Joyful Kosovo awaits freedom

Thousands of ethnic Albanians filled streets festooned with Albanian black-eagle flags here Saturday night in early celebration of Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia, expected today.

The breakaway province in southern Serbia will secede with backing from Washington but firm opposition from Moscow, Serbia’s unwavering Slavic ally. Kosovo has been run by the United Nations since 1999, when NATO bombing campaigns drove out Serbian forces attacking ethnic Albanian separatists.

“Tomorrow will be a historic day in our efforts to create a state,” Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, a former rebel leader, said as he visited a cemetery where a family of ethnic Albanians slain in the war are buried.

“We are getting our independence,” Thaci said later in a televised appearance. “The world’s map is changing.”

For Kosovo’s Albanians, statehood is the dream of generations. “Happy independence,” declared signs on countless stores and businesses in downtown Pristina where drivers honked their horns and people waved flags (American ones were especially popular), set off firecrackers and sang national songs. Restaurants offered free Independence Day meals. Kosovo expatriates were returning in droves from other parts of Europe and the U.S.

“I have a very strange feeling of independence: Whenever I think of it, all my body shudders,” said Agron Mali, 25, a judiciary employee. “This is much more than any other holiday.”

But in the rest of Serbia, where Kosovo’s secession is seen as a violation of international law, the mood was grim and angry.

Several thousand Serbian nationalists rallied outside the Slovenian Embassy in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, to protest European Union support for Kosovo’s independence. Slovenia holds the rotating EU presidency, making it a convenient target.

“Kosovo is the heart of Serbia,” demonstrators chanted before tacking a letter of protest to the embassy door.

“We used to look to the West as the ideal of freedom and justice,” said Visnja Ciric, one of two speakers at the Serbian rally. “But now, there is no end in sight to the EU’s hypocrisy and double standards.”

Although the EU is divided in its support for Kosovo statehood, the 27-nation bloc agreed early Saturday to deploy an 1,800-member “rule of law” mission in Kosovo that will gradually replace U.N. administrators over a 120-day transition period. The mission includes police, judges and others who are charged with supervising Kosovo’s new officials.

Serbia and Russia consider the EU mission illegal.

Kosovo has about 2 million people, 90% of them ethnic Albanians. The vast majority are Muslim, mostly secular and unabashedly pro-Western. Pristina has a main boulevard named for former President Clinton, who is revered here because he ordered the NATO airstrikes that drove out Serbian forces.

Serbia, a predominantly Orthodox Christian country that traces its cultural roots to Kosovo, argues that allowing the region to split away violates international norms. But supporters of independence argue that Kosovo, given the history, could never return to Serbian rule.

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Zogiani reported from Pristina and Cirjakovic from Belgrade. Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson contributed to this report from Madrid.