‘We Had a Better Life Then’: Kosovo’s Decade of Independence<br />"We need our young people to go abroad to study and then bring their expertise back." Driving toward Macedonia to catch my flight home, I took one of the new highways linking Kosovo to Albania,<br />and I couldn’t help wondering: If the prime minister himself can’t travel, what does it mean for the rest of the Kosovars?<br />In 2003, I was at a meeting at which the United States diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke told Mr. Ivanovic<br />that if he held on to his hard-line agenda, "You will wake up one day and look in the mirror and realize that the tide of history has passed you by." Mr. Ivanovic later transformed himself into a more pragmatic politician.<br />According to a 2017 report by the International Committee for Missing Persons, 4,500<br />people went missing during the war — more than 1,600 of whom remain missing.<br />Tens years ago on Feb. 17, the mountainous, landlocked region of less than two million people declared independence from Serbia.<br />I passed through Meja, a Catholic Albanian village,<br />that was the site of the war’s worst massacre when 372 men and boys were taken from refugee columns and nearby villages and shot dead by the road.<br />The road from the border with Albania, which runs through the city of Gjakova<br />and onto Prizren, is itself like a scar, a poignant reminder of wartime massacres.
