And that is why his friend Milot Cakaj fears for Kurti’s life. “He’s too young, and he’s too smart, so he’s too dangerous,” says Cakaj, 25. No one knows for sure what has become of Kurti. Late last week three men who were released from a prison in Lipljan and made their way to Blace, Macedonia, told NEWSWEEK that they’d shared a cell with Kurti, who was very much alive. But others tell less optimistic tales. One recent refugee from Pristina reported that Kurti’s mother had asked the Serb police when she’d have her son back. They told her to come back in a month to pick up his body.
Life was never easy for Kurti. Born in 1975 to two academics, he came of age in Kosovo in the ’90s, when Albanians were fired from state jobs and barred from attending school. Under President Ibrahim Rugova, the Albanians started their own illegal University of Pristina. Classes met in private homes or shops; Kurti’s computer-science department met in a supermarket. Still, in his teens, Kurti managed an approximation of normal life, studying hard, listening to U2 and watching an occasional bootlegged video.
But for someone with Kurti’s intellect and ambition, it was an unsatisfying life. Despite the lack of civil rights for Albanians, Rugova counseled his people to resist passively. And like many young Kosovar Albanians, Kurti found Rugova’s pacifism–dubbed “the movement that has no move”–too stifling. He began organizing peaceful protests in the fall of 1997, eventually galvanizing the population into staging Kosovo’s first massive marches in seven years. On Oct. 1, 1997, in an area of Pristina that came to be known as Execution Hill, thousands of students dressed in white marched with banners bearing slogans aimed at Western governments–HELLO EUROPE, WHERE ARE YOU?–and fellow Kosovar Albanians–BREATHE AS WE DO! Suddenly, the police attacked, hurling tear gas, beating the protesters and arresting their leaders. Kurti was dragged off by his trademark mane, taken to the police station, and beaten and interrogated. Then he was released.
Kurti’s fame grew over the next year. He traveled to Europe and America to meet peace activists and politicians, and they came to Pristina to meet him. “He was very forceful and very well spoken,” says the OSCE’s William Walker. “The only thing that didn’t impress me about him was his hair. He didn’t look like a serious negotiator.”
But he was. When Kurti went to Washington, D.C., to talk to the Albanian Issues Caucus on Capitol Hill, he impressed congressmen and think-tankers with his argument for nonviolent resistance. His charm worked outside politics, too. Last summer he and two friends were flown to Stockholm for a student conference. On their last night they wanted to go to a disco, but none of them had the money. “Listen,” Kurti told the club bouncer, recalls a friend who was there. “I’m a Kosovar Albanian. We’re going back tomorrow, and we could be killed. What about letting us have one last night of fun?” They were admitted for free.
As Kosovo’s situation deteriorated in 1998, it became ever harder for Kurti to hold to the pacifist line. Over the spring and summer, Kurti’s e-mails to his American friends grew grimmer. “Last night there was another massacre,” read one. “Please help. Do what you can.” By June, Kurti was openly accusing the West of ignoring police oppression of Albanians. “He saw the international community willfully turning a blind eye,” says Susan Blaustein, senior consultant at the Washington-based International Crisis Group.
After Serbs killed unarmed civilians in the Drenica valley last fall, Kurti finally decided to join the armed resistance. He became the spokesman for KLA leader Adem Demaci, 61, who’d once been a political colleague of Kurti’s father and was known as Kosovo’s Nelson Mandela for spending 28 years in prison. Last summer the grizzled elder statesman and his young protege, joined by Milot Cakaj, found a house near Pristina’s old market and set up a KLA office.
Within months, splits emerged between Demaci and the rural-based KLA leaders, who accused the urban intellectuals of doing nothing. Things got worse with the approach of the Rambouillet talks, which Kurti considered a sellout. There was no way the KLA could disarm. “There was a lot of careerism around the time of Rambouillet,” recalls Cakaj. “Suddenly everybody in the KLA is imagining himself a minister of the Republic of Kosovo.” Right before the talks, Demaci and Kurti resigned from the KLA.
Kurti was deeply depressed over their failed struggle. He spent last winter reading the black poetry of Sylvia Plath and listening to the bleak lyrics of the British band Joy Division. And he mused about death. “He’d talk about how it would happen,” recalls Alice Mead, a Maine peace activist and writer. “A bullet to the back of the head? In prison?” When Mead cautioned him to be careful, Kurti only laughed. “Don’t worry, we’ve got this new door,” he told her. And he took risks. The night before the bombing began, Kurti walked home late at night as Serb cars slowed, looking for Albanians. “It was kind of like a death wish,” says Mead.
Kurti turned 24 on March 24, the day NATO began bombing. His birthday celebration was muted: he and Cakaj sat in Demaci’s office drinking neat vodka and watching the news. “It was incredible,” recalls Cakaj. “After all these years, the international community was moving. The world was being cooperative.” And at the same time, they recognized that Kosovo’s fate now rested with NATO: “Suddenly we realized that this issue was being dealt with at such a high level that we were helpless.” The friends parted at about 5 p.m. Cakaj, who escaped Kosovo for Macedonia in April, hasn’t seen Kurti since.
But a former prisoner, 27-year-old Avni, says he has. One of 60 prisoners released from Lipljan last week, Avni says he was among Kurti’s 300 cellmates. He says that the activist’s curls have been shaved off, and that his breathing appears labored from the beatings. His jailers said they would set Kurti free if he signed something about being a terrorist against Serbia, says Avni. But he refused. Perhaps, if Albin Kurti is very lucky, he’ll make it through the war. And then everybody can start talking about him in the present tense again.
