The Countdown.(Kosovo; Prime Minister Agim Ceku)

Early in the morning on May 14, 1999, a large force of Serbian paramilitaries, soldiers, and special police appeared in Qyshk, a farming village in western Kosovo. The Serbs had come to Qyshk before, searching for weapons and valuables, but this time they herded the residents, all ethnic Albanians, toward the center of the village. They said that they were looking for Hasan Ceku, the father of General Agim Ceku, the chief of staff of the Kosovo Liberation Army. This was at the height of the war between the Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's forces and the K.L.A., and seven weeks after NATO had entered the conflict, bombing Belgrade and other parts of Yugoslavia in an attempt to halt Milosevic's brutal campaign against Kosovo's Albanian majority. Hasan Ceku, who was sixty-nine years old, came forward, according to an eyewitness. To prove who he was, he produced a picture of his son Agim. "They shot Hasan right there, and set him on fire," another witness said. The Serbs also killed Agim's uncle Kadri Ceku.

The Serbs beat the villagers with rifle butts and stabbed them with hunting knives, demanding information about the K.L.A., according to reconstructions of the events by Human Rights Watch and two American radio reporters. They singled out Qaush Lushi, the richest man in town. One Serb, according to a witness, asked Lushi, "Do you want a state? We are eleven million Serbs, so if you want a state ask for help from Clinton and Blair. Ask for NATO's help now." Lushi said, "We have a state." Lushi gave the Serbs his car and ten thousand Deutsche marks, in the hope that they would spare his twenty-year-old son, Arjan. Still, they killed both men. Lushi's wife, Ajsha, found his body in an outhouse; one hand had been nearly severed in an effort to remove his watch.

The Serbs separated the rest of Qyshk's men from their families, lined them up, and machine-gunned them. Then they burned the bodies. Forty-one people were killed in Qyshk that morning. Hasan Ceku was the oldest; the youngest was nineteen.

Qyshk sits in a lush stretch of the Bistrica River Valley, near the main road running from Pristina, Kosovo's capital, to the western city of Peja. A low marble monument in the village lists the names of the victims of the massacre. Not far away stands the whitewashed hut, still used by the Ceku family, where Hasan's nine children were born. His son Agim, the K.L.A. commander, is now the Prime Minister of Kosovo. Given the number of Kosovo Albanians killed in the war with the Serbs--it is estimated that ten thousand died, and bodies were found in mass graves far away in Serbia--it is perhaps not surprising that Ceku's family was victimized. What I found strange was that no one outside of Qyshk seemed to know that the Prime Minister's father had been executed by the Serbs.

When I met with Ceku recently, I asked him why he never talked about the murder of his father. We were sitting in his office in a new government building in Pristina. A few blocks away stood the shattered seven-story hulk of Milosevic's old police headquarters--bombed, looted, and wreathed in hanging rebar. Ceku, a big, rawboned forty-seven-year-old career soldier with a buzz cut and a frank gaze, looked at me. "My father was killed because he was my father," he said finally. Then he added, "He has his name."

I took that to mean that his father's life had a completeness of its own, which it was not the son's place to traduce. Ceku went on, a bit stiffly, "I consider it not fair that I should try to get some benefit from my father." Anyway, he conceded, in postwar Kosovo such plays for sympathy could backfire. "Somebody else lost children," he said. "That's worse than losing a father."

He also admitted that, in certain private conversations, he wasn't so restrained. "Maybe sometimes, in arguments with Serbs, I use it," he said. "I say, 'Look, my father was killed. But leave it. We are now invited to build a better future. It happened to everybody. It happened to you. It happened to me. I'm here to talk about the future, not to sit and argue about who suffered more.' "