenun Çelaj

"It has been announced that Flora Brovina, humanist and poet, previously sentenced to 20 years in prison, will soon be released. Her case denounced before international opinion the institutionalization of the judicial system by the Serbian regime, the regime that Serbs themselves now call fascist. Suddenly, and incredibly, anything can happen.

For the Albanian slaves of war in Kosova, there is hope for release from Serbian prisons. This isn’t just a desire that most prisoners and their loved ones are interested in. There are signals from the high posts of the new government, also known as Yugoslavia, that this will happen. The procedure for an "Amnesty Law" has already been initiated, which now waits approval from the "Yugoslav" parliament, which is now in quick session. This information is better than anything previously hoped for.

The protests and hunger strikes, held after the arrival in Kosova of KFOR and UNMIK, clearly were not only the products of grief and solidarity that aimed to support the slave in Serbian prisons, the slave held for being Albanian, or for other reasons given by the regime. They also served as pressure over the factors that were able to affect the changes in their fate.

Albin Kurti, the leader and the personality that gave strength to student demonstrations, which were killed because of fear of violence and cruelty by Serbian police, is a man among the sentenced Albanian prisoners whose name commemorates the anthology of resistance before the cruel and unjust Serb trials occurred.

But the name Albin Kurti also reminds us of the inexplicable indifference of the people who should be disturbed and troubled everyday about his young fate, of the indifference of the people who should be working hard for his quicker return to Kosovar politics, from which he is absent. The case sounds like this: Albin Kurti doesn’t have anybody to release him."