PRISTINA, Serbia – Draped in Albanian and U.S. flags, thousands of ethnic Albanians danced and cheered in the freezing streets of Kosovo's capital yesterday in anticipation of the province's declaration of independence from Serbia today.
Kosovo's prime minister, Hashim Thaci, is expected to call an extraordinary session of parliament this afternoon during which the Republic of Kosovo will be declared.
Afterward, Pristina is expected to celebrate with a 3,000-pound cake, independence champagne and fireworks.
Thaci – a former leader of the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army – marked yesterday by visiting a village where Serbian troops massacred ethnic Albanians in 1998.
The territory's ethnic Albanian majority is jubilant, but its Serb minority, which wants the territory to remain part of Serbia, is greeting the secession as though it were an amputation.
Twenty young women have labored the past five days to bake the 3,000-pound cake, which is shaped like Kosovo. Pristina, Kosovo's capital, is awash with red-and-black-eagled flags of neighboring Albania and signs thanking the United States for its support.
“I can't describe the feeling, I'm so happy,” said insurance agent Valon Munolli, 24. “We have been waiting for so long for this, for a hundred years.”
The international community took over the governance of Kosovo in 1999, after a NATO bombing campaign ended the Serb forces' brutal crackdown on Albanian separatists, which displaced many of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians. For almost nine years, Kosovo has been in legal limbo, formally remaining a province of Serbia but under U.N. administration.
Casting a shadow over the country's birth are the discontent of Serbia, which considers Kosovo to be its cultural and religious heartland, and the region's Serbian minority, estimated to be about 100,000 of the 2 million population. The Serbs say they will never accept an independent Kosovo. Most Serbs identify with the Serbian Orthodox Church, while most Albanians are Muslims.
The international community is divided, with the United States and many European countries supporting the province's bid for independence, but Russia saying that secession will set a dangerous international precedent.
